They are on Zoom. Okay, perfect. All right. Well, we'll start shortly. Thanks. Okay. Madame Clerk, are you ready? Is everything Yes. Is all of our technology working? We think so. Yeah. All right. Uh, good morning everyone. Happy Wednesday, September 10th, 2025. We are going to start off with the pledge of allegiance. And Connie, our parks champion, do you want to lead us in the pledge, Connie? Thank you. Okay, Madam Clerk, I'm going to send it to you for roll call. We are calling roll for the Wednesday, September 10th, 2025 Reno City Council meeting. Vice Mayor Taylor, Council Member Der, here. Here. present on Zoom. Uh, Council Member Martinez. Oh, she's in person. I see you. Zoom and in person. Double dipping. You're double dipping. Okay. Council member Martinez here. Council member Eert here. Present on Zoom. Uh, Council Member Reese here. Present on Zoom. Council member Anderson and Mayor Sheibi here. Madame Mayor, you do have a quorum. Okay. Thank you so much. All right, we're going to start off with public comment item 83. So, I'm going to send it back to you, Madam Clerk. Madame Mayor, our first item for today is public comment. Members of the public may hear, observe, and provide public comment virtually by registering through the following link, which can be found on reno.gov/meings. https colon slashward slash l i n ks period r e n o period go v slash c o u n c i l 09-10. It should be noted for those in attendance that comments are to be addressed to the mayor and council as a whole. Comments heard under this item will be limited to three minutes per person and may pertain pertain to matters both on and off the council's agenda. Council may not take action upon any matter not agendaized on today's agenda. When you are called on for public comment, please state your name for the record and begin speaking. The timer will begin when you've stated your name, and you will be afforded 3 minutes. For those participating in chambers in accordance with council rules 6.3.11 while in this room please be respectful. Disruptive behavior from audience members like clapping, yelling, whistling, etc. which impede the meeting may result in a warning issued by the presiding officer. If the behavior continues, you may be removed from chambers. If you are an attendee in the Zoom meeting and would like to make public comment, please raise your hand at this time. Okay, Terry Brook. Oh, um, I just want to give a little note to everyone in the audience. Um, to take an inventory because I like to get everyone started with their day. Um, if you're here for a specific item, please let the clerk know. Uh, because then that way we can also accommodate the agenda. Um, and so, Madame Clerk, will you also please help me in making sure that we know everyone that's in the room so that we can streamline our agenda? All right. Thank you so much. Go ahead, Terry Brooks, followed by Steven White, followed by David Shakar. Good morning. It's me, Terry Brooks, again, and today I'd like to share with you my thoughts on Medicare and what seniors go through. The older that seniors are, the more they need health care. And it's fortunate that we have the benefits of Medicare. For a long time, health care has become more expensive, and prescription drugs and medications have become even more expensive. The older people are, the more susceptible they are to diseases and accidents such as falling or getting hit by a car. And the older they are, the more difficult it is for them to recover from a disease or an injury received by them. So the older we are, then the more we need medical insurance that will help us get back up to speed. Medicare was enacted back in 1965 and since then it has helped so many seniors to stay alive. I've had Medicare for several years and I'm really glad I have it. I'd rather have it and not need it than need it and not have it. The older that we get, the more we need health care. Not having it would be a heavy burden to bear. Medicare is a lot like the benefits of Social Security. The older we get, the more we need to be relieved of our insecurity. When we were young, we didn't worry much about our physical health. But when we age, we're more concerned about our physical health. And health care is way more expensive than it used to be. But when we age, we're more in need than we used to be. All people of all ages have a right to stay alive. And Medicare is one of those gifts that help us to survive. I would like to thank you all for listening to me today and I look forward to coming back if I'm still alive that day. Oh, no. Good job. Thank you. Don't say that. Steven White, followed by Hi. Good morning. Followed by David Shakar, followed by Doug Irwin. Good morning, Mayor. Good morning, council members, city manager. I brought another painting for you to look at real quick. Oh, it doesn't show up on the screen. But anyway, more important, that's a 4x6 foot old, by the way, oil painting. I have over 12,000 of those paintings hanging in homes all across the country. This is a picture I brought of uh the in town park in Fernley showed all these pretty little umbrellas. So, if you notice, they're candle levered over uh tables. But what I did was I took one of these pictures and I photoshopped it. And if you did the same thing and you had a center pole, you could have four panels, an extruded metal panel sticking out, each of the ribs would be supported by an exter, you know, outside pan uh pole going into the ground. And each one of those umbrellas, they're 10 by 10 foot. Uh, but each one of those umbrellas would provide a wedge for four artists to be able to come and hang their artwork on on display. This would really help a lot of senior citizens, by the way, that and a lot of young people that can't afford displays and all. Oil paintings and and art, fine artwork that hangs on the wall, it has to be protected from the sun. And this is why you got to have an umbrella kind of picture like this to do that with. But I'll bet you could install one of those for a cost of under five grand having it completely fabricated and everything with metal tops on on the top. These particular tops are made out of fabric, but that wouldn't work with artists because you don't want sunlight shining through a yellow fabric on a beautiful painting, for instance. So, they'd have to be metal. But I'm sure hoping, you know, you folks, we've been at this for a long time, mayor. This would provide opportunities for artists in the park. It is required by state law that you have, you know, areas in the park for artists to perform, display, and sell their artwork, no fees. And this is a way you could do it. If you provided made 20 of those, put out a contract for and took bids on making 20 of those, it would provide space for 40 artists in various areas all around the city in various parks and along the verbal walk as well. and they'd be colorful and you could even claim them as being sculptures. So you could use the art money to pay for them instead of spending $375,000 on a couple of sculptures out of New York and Seattle. So I'm sure hoping I'm getting together with Nathan and I'm sure hoping you folks will do this over the winter time. Let's get this done for next summer and have art in the park this next summer. Yeah. And provide opportunities for young people and artists all over. I love it. See, and you can become the example, by the way, for every city in the state and every city across the country. This turns Reno into a true art capital of the country. Thank you folks. Thank you so much. Calling all entrepreneurs on on that one. That that could be a great business. Okay. Good morning, Mr. Shakar. Good morning, Madame Mayor, council members, and the always helpful Reno City Clerk's office. Uh Steve was just talking about opportunities in the park and uh we know that Reno is known as the biggest little city in the world, but I think that Reno should also be known as the city for lovers. And what I what I mean by that, people love to come to Reno for the wonderful special events that we have like hot August Nights. A picture is worth a thousand words. I'm going to show you some pictures of lovers. And don't worry, everybody has their clothes. Isn't Paris the city of lovers? Is that right? That's right. Okay. Everybody loves Hot August Nights. The classic cars. This couple is clearly happy. Look how great your pictures are. It's Oh, it's a little bit dark here. Sorry about that. It's not dark on my camera, but it comes out like that. And then uh young lovers. Love that. Older ones. This couple, look at their faces. If you can see it. They're both happy to be there. They're both happy. They're in the presence of each other. And I think they're happy because I drew their picture. And this couple is clearly happy. This is their third wedding anniversary. They celebrated at uh Hot August Nights. I was surprised to find that there were a lot of people from from Mexico that traveled from Mexico to go to hot August nights. I met somebody from Peru. There was somebody from uh Alberta. No, uh Sat I'm pronouncing it wrong. Sas Saskatcher one and somebody in Canada. I forget the name of the city. Uh people came from all over for hot August nights. This is uh Jose from Mexico with his two sisters. They came for hot August nights. We do get quite a bit of international visitors for sure. They do. They do. This is a a typical caricature that I do. Forgive me if it sounds like I'm bragging. I'm not. I just don't do the cartoony characters. I like to do more of a formal thing. They're fantastic. love to do eyes. Now, I want to show you this picture. This is a at the Reno Labor Fest. It was in Ottawa Park about two weeks ago. And the last picture I wanted to show you, come on. I'm a digital doofus. Well, in any case, uh the vast expanse of Ottawa Park is perfect. You got lush green lawn. You have you're are in the shade of old growth trees. It's right along the Truckucky River. Reno truly is the shining star in the constellation of other cities that are art towns. Keep up the good work. No, you you keep create creating and designing Reno. Keep doing that. Great job. Doug Irwin, followed by Art Rangel, followed by Tony Harsh. Good morning, mayor and council members. Uh for the record, I'm Doug Irwin. Um, and for the past 13 years, I've had the privilege of working at Edon, uh, championing small business and entrepreneurship. And that's why I want to share my personal perspective today on the proposed restrictions for accessory dwelling units and short-term rentals. Um, short-term rentals are not just an option for visitors, they are part of Reno's small business ecosystem. Uh, the roughly 1100 rental units in their city generate well over $25 million in uh, revenue for local small businesses every year. And that translates into well over $3 million in room tax for the city that goes into really important community projects like our parks. Um many of those uh rentals are managed by residents who have come to rely on that income to make ends meet. And this is really like grassroots entrepreneurship at its best. Um we also know that the problems like noise and ordinance or uh nuisance are already addressed by existing ordinances. And if you look at the bigger picture, over the past several years, we've only had a handful of complaints across all the 1100 units. Um, that track record shows that we have tools in our tool chest that already work. I think the bigger risk is that the new restrictions will discourage uh the housing we're trying to encourage. Uh, building an ADU is a significant investment and it makes and what makes that possible for many families is that flexibility. If you take that flexibility away, many homeowners simply won't build ADUs, and that means fewer housing units, not more. Um, this council has a proud history of standing by small business, and that I think that's been one of Reno's greatest strengths. But make no mistake, restricting ADU as short-term rentals would be a decidedly anti- small business move. It would cut off a vital income stream for residents and undermine one of the few ways that everyday people can participate in Reno's economic growth. On a personal note, I have a been an Airbnb host for four uh 14 years and I have a small 400 foot unit in our backyard. Um hosting has helped me support my family, pay for my kids extracurricular activities, which are expensive, and provided a place for my parents to visit during the holidays. Um I've also welcomed many people to Reno, from my neighbors uh family during the holidays to travelers discovering our city for the first time. Uh that flexibility has what has made our short-term uh rental a real asset to our family, the neighborhood, and our community. So, in closing, uh I urge you to stay true to Reno's values, pro- housing, pro community, pro small business. And really before you today is a choice um to decide whether to support residents who are investing in housing and entrepreneurship or to restrict them. So let's trust the regulations we already have and continue building arena that supports small business families and its future. So thank you very much. All right. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. Art Rangel followed by Tony Harsh followed by Taylor Kern. Hi Art. Hello Madame Mayor, members of the council. Uh before my time stops starts, I wanted to thank you se seated seated at the as a redevelopment agency for approving the GSR UR uh and Nevada uh University um stadium. It was a great project at the right place at the right time. Uh but I'm here to talk about uh the Reno's public engagement review process. Um I'm going to read what it says verbatim. It says, "By examining engagement, the city aimed to create more effective and accessible engagement strategies. This review was essential to ensure that community voices are genuinely heard and considered in decision-m ultimately leading to more transparent, responsive, responsive, and trusted governance." Quote close quotes. I have a policy I'd like for the council to consider for a vote at some point and it starts with this. During the budget preparation process, the planning staff recommended increase in the land use appeal fee from $ 107 to $500. After a lot of deliberation by this council, you approved a land use appeal fee of $1,200. It only seems fair to have the project proponent, typically the developer, pay 90% of the $1,200 fee and the appellant pay 10% of the appellent fee. The project proponent, typically the developer can write off that expense while the appellant cannot typically a homeowner cannot write off that expense. By adopting this policy that would ensure that community voices are genuinely heard and considered in decision-making, ultimately leading to more transparent, responsive, and trusted governance, thereby making it consistent with this public engagement review process. I have to say that throughout my decades of career as a city planning, city planner, I've never seen as many land use appeals as I have for the city of Reno. My assessment is that because of Nevada's tax and structure, the planning staff is recommending a proven development for the sake of development, never mind compatibility with neighborhood pro properties. That's not good public policy. By adopting the before mention mentioned policy, the result could be that the project proponent engages more of the neighborhood to come up with a development more suitable to both parties. Please put this on an upcoming agenda for your discussion and a vote. Thank you. Thanks Art. Tony Harsh, followed by Taylor Kern followed by Thomas Tate. Long time no see. I know. Was it what 12 hours ago? We were at a dinner last night together up at the university uh for the honors honors um college. How small Reno is very small. No matter where we are, there we are. Right. Thank you. Thank you for taking the time um to talk to me about this. Uh for the record, Tony Harsh, and I have had the opportunity to talk to many of you. Um and I appreciate that immensely. Um the one thing that I heard um from every discussion was the concern for the neighborhoods and I think that as we um bring ADUs into every neighborhood um this is a huge component. I have before you the map which is the map from the draft uh proposal and on the left is the yellow. This is the way we look now. And on the right, this is the way we will look because we will be required to add one more dwelling unit to every residential lot thanks to AB 396. AB 396 came in under the banner of affordable housing. It is clear that that was the impetus for it. Um also under the draft ordinance as we look at it in the introduction it is for affordable housing. So in the discussions we can listen to many things um but truly short-term rentals is the antithesis of affordable housing. So we need to look at affordable housing. Um, in fact, uh, one of the, um, discussions that you put forth and that you yourself put forth, uh, with, um, comments to, um, the ordinance is a ban on short-term rentals. Um, I want to celebrate truly all of the components of the draft ordinance. The only one um, one short-term rental, I mean only one ADU, I get confused with my initials. um the one parking place, the heights restrictions to the primary residence, um setbacks, we could look at setbacks and terraces setbacks. That could be a discussion. The protection of the CCNRs, this is just so important. And I would add, as a personal note, I'd like to see it come in under your historic conservation districts. You have a chapter in chapter or you have a place in chapter 18 that's sitting there for that. Um, also the design standards. Um, I would encourage that you consider as you move forward a requirement of having when they pull their or they apply for a building permit for a new ADU that they are required to post a sign so that their neighbors know what is coming down the pike. Let's not get into warfare in the neighborhood when all of a sudden it's there. So, I think that would go a long way for um for helping us move this forward. Um I would in my final discussion really ask you to bring back short-term rental law within 6 months. Thank you. Thank you so much. Taylor Kern, followed by Thomas Tate, followed by Chris Bell. Good morning, mayor and council members. My name is Taylor Kern and this is my colleague, Karly Norton. We are recycling education representatives for WM. Part of our role is to serve as a resource for the community, ensuring residents and businesses have access to recycling education and helping connect customers with solutions when questions or concerns come up. We wanted to take a few minutes today to introduce ourselves and share some of the outreach and initiatives WM has been leading in our community. Over the past several months, we have hosted over 12 tours of our materials recovery facility where residents, students, and businesses can see firsthand how recycling is sorted and processed. Tours can be signed up for online through Reno Recycles. We've also been partnering with local schools. We have given three presentations on recycling and visited two different schools to help support students who want to establish or expand recycling programs and encouraging hands-on involvement in sustainability reaching over 200 students. We have attended the following community events this summer such as community health alliance vaccine clinic, labor fest, milk and honey where we set up outreach tables and shared information on how to recycle right and reduce contamination which helped keeps our recycling program strong and folks on the same page while sharing recycling education at these events. We were able to speak with over 600 individuals. This is what we've been up to this summer and Kari's going to share where you can find us in the future. So, here is where our outreach tables will be, including where they where we will be bringing a WM truck for those residents who get extra excited about big trucks. Yay. Love this. We are sponsoring a ball game at AC's ballpark on September 14th with a truck that will be parked outside of the field entrance. On September 20th, we will be at the Tahoe Bear Fest as well as Dozers and Dirt. And we'll be bringing a truck to Dozers and Dirt as well for kids to play in. Uh September 27th, we will be at the Wo County Sheriff's Office community picnic. We'll be on a panel on October 2nd for the Nevada's Energy and Economy Summit at the Reno Sparks Chamber of Commerce. And on October 26, we'll be tableabling at the Reno DMV for a trunk retreat hosted by the Nevada State Police. And we'll be bringing a WM truck there. What What's the date? Uh October 26th. Okay. And then so for those who don't know, we send out uh bill inserts that look like this to residents every quarter for their bills. Um for residents who have paid for this billing, it should come in their email. For this quarter, we are highlighting the items which can go into the recycling, including gable top and aseptic containers, which we've had confusion around uh their recyclability. So, we are highlighting that we do take these in your curbside recycling. Another thing we aim to do each month is support multifamily buildings and business parks in starting to improve their recycling programs. Since recycling isn't mandated in Nevada, businesses and apartment complexes can choose whether or not to participate. Because this is there's often hesitation around setting up recycling, Taylor and I visit locations that request help. Whether they're new to recycling or just need a refresher, we provide customized on-site support to owners and managers. Thank you for taking the time to hear from us today. All right, good job. [Applause] Thomas Tate, followed by Chris Bell, followed by Barry Levenson. Good morning. I'm Tom Tate. I live in the Newand's Historic District of Ward 2. Um, I've attended just about all the meetings on ADUs since 2018 and I have spoken out against ADUs at almost all those meetings using different arguments each time because there are so many things you can't cover them in just a few minutes. AB 396 requires an ADU ordinance by July 1st of next year. It does not require a bad ordinance and there are actually very few requirements in there. Uh specifically, it doesn't specify anything about lot size. So, you could pass an ordinance that says ADUs are only allowed on large lot residential 2 and 1/2 acres with one parking spot and residential setbacks. and that would completely satisfy the requirements of the of the uh law. Unfortunately, you've chosen Oh, another thing that the the U uh AB 396 says is that one of the purposes of zoning is to preserve historic areas. I live in a historic district, not just an area, but a district that's officially recognized. And there's no carveouts at all in the uh existing ordinance for doing something special. There are also other historic areas in Reno, such as conservation areas. These probably require special attention also. Um, instead what you've done is you seem to have channeled Shane Phillips, the consultant who came here who seemed to think that all single family houses were bad and ought to be replaced by forplexes and most parking ought to be uh changed into housing. Um, I exaggerate slightly but really not very much. Uh, one of the things that the ordinance has done, which doesn't appear in the ordinance, but they've changed the setbacks so that housing units, ADUs, now have the setbacks of auxiliary buildings, which are intended to be storage. Uh, residences should have are have people in them. Storage buildings have storage and they're quiet. Uh, it's inappropriate to use storage type setbacks for residential use. Every meeting I've gone to, people have expressed concerns about ADUs being used for short-term rentals. There's a law uh the ordinance now says you can't use use them for STRs. Unfortunately, this is to toothless. For effective laws to work, you need a law that's clear. You need enforcement and you need penalties for violation. Those last two things don't exist. People will just go ahead and use them as ADUs and there's no penalty. What are the what are you going to do? Nothing happens. My biggest concern or one of my concerns is that corporations are buying up a lot of houses uh and renting them out. In the old parts of town, small houses become very attractive for corporations to buy up. This will take young this will take these things off the market and so young uh uh young people cannot buy houses and I think that's important for uh community cohesion. I hope you reconsider this and pass a better law before July 1st. Thank you Tom Chris Bell followed by Barry Levenson followed by Sally Tate. For the record my name is Chris Bell. Good morning, Mayor Shibi, and council members and hardworking. That sounds like a Nevada accent for sure. I'm working on it. I need I might need another 20 years. Um I'm a resident of Reno and urged the city to refrain from appealing the August 4th uh Truckucky Meadows Regional Planning uh AY's decision on the Stonegate Hines Ranch development. The Stonegate proposal is a mess. It'll make a mess of what's now a beautiful piece of natural landscape. It defied the city's master plan. It was a complete switcheroo from housing to more ugly warehouses. Its water issues are far from certain. There are obviously traffic there are obvious traffic and trucking problems emanating from this location. Frankly, there are critical issues still missing. Enough to make this a momentous and longlasting mistake. Where will the water come from? How can such a huge load on existing groundwater not affect those whose lives have been depending on the same aquifers for decades? Messing up the water supply for established residents will be a devastating outcome. So, please triple check the viability of these water supplies. Where will the water go? We have seen and should understand that catastrophic rain events now happen with more frequency. Are the water retention rates for all these roofs and hard surfaces sufficient to prevent the flooding of cold springs? Do these codes consider that a once in a 100redyear deluge can now occur much more frequently than than that? I am deeply concerned about the ambition for data centers to be cited at this development. when they arrive this development in this development the aquifers will really take a hit. Data centers are not business that are not a business that aids our community. They are disproportionate drain on public resources for a mere sprinkling of long-term jobs. They will be running diesel generators at all hours and our our air quality will suffer. We need housing, and this expanded industrial proposal is a reversal of the right intention to help families get housed. What's more, it will be another bland and uninspired welcome for visitors entering our beautiful region. Welcome to Reno, biggest little industrial park. Thank you. All right. Thanks, Chris. Well, and English strategy. Oh, see anyway, nice job. Thank you. Barry Levenson, followed by Sally Tate, followed by Peter Newman. Is that a bad thing to say? I don't know. Is that a an Aussie thing versus like an English thing? Oh, no. Whenever I I said, "Is that English?" I'm so sorry if I offended you. Thanksgiving, but I I love your accent. Okay, go right ahead. Council members, happy to be back here. Nice to see you again. Yes. So, uh, my name is Barry Levenson. I'm a resident of Reno and I'm a retired physician and chemical engineer and a volunteer with Sierra Club. I'm speaking today in opposition to the proposed zoning change for the Stonegate development. The Stonegate developers are seeking to dramatically shift land use from primarily residential and commercial to industrial use. Although we don't know exactly what industries are planned for this space, the developers have indicated that at least 15% of the land will be used for data centers. If you do the math, that is over 250 acres. For comparison, the web data center is 8700 square feet, which is about 2 acres. 250 acres is therefore enough land for over 100 web data centers. That's a lot of data centers. As we all know, data centers can consume a large amount of cooling water. If the city of Reno allows development of even 250 acres of data centers in Stonegate, the impacts on water could be severe. Currently, the Great Basin Water Company has 314 acre feet of water available. According to the TMRPA staff evaluation, the the new proposal will require 1,08 acre feet, which does not even account for the potential data centers, according to Dr. Jeremy Smith. So, the water requirements will likely be far greater. And the proposal comes amid an ongoing hydraological study of the Cold Springs Basin, a region already impacted by drought and sewage issues. Sierra Club feels that approving industrial expansion now before this study is completed would be premature and irresponsible. Data centers will also cause significant air pollution from diesel generators including particulate matter and toxic chemicals. These pollutants have been proven to contribute to increased rates of asthma, cancer, and cardiac disease in the local population. Data centers will also cause light pollution from bright nighttime lighting and significant noise from cooling fans and generators. As you know, at this point, the city of Reno does not have a specific ordinance governing the approval of data centers. This means that developers have virtual free reign to get approval of their projects without regard to their environmental and health impacts. This is a serious problem. If this reszoning proposal goes through, we will be at serious risk of many new data centers coming to our area without adequate guide rails. So, I'm urging a vote of no on the Stonegate proposal. So, thank you, Sally Tate, followed by Peter Newman, followed by Timothy Kirk. Good morning, mayor, city council members. Um, my name is Sally Tate. I live here in the old southwest. Um I have sent you other information regarding the ADU and under D1 and today I will embellish on that from another perspective. Um I read AB396 like my husband. Um it identifies a few parameters to include into policy on the ADU issue. However, uh, Reno went to an extreme on establishing policies like we are on steroids. They made a simple fix into a complicated attack on most of our older single family neighborhoods and chose 5,000 square foot lots which will destroy our current long existing neighborhoods forever and turn them into cement wood jungles, reducing our green footprint, thus affecting climate even further. and impacting existing older infrastructures. This also includes our historic districts which should be preserved as is. Shouldn't we respect our history and preserve what was established? In most communities, such treasures are cherished and protected. What is our problem? It appears to me that this was an opportunity for some city staff to implement Shane Phillips philosophy into our town, which ruins our quality of life. We are not California and don't want to be. Later developments such as Somerset, Conland Ranch, Damati with HOAs and CCNRs will be exempt at this time. And is this fair to the older neighborhoods in our city? Let's go back to the drawing board and create a simple solution we all can live with. Let's be smart and do it right for everyone more equitably. We should start with a larger lot footprint. Then we will not have major issues and possible lawsuits with the city and neighbors regarding tight property lines, infringement on property, and issues with older infrastructure, some of which runs in our backyards. We will then preserve neighborhoods for families who have sacrificed to save for a single family neighborhood for them to enjoy and continue to have that quality of life that is so deserved for people of Reno. It is not about small business. It is about maintaining our family, neighborhoods, and quality of life. Thank you. Madame Mayor, um, honorable council members, my name is Peter Newman, president of Newand's Neighborhood Association on behalf of which I speak today. On be I'm going to read this. On behalf of the Newless Neighborhood Association, I request you to exercise the greatest of caution in adopting zoning standards which would allow residential homeowners in Reno to construct additional dwelling units on properties currently zoned for use as single family dwellings. to effectively reszone existing single family dwelling residential property in any manner that would permit owners to construct or maintain additional dwelling units on properties currently zoned for single family use would amount to an unconscionable taking of valuable property rights. This would subject the city of Reno to thousands of inverse condemnation lawsuits that could without question subject the city of Reno to many years of litigation and hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. This in turn could force the city of Reno into bankruptcy and ruin its credit rating forever, thus prohibiting its ability to borrow money for needed projects such as street maintenance and repair, maintenance of an adequate police force, and dozens of other civic needs. ADUs are touted as a way to provide lowcost housing. But the real reason that a relatively few developers are lobbying for ADUs is so that the short-term rental industry such as Airbnbs can make a financial killing because ADUs do not create lowcost housing for the long-term residents. This because the construction costs today are quite high and in order to recapture those building costs, the ADU developers must sell their tiny homes for very expensive prices. In turn, the owners who short-term rent their tiny homes for Airbnbs must charge relatively high rents. Existing single family residential owners in Reno will not stand for their formerly quiet, leafy Reno neighborhoods to be turned into Airbnbs and other short-term rentals with all the additional nuisances that that will bring to those neighborhoods such as parking problems, traffic, noise, and increased risk of crime perpetrated against both children of tender years and aging adults. Accordingly, Newland's Neighborhood Association urges the entire city council and mayor to just say no to ADUs. Thank you, Timothy Kirk, followed by William Mantle via Zoom, followed by Sharon Engel. Uh my name is Tim Kirk and I live in the uh uh Nulance neighborhood and um when I heard about AB 396 uh I did some research and found out that it was heavily supported by the uh state developers lobbies. And you have to understand that when state developers lobbies support something that affects local jurisdictions, they do it to make them money. They don't do it because they care about lowcost housing. They don't do it because they care about your community. They're looking at your community and they're drawing and quartering it so that they can make more money out of it. Uh affordable housing doesn't increase property values, it lowers them consistently. Um, and if they can get property values to lower, then they can buy it on the cheap and turn it into a ranch O'Hara or whatever they have planned for it with apartments. It's downtown. It's really close to everything. It would make them a lot of money. Um, they contribute to both polit political parties at the state level because they want to work both sides of the street. Um, I will also say that I noticed that in our neighborhood, I've only been there five years, there is no citizens impact or advisory committees. So, we have no way of communicating. And when you have uh meetings like this at 10:00 a.m. We appreciate the chance to be heard, but I had to leave my business to be here. And a lot of people who work who would fill this place up at 6:00, they they don't get to be here. They don't get to be heard. Um, if we did have an impact committee, we would be able to discuss things like the plans to widen Marsh Avenue, which I've heard about, and I guess they're going to try to take a piece of everybody's front yard to do it. So, uh, it would be a good idea for us to establish a, uh, I heard it from city workers. Anyway, um the uh the thing about it is getting back to what I was saying, if we had some sort of impact committee where we could uh or advisory committee where we could have meetings, discuss it among ourselves and have better communication with city hall rather than waiting for a meeting because this is sort of like it doesn't really happen until it becomes a crisis. So it's an important issue and we like to take care of important issues before they become crises and since there is no impact committee since there is no advisory committee we don't have that. So, I would like to see something like that formed if it's possible so that people like the qualified people that we've heard speak today could actually get together and come with a proposal that would help everybody because right now we're looking at people building whatever they want, however they want with street parking and the street parking there is so narrow already. I mean, there's no place to park. Thank you for your time. Uh just real quick too, a reminder for those on Zoom that if you did want to give public comment, please raise your hand so that we don't skip you. Uh William Mantel via Zoom. Good morning, council. Uh thank you for having me. I know that you heard comment already from Mr. Bell, who has a far more enjoyable voice than me, and Miss Levenson. They both talked to you regarding the Stonegate appeal that's on your agenda for later and I don't want to reiterate their comments. I want to embolden and support what they said. And in addition to this, this appeal was already denied by your Reno Planning Commission and by the regional planning commission um for a variety of purposes which I'm sure you're well aware of. I recently sent a PDF to all of you which some of you have already read and already had seen regarding the technical challenges that regard data centers specifically but I don't want to talk to that further today as they already have. Uh, I just want to state that the Stonegate appeal is, in my opinion, poorly conceived and clearly lacks the public support that it should have for such a massive use of land that is front and center in our region. While there could be a better compromise potentially of industrial and more public uses, that's not before you today. What's before you today is a massive industrial park that in my opinion and I believe you've heard unanimously from your citizens doesn't support their vision or their desire of what they want to see in their region. They want to see more homes, more amenities, more grocery stores, more things for them to live with, not live by. And I urge you all to consider that there could be a greater partnership and effort on the applicants end to engage the citizens, get public support for a vision that they actually enjoy and want, which presently is the current plan of the 5,000 homes and supporting um industry of grocery stores and whatnot. and not this industrial park. I encourage you to think what the citizens have told you to consider what could be and the efforts that the applicant has actually made to get buy in here which I see little of further I haven't seen any data on why they can't produce housing in the area and maybe you have but I think to the Talis Valley development that's building right now down in South Reno for 4,000 homes that was permitted around the same time and has the complication of being directly in a flood plane somehow managing to produce their homes and yet this developer, this applicant cannot do so and hasn't at least expressed in my opinion transparently what their issue is completing their original form of what they've promised the city. So again, I urge you to consider the previous commentary that you've heard. Consider the unanimous opposition that the citizens have told you, again, from what I've seen, and please vote no to approve the appeal for Stonegate. Not because it's impossible to change what they want, but because they haven't done a good enough job to create a partnership and move the entire community forward like they really should have. And I think that we all deserve. Thank you. Thanks William. Sharon Angel followed by Audrey Keller via Zoom. Good morning. Good morning. My name is Sharon Angel. I live in Northwest Reno in Ward Five. I'm a former Assemblywoman, so I know how laws are quickly made in Carson City. And I believe that often those laws have unintended consequences. The law that was made concerning ADUs is one of those laws. They uh overlooked some of the real consequences of increased populations within single family dwelling neighborhoods. I lived in my dwell in my neighborhood for over 30 years and within a mile of my home there are over 20 apartment complexes and more going in. Uh this ADU uh situation would increase that density even more. I've seen crime rates go up in my neighborhood because of that increased density. It is uh an impact on water sewer parking even traffic within our neighborhood has increased because of this increased density. I think that you have an opportunity to make some regulation that would help us as residents here in Nevada can keep our our lifestyle, the one that we've become used to, the one that says a single family can live within the city limits without these density problems overcome. coming them. Uh this was tried in California and it's a cautionary warning. I believe uh they did it because they wanted affordable housing that uh increased ADD the increased density there did not uh allow for affordable housing. In fact, it just increased the density and gentrified those neighborhoods where they were allowed to come in. We need to have certain things happen. I I put in that I wasn't against this and I'm not for this either. I am neutral only because I think you have an opportunity to allow for growth here in Reno, but smart growth, things that make sense to neighborhoods. And that's why I've come before you this morning asking you please to make considerate deliberation and those things that could impact neighborhoods uh negatively can now be stopped right here at this point and I ask you to do that today. Thank you so much for allowing me to speak to you. Thank you. And thank you for your service. I don't know if we've like ever truly met but I know who you are and and thank you again. All right. Anytime. Come anytime. Audrey Keller via Zoom followed by Wendy Baroli via Zoom. I think you're muted. Thank you. Good morning. Regarding the ADUs, uh it's Audrey Keller, Ward 2 NAB member. Uh regarding ADUs, yes, I am pro- small business. However, I don't believe this is a vote for small businesses launched in backyards on the backs of adjacent neighbors. I do not support short-term rentals of ADUs via third-party online entities. Why? Because online businesses who collect money are not present at midnight to enforce the noisy vacationers of such units. I've lived in two major cities that have experienced what you're about to vote for as ongoing constant negative impacts created by short-term rentals of ADUs. In Bend, Oregon, a high desert town just like Reno and in Oxnard, California, a cool beach harbor town. In my personal experience, neighbors of short-term ADUs get party houses next door. The nature of short-term ADUs is to invite more people who are there to party and have a good time. It is their vacation and in their neighbors worst nightmare. In short, it's about money and the city must consider this before you vote. Council must require a fixed budget increase for code enforcement officers and their vehicles in proportion to the projected ADU's density. How will that work considering city council has an extreme budget shortfall? As part of staff included additional budgets for additional code enforcement officers. If you vote for this, guaranteed in my other cities, you will not have in enforcement officers to cover these short-term rentals. And then what are the defined penalties, which means fines to the owners? Fines require collection staff. What is the fixed budget increase for fine billing and collection staff? Sounds mundane, but truly that's what happened in my prior cities, both of them. They needed a lot of code enforcement officers for the complaints that were ongoing. And in both cases, true experience, hometowns ended up adding more rules after the fact, costing more money to enforce. And at the end, the poor neighbors that are directly adjacent are left with problems, with trash, with parking, with loss of sleep, and with noise. So again, if you haven't funded this properly with code enforcement, that is an ongoing problem for the city. So I beg you, please consider how it will get paid for. Thank you very much. Thank you, Wendy Baroli via Zoom. Hi, I'm uh Wendy Boli and I'm a resident of uh Reno, Nevada. And um thank you very much, Mayor and Council, uh for uh once again letting the public participate in an environment that often seems like our voices are not heard. First of all, I'd like to say that I'm not anti-growth. Um and I'd like to speak about the Stonegate specifically. And I find it ironic that this very moment you guys are discussing ADUs and people are frustrated because it's supposed to address housing issues and yet you have in front of you 5,000 houses pre-approved and we spent a lot of time getting to that place. And I have three issues that I would like you to consider because it has been rejected by planning not once but twice. Um the first issue is that this particular organization is represented by locals. However, it is a corporation out of England specifically to develop personal family wealth. Um, we know that we've had conversations with the representatives and I think it's pretty awful that our taxpayers have to end up somehow being harmed because it's easier for them to put in warehousing than it is to do the promises that they made to do treelined walking paths and multifamily housing and help with the housing crisis that we have. And I think it's unfortunate that instead of listening to the citizens and the taxpayers, um we are dealing with a corporation that doesn't even exist, nor does it care about the community that it is, uh proposing and asking for the zoning amendment change. And the second thing that I have a concern about is that we spent years years literally years arguing about this piece of property. And um they tried to do an end run and go to the state legislature and have it deemed a super PAP pad instead of having to go through the public process. And when forced to go through the public process, we all spent a great deal of time, negotiating, showing up to meetings, you know, talking about it. And no one wanted 5,000 houses. We can't even imagine it out here, but we know it's happening. And we also know that's part of the regional and master plan is that workforce housing and housing needs to occur out here in the North Valleys. So, we get to this number of 5,000 houses. That's a good thing in the end long term. And this goes to my third point and why warehousing is the worst for this particular piece of property and why housing is much better. Warehouses go up now from 12 from anywhere from 12 to 20 weeks. Literally the truck traffic outer here can change in 3 months. And we don't have the on-ramp, the off-ramps or any of those infrastructural requirements to keep up with that kind of industrial growth that's occurring. And there's not a thing we can do about that. But we can do something about this because if you put 5,000 houses here, we can grow into that. The infrastructure can grow into that. We can build grocery stores. We can build high schools. We can build recre recreational areas. Warehousing is just an easy fix. And these guys have told us point blank said we don't have to do anything because we own this outright. So, I think that the city council in its rush to want to please this particular group um has forgotten that the taxpayers have worked very hard with council and with other members of the public and all of your agencies to get to the number of 5,000 houses. And we would urge you to vote no against Stonegate. Madame Mayor, with that we have no additional public comment registered. We did receive five comments that were general in nature or not directly associated with an agenda item prior to yesterday, September 10th at 4 PM. Okay. Um Wendy, thank you so much for your your comments. Very appreciated. Um Okay. Hold on. I think you might have more public comment, Madame Clerk. No worries. Take your time. They have decided that they would like to speak under A3 instead of D1. So, are you okay with me adding them in? Sure. Okay, no problem. Beth Dory. All right. I'm Beth Dory. First of all, regarding um Airbnbs, a lot of these old neighborhoods have CCNRs that prevent or they don't allow commercialization. So, um I would check your old CCNRs, which are still enforcable. And I'm going to start out with uh the conclusion and the beginning. First of all, I had a nice visit with Shea Bakus, who was the sponsor of this bill, AB 396. AB 396 would allow the city to have until July 2026 to pass this upzoning. This blanket upzoning does not have to be rushed. AB 396 would allow the city to notify affected property owners by mail instead of depending on an unreadable map. AB396 would allow for the city to require proof of a recent recorded boundary survey prior to issuing an ADU permit to prevent building inside the required setback. AB396 would allow for larger lot sizes larger than 5,000 square feet. And AB396 would allow the city to require an affidavit for which the owner declares that they don't have active CCNRs prohibiting extra units. And this is the conclusion. I don't think the city wants neighbor wars or litigation. If the city does not require proof of a boundary survey prior to issuing an ADU permit, I'll have to engage a surveyor and pass that cost on to my tenants, many who are living hand-to-mouth. If I have to sue a neighbor who installs an ADU, which is in conflict with existing CCNRs or encroaches into the setback, that cost too will be passed on to the tenants. It's my belief that this developer friendly council did not seek uh did not seek to add costs and restrictions to the investors who will be building these unaffordable units. And by doing so, we'll be shifting these costs on to those who can least afford it. And oh, I don't have very much time. So, I'll the rest of my time I'll show you my statement right here. Oops. read it. Can we make this visible online? [Music] Thank you, Tom Taber. Morning, madame mayor, council members, and especially my council, Kathleen Taylor. Thank you. This ADU seems to become a greater and greater problem. And I speak to that because as people have moved out of single family residents, most of the homes that have been repurchased have been repurchased as bedroom units. There is one unit, one home south of our house that now has construction going on without a building permit. And those people have never ever been stopped. They continue now to increase their work inside of the residents even though they don't have a permit to do so. One of the biggest problems that we have now is parking. On street parking seems to be a major problem in our area and that's the uh University of Foothills just north of Rancho San Rafll. When when we meaning my lady and I were at the Reno council, our Reno planning commission a week or so ago, one of the staff members said, "We and we I took as city of Reno, do not enforce ordinances." And I thought that was a terrible thing for somebody from the staff to say, but I have witnessed that because of the construction down the street. We also witness that because of the the over parking on our street. U people laugh when I say this, but most of the homes that are utilized as individual bedroom units happen to have college students in them. That's not a big problem except on the weekends there's usually twice as many cars. Does that make sense? So it makes it very difficult for people who are residents. If it supposed to be a single family resident, why are we allowing units with four bedrooms to have four to rent out four different bedrooms? That seems to me more of a motel or a small place. And yes, they are greater than 29 days cuz most of them spend at least one or two semesters at the school. It's just frustrating and I can't express that enough that the city does not enforce ordinances that the city does not stop construction from a place that does not have a permit for such construction. and the traffic increases and the parking problems that will arise from ADUs will be insufferable by the residents of the area. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak to Tom. I'm going to um actually have someone from our staff meet with you. I'm I'm gonna have someone from our staff meet with you because that is um part of the requirement that we do uh follow those ordinances. So, thank you. I'm going to have our assistant city manager, Miss Santoyo, meet with you. Okay. Thank you so much, Tom. And sir, I just wanted to say, and this is for everyone, I mean, it's impossible for us to know what's going on inside people's homes. So if neighbors become concerned that there's building that requires a building permit that doesn't have one, that's what Reno Direct is for is that you need to let us know. There's no way we can know it. It Okay. So just another we have been working on this for almost two years now. Okay. Thank you. We have informed city people, city engineering, council members and so forth. Okay. Thank you. And we have not gotten anywhere. By the way, because you're so interested in wild horses, may I chat with you to see about you coming on our radio show to talk about? Sure. Oh, great. No problem. Okay, Tom. Thank you so much, Miss Santoo's right there. I believe that is it. You believe that's it? I believe so. Okay. Anyone else want to speak or forever hold your peace? Do you want to come on up and then just make sure did you fill out a public comment card? I didn't. I'll do that on the way out. Okay, perfect. You know, you know the drill. I love it. Go ahead. Go ahead. Yeah. Yeah. My name is Cliff Nellis. I I lived in uh this area for 50 years and I've lived in uh the city of Reno property properly for most of that time. Right now I'm in in Wo County for the last six years. So I'm outside of the city. But one of the things I want to uh bring up is the fact that um you know the the city streets in Reno are not designed for heavy traffic. It was designed for a small city. I grew up in Las Vegas where we have you know we have eight lane roads all over the place and therefore now because they got two million people. The population will just keep on growing. And when you add units into the inner city like that, you're creating a real serious traffic problem. Now look at the state of Nevada. How big is Nevada? I mean, how many empty acres do we have? You know, for for affordable housing, it needs to be built outside of the city. See, that's the thing. And so this whole concept of affordable housing, I'm all for it. But there's all kinds of ways to make affordable housing happen. Oh, and by the way, subsidized housing makes rent for regular people more expensive. A lot of people don't realize that because it's it's it's pushing the market higher. But yeah, so I'm totally against it and I know just about everybody is, so I hope you guys will listen to the voice of the people. Yeah. All right. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Okay, Madame Clerk, are we good? Yes. Yes. Okay. With that being said, I'm actually going to hand it over to our city manager for updates um on the agenda and any notes you have. Thank you, Madame Mayor. The plan today is to pull items off of the consent agenda and and then immediately move to item C1 for the EDON guest presentation, followed by item C2 for the property tax presentation. After those two items, we'll move down to our public hearing section and open up item D1 related to ADUs, followed by D2 related to Stonegate. And then after the break, uh, we will follow up with the pulled consent items and no earlier than 2 p.m. we will hear C3 for the most team presentation. Okay, fantastic. I appreciate it. Okay. At this time, um, Madame Clerk, I believe item A4, uh, I'm gonna ask for the approval of the agenda. My I get So, so moved. I have a motion. I have a second. All those in favor say I. All those opposed? Motion carries. All right. Uh, I need item A5, approval of the minutes. So moved. I have a motion. I have a second. All those in favor say I. I. All those opposed. Motion carries unanimously. Okay. Uh, we are now going to head into consent items and I am going to start with you, Councilwoman Anderson. Do you have any items you want to pull off consent? Not today, Madam. Okay. Thank you so much, Mr. Martinez. Council Martinez. Well, thank you, Madam Mayor. I'm good. Thank you. Good. Okay. I have a disclosure and an abstension for item B4. Okay. Um, I would just ask our city attorneys, do you want her to read that now or can we do that when we come back? Um, yeah, probably pull it and then bring it back. Okay. Yes. All right, we'll pull that item. Uh, heading over to Councilwoman Der. Yeah. Um, I don't want to keep people, but I wanted to identify B4, which is over $4 million, and B5, which is really special about naming our city after General Jesse Lee Reno. Okay, sounds good. All right, Council Neighbor. Yeah, I'd like to pull B3. Uh B4 and B5 have already been pulled, but also um B13, B14, and B15, please. All right, perfect. Okay, with that being said, um I just want to remind council members that we will come back to these items. Uh so, um I would like to approve. Did you want to make a motion to approve the rest of the Thank you. So, I'm uh little ahead of me. So, a motion to approve. I have a second. All those in favor say I. All those opposed. Motion carries unanimously. Okay. All right. Now, we're going to head into item C1. We have uh a great presentation today. I'm looking forward to this. We have uh the one and only Taylor Adams here to pres present for Edon and give us um a sneak peek of what's happening and all the exciting things that are going on with economic development. So the floor is yours my friend. Take it away. Thank you. Good morning, mayor, vice mayor, and council. For the record, I'm Taylor Adams, chief executive of Edon, and and I'm excited to give you uh a presentation on the fiscal impacts of AD. I'm kidding. No, no, no. I went what? Yeah. No, no. We'll we'll dive into what's going on what's going on in the the region, I'll I'll be uh I'll be pretty quick as we work through this. And also, I'm going to say I'm not going to for the benefit of the of of council and also for the public that's in the room. I'm not going to go through every slide here. Some of the information we provided is purely for uh for the public's reference if they have something to refer to as we move on, but we'll hit the high points for sure. Also, I'd be remiss, mayor, if I went any further without um commenting on what a fine job you did last night uh uh at the uh at the honors college, gayla. Uh there the mayor participated in a in a panel with two other community leaders and did an exceptional job of representing all the great things that city council continues to do in our community and that your staff is doing for us every day. So, thank you for your comments. It was really enjoyed being a part of that and getting getting to hear getting to hear your perspective. Well, well, thank you. I was impressed because there was a young man there that was he was so incredible, so kind, so polite. And I said, "Your parents must be proud." He said, "That's my dad sitting over there." And he was pointing at you. I said, "No way." So anyway, you should be proud because it really stood out, but I just I had to harass him that you were his father. So, thank you. It thankfully uh did a great job. For those of you that know my wife, thankfully all of my kids take after her, but no, but our but our our oldest is a freshman at the university and we're we're we're certainly proud that he's part of the honors college and so it was great to be with you last night. But but quickly on on what I always like to start by reminding the public uh just sort of what is Edon? We're of course the we're the economic development authority of Western Nevada. It's important that we tell people that we're a public private partnership and this is where as you can see here about 30% of our revenues come from I know. What is that? I know it's not it's not me. I guess I'm already boring him to sleep, mayor. But yeah, that's what I thought. You've already you haven't even started and you're putting us to sleep. That's right. But no, uh 30% of our of our funding comes comes from the public agencies in Northern Nevada, chief among them, the city of Reno. And we're of course grateful for uh for your support. But then also every year my team goes out and about 70% of our revenues are raised in the private in the private sector from organizations that generally believe that the rising tide lifts all ships. Um, how is our team organized? Well, obviously business attraction is what everybody knows us for doing and that's where where I have a team that we'll show you a little more about in just a moment that goes all over the world trying to uh trying to attract companies that are right for Northern Nevada that embrace our cultural pillars and would enhance our economy. We also have business retention and expansion. This is something you've not historically heard us talk as much about, but it's incredibly important. We believe that 80% of the of the net new jobs in any community should come from the existing business community for us to be a healthy and sustainable economy. Uh more simply put, I like to say if the promises that we make to businesses that are moving here aren't true for the businesses that are here, then we got it wrong. And so we're we've and you'll see more about this in just a moment. We put a tremendous amount of resource over the last two years into building a more robust business retention and expansion program. We'll talk about that in just a moment, but just to make sure that we're caring for our bit for our local business and industry. One thing I should note here, Edon works exclusively in the commercial and industrial side of the economy. We don't specifically work in retail, but what that but what that does mean um is uh well it's a great it's a great divider in in Ann Silver's work at the chamber in my work and does an amazing job of providing assistance to our smaller businesses, our mom and pops, our main street our main street retailers. We work more in the commercial industrial and professional services side. And so a little a little a little division between our work but but again working on business retention. We'll talk about that just a minute. entrepreneurial development. I'm so proud of Doug. I always love it when my when when team members of ours come and participate in public process as you heard from Doug Irwin just a few minutes ago. Doug Irwin, of course, long-standing fixture at Edon that that basically has built our entrepreneurial development division. And then we have a group focused on strategic partnerships and workforce. And what what's that about? That's just making sure that um our regional education partners are producing a great day one employee employee for the uh uh for the employers in our region. We uh we know that the that the great companies that we bring here are going to to train employees once they get there. We we talk a lot about lifelong learning and pathways, but but all of it starts with a great day one employee and we're so fortunate to have great educational providers in the community chief among them county schools, our own community college, trek trekking community college in the University of Nevada. What did 2025 look like? I always like to our fiscal year like yours runs July 1 to June 30. I always like to start with the raw data so that you all can see put a little context between behind the charts we're going to show you in just a moment. This is everything that happened in our last fiscal year that ended up that ended on June 30th. Here's what the uh here's what our industry breakdown look like. This is and by the way really happy to have made the announcements that we made. But this is I'll tell you there's something that's a little concerning here. There there's there aren't nearly as many pieces of pie on this chart as you're accustomed to seeing. Think of that as an indication of just the economic headwinds that we faced, a lot of uncertainty this year, an unknown corporate tax policy. Um, along with that, the Fed maintaining its its its restrictive interest rate policy. All of that led to a really hard year. Make no mistake, we performed well above most of our peers, but it we did see the uh the breadth of industry that we where that where where we were able to generate success reduced a little bit. I'll show you some something on that in just a minute. Quick look. This is specifically what happened in Reno last year and what we're and and basically projects that are moving into delivery right now. Um this is the if we were to break that down for Edon, you can see it roughly conforms to what we showed you just before. But let's look at 24 again showing you the list. But see, you can see in the fiscal year that ran from July 1, 2023 to June 30, 2024, a lot more diversity in the employment uses that we attracted. Um, and so you can see uh a more tech um advanced manufacturing, aerospace, things of that nature. What did that look like specifically for uh for Reno? You can see that right here. And then here's the re here's the Reno pie chart. Again, roughly conforms to what we saw across the region. Why do I show you these back toback? Because um I think it's important that we note we anticipate that as we work into 26, we're going to return to something that looks more like the fiscal year 24, the more diverse chart. Why is that? We the the Fed has all but said they're going to start lowering lowering rates next week. We got some we had some economic data yesterday and today that really drives that home. Most importantly, I always get the name of this, but but whether whether the big bold beautiful bill thing, whatever it was, I always get the name of it wrong. But where but what's really important about that bill is um whether you love it or hate it, um before that bill was adopted, uh corporate tax burden in America was unknown. At the completion of that bill, we now know what it is. Whether you like it or hate it, the important thing to know is it's now a known thing and so business can plan for it. um you know we were on a res I thought we were on a glide path to understand what final tariff policy would look like by the end of the year. Obviously there was an appeals court decision that sort of thrown that whole thing back up into turmoil or up into question but but I still believe that in the coming months um the uncertainty around tariffs will will will abate and we'll return to to a more traditional development pattern for northern Nevada. So we're very bullish on 2026. We're already seeing uh a real uptick in prospecting activity and we're hearing from our commercial real estate partners that they're experiencing the same thing. So, a couple of a couple of recent announcements that uh that that that we were happy and I love to show these because everybody thinks we only do we only do deals the size of Tesla. No, we I mean uh Tesla's a once in a generation deal. Redwood is a once in a generation deal for most economic developers. Yeah, it's just really it's interesting that we've been blessed with a number of these, but the truth is a lot of the majority I I think last year we did a we did about 18 deals and uh and only four of them, I think five of them qualified for an abatement in Nevada because these are small manufacturers. They're coming here because they believe in our region. And so here you can see five new jobs at Trident and then and a great company, Bit Deer, that's going to bring um a hundred new jobs to our to our region. um we see a lot of advanced manufacturing energy generation is a big part of what we're seeing now. Why is that? Um we there is a race everywhere in the west as there has been for the last 25 years to bring on as much energy generation as we can to meet our growing population and industrial needs. What's interesting is I didn't think if you back up 12 months, I didn't think you'd see another natural gas or fossil fuels um dri fueled uh generation facility built in the western half of the United States. Well, that has ended um with with the new administrations. Like we always say, the the the the economy always expands on the back end of a presidential election. We just have to have the election to know which part's going to expand. Well, make no mistake, we're seeing a a vast acceleration in what would be natural gas generation projects coming through. Well, in Nevada, half of our generation has to be from renewable sources. And so, that's actually created a really interesting opportunity for us in the short term. And so, we're spending a lot of time talking about where we can appropriately site renewable energy generation that can feed both northern Nevada, but also um the state and whole. And then we there's I could talk about data centers all day. What I can tell you is where there are certainly data centers in our pipeline. It's important to talk about why data centers are in our pipeline. data centers in our pipeline because that is the most financable deal in the marketplace right now. As we work into 26 where you'll certainly see that demand continue, you'll see it diminished by the fact that um that manufacturing becomes uh manufacturing uh and and uh logist and basically logistical uses uh distribution specifically are able to be a lot or start to pencil again become a lot more attractive. So again, we anticipate you'll see more balance in the pipeline as we work into 26. What's this map mean? Two years ago, we asked ourselves the question, um, you know, what what can we do nationally speaking? California's been the gift that keeps on giving to this economy for a long time from an industrial standpoint, and it still is, but we have to admit that that's a mature part of our business. So, we looked east and said, "All right, what what can we do?" Well, in the first year of looking east, we cited projects from from 10 different states that aren't California and Nevada. And you can see and then the the hatched lines we added a few more this year while holding serve in those other markets. So so what's great is we're we're we're seeing this as as as something that's driving diversity within employment uses in the region and it speaks to how attractive our market is. This last year we ask ourselves the question what does that look like if we spread that internationally? Well all of a sudden now we're now we're working projects on three on three continents around the world that that aren't North America. And so we're really excited to speak about to to to sort of be able to say to you that that that as our market is continuing to mature, it is an attractive destination not just for national business but for global business. And we're and we're really really excited to work into this year and see what that can mean for us. These are these are the slides I'm not slides I'm not going to read to you, but I wanted to provide um for the public's reference. And so so you can see here 1,800 jobs last year in business attraction. This is the this is the one I do want to spend a minute on. Um this as we're building this program, historically Edon has visited about 120 companies per year just to do health checks, find out what's going on. We're on a three-year path to get that to 650. So we went from in year one, we went from 120 um to 250. This year, the year that we've just started, we're going we're going to go from 250 to 450. And next year, we're going to visit 650 primary companies in Northern Nevada. Why are we going to do that? We want to have robust data and we want to and we want to have our finger on the pulse of truly what's going on in business within our community. And so just know we're building this program out, but but it's amazing just going to 250 what we learned about what our businesses on the ground are facing here every day. As we're as we're working towards 450 this year, we're learning even more. really excited that next year when I'm standing in front of you, we we'll have talked to these 450 companies and I'll be able to tell you provide real information on what our businesses are facing on the ground in our community as they're trying to grow scale and in many cases just hold serve right here because they love it here and they want to be here. So, uh looking forward to continuing to enhance this part of our offering and and report more more to this to you in uh as we move forward. Um I'm going to entrepreneurial development. And I'm going to talk more about entrepreneurial development in one second as I wrap up. Strategic partnerships as I mentioned this is where we're building that day one employee. This is what I want to cover with uh with entrepreneurial development. I mean as as all of you I believe know we had uh uh Edon uh sort of had we had our first startup week two years ago. So my first year here I wish I could take credit for it. Doug had been working on it a year when I got here but three months after I arrived we had our first startup week. We thought we'd have 300. We had 600. businesses come and participate that week. Last year we we were hoping that we would have 600 again. We had, as you can see here, just over a thousand. Reno startup Reno Startup Week 2025 is in three weeks. It's the 29th, Doug. Is that right? The 29th. It starts and and it runs into the weekend. Um I would love to tell you we're we're going to have a thousand again, but I think we're going to grow out of that number. and Doug and his team have done an incredible job working with our partners and volunteers throughout the community to to make an even richer event this year than we had last year. The reason I want to focus on this, this is something that with you with your help and it's important to know that uh that reena that that startup week happens exclusively downtown and in Midtown. And uh and so uh it's it happens in the core of our city. It is free to the public. any any existing entrepreneur, starter, founder, wannabe entrepreneur, um investor. This is a free event. It runs all week and uh uh thanks Doug's team has to go raise about $150,000 a year for us to do this um at at no charge to participants, but we would welcome anyone from the uh from the public that that wants to participate to come and join us. Registration is open. And what's great about the event this year, uh, part one of the enhancements Doug has done is this now we've now pulled our event and the offbeat music festival together. So as start, so as startup week is wrapping up, offbeat is kicking off. And so a great we we anticipate that this will be a great week of programming in the core of our city. And uh, and and I will tell you it's I don't I don't ever want to be in front of you where I don't talk about downtown a little bit. I we moved our office downtown the first year that I was here and and I'm in the district every day, walked through it every day, and I just can't tell you how excited I am about the future for our downtown and some of some of the great restaurants that have come that have come in recently like Toro Bravo and the Belleville Wine Bar that just as as a as a in addition to all of sort of the traditional legacy providers that we have primarily through our gaming community. So really happy to be delivering this this in the heart in the urban core of our city for our entrepreneurial community. Here's a quick link to uh uh to to to where a potential business can come and uh and register. And with that, I'm happy to take any questions. Thank you so much for the presentation. Great information. Thank you. I'm going to hold my comments, but it's going to be hard to do because I'm so excited. So, I'm going to start on the right hand side with Council Member Anderson. Questions or comments? Thank you for coming before us today. Um I was just looking at the the industries on that pie that simplified to three different um areas. It looks like we lost most momentum in clean energy and in aerospace and defense. So what makes you so confident that in those two areas we're going to see those investments come back in 2026? So important to know about aerospace and defense. When that one landed on us in 24, I didn't see that one coming, but I'm glad it did because those were that's a great job, great expansion, and we're we're we're working in that space. Um, the decline in in renewable energy development was uh was almost exclusively attributable to the to the change in administration and some of the direct pressure that was being felt in the lithium industry. As we're working through those and finding a road forward, we anticipate that we can that we can restore some momentum there. I mean the the truth of it is we are still the home to what to at what is at minimum the largest lithium deposit in uh in in North America and what many believe to be the largest lithium deposit in the world. So this is going to be part of our economy. Our university is working through the the lithium tech hub that it was that it was awarded. They've been a great partner in this space. And so I think that the slowdown that you saw specifically in lithium over the over over this last fiscal year was about us pivoting on the back end of uh of what is an administration change and figuring out what our road forward is going to be. We have a much better sense of that now. And uh uh and so we're confident that we that we're going to be able to to restore that activity. Um we we and and by the way I think it's important to note that I separate renewable energy from from lithium production. So lithium is a storage medium. Renewable energy is sort of how that's how we make it. Um, and there's a lot more to renewable energy than than solar. One of the great things about Nevada is we're we have one of the one of the the most exciting geothermal opportunities which counts as base load which is great energy um in the country. And so uh we see uh we see as the market is calming down returning to norm in that space. Now, as it relates to aerospace, I don't know that it will be aerospace specifically that we see next. And thank and thank you for the question, but I would say what I think you'll see more of from us, particularly as I'm looking at our startup pipeline, you'll see more tech manufacturing. So, we're seeing we've had two really exciting starts in what would be the equipment that is used to make AI, you know, the the the manufacturing of AI specific equipment. two of our two local companies have have received great funding in this space and so we anticipate that we that we're seeing real growth in that space and that that's going to create some new diversity for us. Okay, one more question. Thank you so much. Um there's an audience here that probably bristles to hear that we have data centers that are you know very very interested in Northern Nevada um for a variety of reasons whether it's renewable resources and the concerns around that um including water. But I want to hear because I hear two things here because you're also speaking very um excitedly or opportun or optimistically about the development of more natural renewable resources and I'm hoping that you're considering that that's going to go handinhand with data center development because those are the two things that I think need to be married to give people confidence in those investments. And council member, thank you for the question. And now I I promise you I could I could talk about data centers for the for the rest of the day and I promise you I won't. Um the the the the simple thing I'll say about data centers is there there's a ton of misinformation um in the community about data center development in the present. But now I want to be quick I want to be quick to also say the reason that exists is because if we back up to early gener earlier generations of data center use in the here in our country and around the world, it was all true. it was 100% true that that that that we only knew what we knew 10, 15, 20 years ago when we were doing this. And it's important to know one of the biggest data center hubs in the world uh is in the Commonwealth of Virginia where I spent the 10 years preceding my time here. And I should also tell you uh the the two ca the the the first two subc cable landings I had in this country in a long time happened in the community where I was doing this work at that the Maria and Brussa cables. I landed them to sort of enhance that use in Northern Virginia. So, so this is something I've spent a good bit of time about. And so, make no mistake, some of the criticism that we hear is wellounded, but it's but it might be a little outdated. And so, as we're working forward, I think it's really important that we have intentional conversation as a community because there are ways. One of the things that we often hear is that data centers are big water users. If they use evaporative cooling, they are. There are other technologies that can be mandated now that can buy that down. the absolutely generators are loud. And by the way, if we do mechanical conditioning of space in a data center, that's also loud. Here's what's great. There's there's an amazing company. There are several of them, but but the one that the first one that comes to mind called acoustical sheet metal. All they do is they make giant steel boxes with acoustical panels that can sit over the top of these data centers. are used in metropolitan areas all over the country primarily around research facilities and hospitals to ensure that um that adjoining residential uses aren't impacted by the cycling of of of what would be industrial generators. And so what I would say is um and yes, we agree that that it's critical that that as we look at the future of generation in Nevada that we're that we that we safeguard the residential rateayer that and that we make sure that we have that we that we build a resource that that is that is adequate to ensure that that we we have a safe reliable grid going forward. And I'm so thankful that we have a part we have partners like Nevada Energy that are that are helping us with that every day. So what I would say is um the market has moved because because of the need and there are answers to all there are answers and solutions that can that can be put in place to to solve a multitude of concerns about data centers and and and I would say as we go forward as a community um my organization will be delighted to to stand side by side with you and make sure that we deliver on uh that we that we deliver answers and we deliver solutions in a way that the public can embrace them. Awesome. Thank you. Thanks for your partnership, Council Member Martinez. Thanks so much, um, Madame Vice Mayor, and thank you, uh, CEO Adams, for the presentation. I really appreciated seeing you back another year and getting an update. Um, I think it's good to hear sort of the overall picture of what you're seeing and uh, the impacts that, you know, the federal elections have had and how you're sort of adapting and trying to work within the current system that we have. So, I just wanted to say thank you for those presentations, the breakdown between the partnerships that you have with uh the Chamber of Commerce and I got a chance to meet uh individually with the RCVA and got to hear some updates with your partnership there and also with the Reno Tahoe airport. So, really appreciative of you moving your family from the Commonwealth, taking the gamble to be here in Reno and establishing roots and bringing all that expertise that you have into our region. So, I think it's a great asset. uh you and obviously Mr. Irwin and your team have brought a lot of really great things. I'm really looking forward to the expansion of uh Reno Startup Week uh and how excited folks are to contribute and be a part of that. So, thank you, Council Member. Thank you so much, Council Member Eert. Me to go. I was just going to go. Oh, okay. Yeah. All right. Um yeah. Um okay. Okay. I do have a lot of questions so I'll probably need to go twice but first thing I want to ask about because it's kind of a hot topic especially with data centers is tax abatements is the process of applying for tax abatements does help with that at all? Is that a part of kind of the um process for trying to um have businesses come here just to make Reno or the region more desirable? Is that is that a function of Edon? So, so it's important to know. So, short answer is yes. Let me provide a little context. So, it's important to know abatements in Nevada are statutory. They're not discretionary. So, it's simply if you if you qualify for them, the um the state state code is clear. We must advance the application. Edon has a contract uh to basically to do our work on behalf of the governor's office of economic development. It's in our charter that we are an extension of GOED at the local level. And so to answer your question simply, yes. If a uh if a business that qualifi basically if a business that meets the minimum requirements um applies for a uh for an abatement, we must advance that to the governor's office, but we don't approve them. Okay. But do you help them navigate that process to qualify for abatements? Yes, that that is a requirement of the contract that we have with the governor's office of economic development. Great. And um I know that city of Reno um funds a portion of Edon in the region. What other partners do you receive um funding for or from in the region? So I'm going to and and by the way for anyone who might be watching this if I miss one I'm going to a I apologize for that in advance but the governor the governor is our largest public investor and that and that's defined basically in the bienium every year. City of Reno, City of Sparks, Wo County, Story, Fernley, oh goodness, um uh tangentally parts of Church Hill. Okay. And uh and and and I hope I didn't miss one. I ran. Yeah. No, that's fine. And excuse me, a number of our infrastructure providers, the the RTC, the RTAA, the RSCVA, right? Um Tumblas, so on and so forth. Okay. Awesome. Um the other um piece I wanted to ask about real quick, and I I just have these questions I wrote down as you were speaking. Um, do um any of these businesses express any kind of concern with housing for their employees once they come here? I know you mentioned um commercial real estate partners and it's a hot topic. Do you get any feedback after businesses come here that it's been difficult? Sure. I mean, but and and I mean, I don't know that there's so what I'll say is our our commercial community uh and and we are blessed with with great employers in our region, but in in almost every case, they care about their employees. They care they care that their employees can can enjoy the quality of life that our region offers. And certainly, we felt we've felt the uh the pinch of housing shortages. That that said, if my colleague Dan Dan Morgan was here, he would he would talk about how hard his builders are working to solve that problem. But it's a but it's important to know. Yes. I mean certainly we're um our employees are feeling the pinch. Okay. So if you'll allow me just one quick followup. I was going to say go ahead because Councilwoman Anderson went over too. So Okay. Okay. So knowing that do you try to find more commercial developers to come to the region to build these apartments or starter homes, things like that. Do is that part of the group that you're looking to bring here? So twofold. Um generally what we are trying to do what what what what I can tell you is we have a a robust and strong community of uh of residential developers be that owner occupied or multif family. Uh the bulk of my work in this space has been around securing capital to help those partners secure capital so that they can start building again. If you look I mean and and you all know this just from your work here. We have we uh we do not hurt for entitled parcels. what we heard what what is challenging right now was finding finding a way for the deal to pencil given interest rates being where they are and the carry on the development. Um also we're I'm also sensitive to sort of the what would be the uh the availab the the availability of our average employee to pay rents. We've seen real upward momentum in rent and so we're trying to stabilize that as well. So, so, so most of my work in this space is in help is in trying to induce capital to come to the market that will that will invest in housing projects that our existing development community can deliver. Great. Thank you. Um, I will have more if we can have a second round. Thank you. I believe it's council member Dur's tourn. Thank you. Excuse me. Thank you. Welcome, uh, Mr. Taylor Adams. Um, appreciate you being here. Um, I I love getting to intersect with you and find out what's new and different and happening. um appreciated the presentation. Just a few things just to put on your radar and also to help us. Um you mentioned the employees coming here and the quality of life that they're looking for and your predecessor um helped fund I think it was 75,000 uh a regional trail map. Um because a lot of them are coming the great outdoors. This is one of our big appeal. Um we are trying to put in part of that circling the whole meadows uh trails over in the Virginia range. trying to put them in ahead of the development coming so that it's something they can build on instead of having to create. Um I don't want to put you on the spot, but I'd love you to consider continuing that investment as we do this last phase of the full trail network. So I'd love to send some folks to visit with you on that. So council member, that that would be great. Uh we we certainly are very proud of the work that's been done there. I I I I will tell you I have I have made a commitment to your city manager to to talk to her about the city parks that are existing for future investment before before we look at sort of new construction. But that said, consistent with this council's vision, we'll go where you say yes. And one of our items today is the um parks recreation open space plan update. But this is not really the building of those things. This is just planning for them. So it's much less expensive than um having to invest in actual park. Um, the other thing I wanted to mention on a on a personal side, I'm chair of something called the Mackie School of Earth Sciences and Engineering Advisory Board and we focus on getting students educated um in a variety of fields that are related to Earth Sciences and Engineering and you happen to bring up um lithium today and clearly that's in our Bailey Wick, but also um we we focus too on geothermal. We focus too on the coming attractions such as sodium ion uh battery battery development instead of lithium. So what I'd love to do is um have you at one of those meetings so you can understand the sector better maybe from lots of people um CEOs and so on that are part of that um entire sector including battery storage. Love to see those kind of businesses come here um and build on the current wave of interest. I heard there's a lot of money about to be invested in the mineral sector. Um we used to have a federal bureau of mines that did a lot of um analysis to develop why uh the underpinning of why we have the minerals we do today. Uh without that information research we wouldn't have um what we do have today. So we need to continue investing on the R&D side. Um the other thing I wanted to mention is on data centers and I see I'm running out of time but what I wanted to do is make sure that you are um know about and and consider and participate in our special meeting we're having on October one which is all about data centers. And um one thing I'm hoping that you will continue to support as you did in Virginia is that um I think many of us understand the benefits of data centers. But um what we're trying to do here is learn from Virginia and other places what the challenges are and make sure that we put in place um uh policies ordinance to mitigate those things. So, you mentioned noise and you mentioned that um the corrugated sheet metal can really work, but unless someone says, "Hey, noise is important to us. We'd like you to see you install corrugated sheet metal." That typically isn't happening. Um unless we sort of lay out some precedents and some expectations to minimize impact so we can get the benefit of the data center without the ancillary um downsides. That's where our focus is, at least mine. And um so I want to make sure that um you mentioned something really important to me which was safeguarding residential rateayers. Um that's something we really care about too and it's going to take some all of us rolling up our sleeves with MV Energy to figure out how that happens. So I'll leave it there for for now but um just to recap love to talk to you about trails love to invite you to be part of a bigger conversation on uh minerals batteries and alternate you know startup type alternatives and then the data centers. So, thank you. Thank you, Council Member. Yeah. Um, do you mind? Are you okay? Okay. Um, okay. So many good things happening. I'm really excited. I'm glad that you moved downtown. Um, so that answered my first question. How are you promoting downtown be I want to say, like I said, you're doing great things, but I want to talk on a broader scale. the city of Reno. Obviously, we're in a financial position that is a little bit challenging and we need to think bigger and we need to bring more resources and more revenue to the city of Reno with the jobs and I think you are on track for doing that. One of the things that you you talked about with your slides is you've just brought in a couple of new companies that have 100 employees. When we look at the rate that they're paying, which is are good paying jobs, it's still not enough to make to make up for the housing shortage here. We got a presentation last two weeks ago from the Nevada Housing Coalition that you need to make over hundred grand a year to afford the housing here. So at $35 an hour, why that's a good paying job, it's still there's still a delta of 20 or $30,000 a year that we have to do. So my my plea to you is how can the city of Reno help you bring in those jobs within the confines of what we do and those employers? And these are the things that I have heard. Um you mentioned p predictability earlier. So this this body needs to be predictable. Um we need to remove barriers and we need to act with speed and where it's appropriate. Those are the things that I have heard that are the biggest barriers to attracting the companies that we want here. And I guess I'll just end with I'm all in on advanced manufacturing. Anything that we can do um that was in your pie chart to attract those people. We're Reno's ideal for that. We are We are ideal. We're just like Arizona. We're just like Salt Lake City. We can be attracting those companies. I want to know what we can do here to help you get them, land them, bring them here. And also the retention of the talent that we have up at UNR. I talked with President Sandival a little bit about how many of our engineers in our M how many people are staying here and getting jobs, which is we want them to stay here that we do. And that's a lot, but yeah. So, thank you for those thank you for the questions and and I'll sort of I'll I'll try to work them in order. So, you you hit on Nevada's superpower, which is speed to market. And so, the uh it's interesting uh where where I get a lot of questions about abatements in in Nevada and are they right, are they wrong? What I'll tell you is they're a market condition and we actually have less than almost all of our peers do or certainly the the communities I'm competing with. So if you look at what's possible in Arizona and Texas, Florida, Georgia, Tennessee, Virginia, all of these and many others, these are states that offer much larger abatements than uh than and incentives than we do. So So for for us, the way that we work around that historically is with speed to market. uh which and and um our real estate particularly in our in in undeveloped or unentitled parts of our our jurisdictions generally a little less expense expensive than what they would see in those states although that's closing our superpower is really getting that product built and online faster which is which is the same thing as money for the developer. So so anything that you can do to help us preserve speed to market is something that will help us be more effective. The other thing that I would offer though, um, the average value of a job that we recruited last year was just over $85,000, which is great. I mean, that it it doesn't just lead the the state, it really leads the region. But that said, to your point, how we we've not seen a real reduction in housing cost as rates have stayed where they are. And so, we're hoping for some relief on that. But but in the event that we don't, we talk a lot about the pro uh the need for a professionalization of our of our economy. If you look, you we brought a ton of logisticians, manufacturers, but what but what we haven't necessarily seen is is a is the growth in our in the professional services part of our economy that can support that that and this this is generally what I'm talking about here. It's a downtown business climate. I will tell you the most important thing that is that is in front of us are the two towers that are that are that are just right up the street from where we're standing right now. the old Harris revival. The I we are absolutely talking about the old and you know I don't want to get ahead of of our development partner there but make no mistake the most exciting thing that could happen in this community this year is for us to turn the lights on in those towers again and get them on the road back to to being an asset in our community and not and not just not just from a real estate tax standpoint although that would be meaningful. The the other thing though is it brings energy to downtown that we don't presently have and it allows us to start talking about more robust professional office uses in our community which I think is critical for the for the next step and to achieve the incomes you're talking about. One quick thing about the university, you back up 15 years, we were lucky to keep five out of every 10 graduates from the University of Nevada here in the community. We're up to seven out of 10, but we shouldn't quit till we hit 10 out of 10. You're absolutely right. And now that one of my children is a student there, and I hope the other three will be as well, I'm even more motivated to make sure that they stay here. Well, thank you for the again the presentation, and thank you for bringing your organization to downtown. It's really impressive and I appreciate that. Um, thank you. Uh, I don't think Council Member Reese had a chance to go. Council member Ree, do you have any questions? Thank you, Madam Vice Mayor. Thank you, Mr. Taylor, and I apologize for not being able to be there today, but I wanted to say a couple things. Uh first thank you to you and your team for the startup week and your presentation about it. Uh this is something that I know Madame Mayor has been very uh big fan of for several years. Uh I too have um decided to help support it financially because I think it is so very important to our region that people understand the opportunities that it brings. I was able to attend a few of the events last year uh and really Doug and the team have just done a fantastic job of highlighting the ways in which the startup economy can drive innovation and opportunity for our region. So thank you for that. Uh second is you know we are a challenging environment in northern Nevada especially because you know some of our geographic constraints some of the tax related constraints uh make it a difficult proposition for relocations to occur here but yet you posited that the speed to market is our greatest weapon and I actually would challenge that in one way. I I think the greatest asset that we have as a region is our people. our willingness to welcome others into the region with open arms. And I do believe that we have the opportunities in the coming years as we have developed uh training programs at the university and TMCC uh different uh local uh college and universities like Carrington uh which are providing for some of our nursing programs uh to grow the opportunities for people here who are coming from somewhere else oftent times and finding a way to make a better home for themselves. like Vice Mayor Taylor, I'm concerned about housing costs which are kind of outstripping the benefit that people have in coming here, but I do believe in sort of the resiliency and I wanted to just ask you your thoughts on sort of the projections as we move forward about balancing some of these competing concerns. So, thank you, council member, and and and I I I'll just say I stand corrected. Absolutely. Our people are the uh the people of Northern Nevada are absolutely the strength of the community. And so, thank you for that. And uh uh and happily accept that uh that correction. As it as it relates to looking forward, I it's interesting. Every time I think that we're going to that we're going to catch a break in and in in the cost of construction materials, the market seems to move the other way. Um that that said though, we do know we we do see stability coming. We just got an inflation print this morning that actually is is is promising and actually we had a revision down of the prior print from July. So So we're we're optimistic that from a materials cost standpoint, we're seeing an economy starting to move towards equilibrium. we the but I don't know that I can overstate the importance of an interest rate cut as we look forward because that interest rate um that reduction in rate affects not just the buyer it affects the cost of the carry for the entire project and so any reduction in interest cost is is a direct benefit to the cost of the of whatever dwelling unit be be it single family or multif family that we're building that can come that can that can carry through to the end and offer a margin that allows the developer to build it while still bringing it to bringing it to market at a at a price that our consumers can afford. And so so we're we're we're looking at this closely. We're we're I would love to get 75 basis points between now and the end of the year and and uh you know by by the grace of God a similar reduction in the 10-year Treasury that could come through to to uh to to to what would be mortgage rates. But um we're we're very much in a wait and see. We're we're we're very optimistic and and continue to be bullish on this market. Council member Anderson. Thank you, Council Member Reese. Thank you. Just just one more um area. I know that um Council Member Ree brought up some workforce development. I wanted to know your perspective um your comfort level, confidence level in our ability to have a developed and trained workforce for the jobs that you know that are coming here. Do you do you think we have the education partners we need? Do we have opportunities? I know AI is going to force some potential career opportunities um onto people that didn't know that they were coming. Um what is going to be available in the market that are going to be jobs that people can consider being retrained for? So, so first I have to say I I am I am nothing short of aed by the quality of uh of of the education systems that we have here be as I mentioned earlier. So um Wo County Schools I think does an exceptional job when you look at the size of this county and uh and the breadth of the uh basically student offering that they have to provide. I think uh the new superintendent and the school board, they're doing an exceptional job um with with the resources they've been given as well as uh of course I deal with Truckucky Meadows Community College on a on a weekly basis, but also there's Western Nevada College and in the Carson Metro and then we've got the University of Nevada here. So So looking at what is the core of our educational offering, I could not be happier with with where we are and how we're charging ahead. And one thing I'll say about the University of Nevada, you mentioned AI. Uh I'm just it's I I don't know if I'm assuming that you all know, I shouldn't make an assumption, but the fact that they're rolling out an AI assistant that every student on campus is going to be exposed to over, you know, uh starting starting now over the next four years to prepare them for what the world is going to do. I think it just shows tremendous leadership at the at the university is doing. But one one quick thing about the university and our community college that are particularly helpful. Um, having having done this work in a couple other places, it is rare to find a a a flagship land grant institution that will work with a work with a major employer to create programming that is specific for their day one need. We have one. This is I mean I I will tell you I'm so grateful to President Sandival and to his team for their willingness to work with our employers to ensure that that industry specific needs are met within the colleges on campus be that engineering, business, so on and so forth. Same is true at the community college when it comes to workforce education. Um and and really at the at the community college it's more we're talking more about about trades, mechatronics, things of that nature. But what's so great is um we've got partners that that are that are more than willing to step up and help us do that and and it really enhances. Now to that end, we got about 6,000 jobs under under construction right now and I could use more of all of it, but but the truth is the providers we have are doing all that they all that they can within the facility constraints that they're facing to ensure that we can meet the need. Council member Eert, did you have a follow-up? Yeah, I did. Um, so again, I'll try and get through this quickly. Um, do you, um, kind of keep track of what kind of abatements have been successfully, um, received through the state? Um, and kind of part B of that is do you work with businesses at all to um have any kind of financial agreement with the city or the county to help offset the costs of providing services. So, specific to Northern Nevada, yes, we absolutely track the the abatements that are that are received by businesses that are coming to our region. And it's important to know um with only two exceptions, there are no total abatements that are that are offered in Nevada. They are all partial abatements. And so admittedly, no, we have not worked directly with uh with communities on on what would be a general abatement recognizing that it's that it's in most cases the state's portion of that of that tax burden that is that is abated uh and that there is some left over. That that said, there are two exceptions to that and those are the Senate bills one and two and then a revision of that that was granted in the last general assembly which speak which are the the abatement package that specifically came along for Tesla then for Redwood that were that were amended um in in the last general assembly session in the last bianium to um to sort of create more local benefit in that space in the event. So in the cases of SP1, SP2, those are total abatements in those in those situations. We absolutely work with uh with local with basically localities and I'm saying localities here instead of municipalities because it might be a fire district, it might be a sheriff, it might it it it varies on the need, but but a great example is we had a a very robust conversation around with fire district county around um the around lithium uses in the in the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center and and and sort of needs for service that were appropriate there and and and so yes, in the event that we're talking about a total abatement, we have certainly engaged in that conversation. Now, looking forward, if it was something that as it relates to even partial abatements, if that is something that that our uh that our communities were interested in us sort of uh interested in us doing, we would be happy to do it. But it's important to know the reason we have not done that historically is because you have staff that's at that table through through the permitting process. you uh you know you know I see uh well I saw Miss Turney a moment ago but uh but you uh but you there she is in the back but so so you have staff that uh that are working specifically in this space and we have found that that at that table we might get in the way but but just know uh to the extent that we can be of of service we're always willing. Okay. And then one last question. Um I know that there is some talk of a lithium battery factory coming to the Stead airport. Um I don't know if that's actually going to happen or not. Um uh I know there's been a lot of things that need to come into place before that decision is made, but um is it accurate to say that businesses that go to the Stead airport do not pay any property tax? And in that situation, would you help um find funding sources to offset the cost of providing services? So, I don't want to speak ahead of So, so important to know, I'm not an attorney. I don't ever want to pretend to be. Uh and and and I'm certainly and I'm certainly not the real estate assessor or I'm not a uh and and and I don't work for the state's finance department. So, I will answer this through the through the with those qualifiers, through the layman's lens that that I have. And so, um, as I understand it, the entirety of the state airport is, uh, is, uh, is owned by the federal by the FAA and as such would not be would not be local subject to local real estate tax. To that end, though, uh, I believe they do still projects there that that are coming forward would still have to be permitted, and there'd be an opportunity to have a conversation about benefit to the community. They certainly will receive service. And so again, if that is one where we would never want to be in uh we would never want to be in the way of your professional staff where uh you've got a great manager who's got a great staff who knows how to negotiate these things. But just know if ever you want to sit at that table, we're delighted to help. Yeah. And then just real quick too, is is the fact that it's uh an area where they don't have to pay real estate tax. Is that kind of a recruitment tool that you're using to bring businesses here specifically? Not not for us. No. I mean for us uh the cost of so any sort of tax burden in any jurisdiction is a cost of doing business and and I try not to deal on that. I mean this this is the thing. We're either right for your business or we're not. The cost of business in our community is right or it's not. Nevada's already a low tax state. Everyone knows that. code. So, no, beyond beyond the general messaging that that Nevada is generally a low tax state for corporate purposes, we wouldn't we would not go beyond that on the specific parcel. Okay. All right. Thank you very much. Okay. I think did you have something? Okay. And then we'll wrap this up because we got to get into the next presentation. Good. Thank you. Um I just did you just said what I was about to say when you said earlier comment that we have lower tax abatements than many states but we have lower tax to begin with a lower tax burden so we don't even have that much to offset a lot of the states you mentioned I already know have a high tax burden and right um whether it's income tax and and other much higher property tax all kind of things so I think that could be part of the explanation so anyway um but I did want to mention And Miss Anderson brought this up right off the beginning and I wanted to revisit it and that's about our alternate energy, sustainable energy and one of the challenges um you know it had fallen off your list and and I keep hearing nationally that you know they've withdrawn tax abatements for those kind of things. You know like when I put in my solar panels I had a good tax abatement from MB Energy. I had one on my tax uh you know my IRS taxes and it made it affordable to the point that I could do it. Uh today without those things I I absolutely could not do it and that's just on a personal level. Then the businesses, you know, they were really hurt around the 2014 time frame when um we had this huge process where they were taking away net metering. And net metering is one of the reasons a lot of people got into it, including myself, which is your ability to sell back into the market your excess energy. Now, so we got grandfathered in. It was a long arduous process, but only the people had already had, which luckily I'd invested, you know, a number of years before that. But the newcomers, they ended up getting much lower um reimbursements and they couldn't sell. They had to self-use. So they they were able to store it and then they have to use it themselves. They they can't sell to their next door neighbor. Um and then the um the impacts all of our solar providers anyway, virtually everyone fled the state. There there was no need to be in business anymore. And you're in the business of making business. And we're one of the sunniest states. And so to to to drive away these providers, you know, seems so upside down. So both at a state level, you know, the PUC, but now at the federal level, they they've done away with um in um information, investments, information about climate change, all the things to to to make people not even care or be aware. Um pricing that doesn't send the right kind of signal. do what's your thought on how what can we do as a so council member Jim we agree um and and as as someone who was pretty heavily involved in in the the the first generation of back then what was commonly known as CPACE which is the program that that would have led to net metering um we've seen the uh the I guess the the reduction in the attractiveness of that program at the at the at the single business or at the res at for residential use um at present we do see opport opportunity for the deployment of solar solar arrays specifically that are pro that at grid scale that are project specific and that's and that's where we're putting the bulk of our energy and we think and the main reason for that is we recognize that um where where this this administration may not be as friendly to uh to renewable and alternative uses the next one might be. And and so for us, there's been real energy uh pun intended invested into developing that part of our region and our regional infrastructure. And so we do think it's appropriate to hold on to that to see what the future holds. We don't think it's we see so many of our colleagues sort of jettisoning anything in that space. For us, we think that that's an incredible waste of intellectual capital that's been invested in Northern Nevada. We think it's critical that we hold on to it in the short term. Okay. Recognizing you may see other generation coming uh in the meantime. Yeah. like there's not it's not an instant in time. We have to look at the long term. I so agree. And I just wanted to mention, you know, you mentioned grids scale. Those are big solar production. Often they come unfortunately with some downsides, you know, whether it's to animals, you know, wildlife, water, land use. Um I've seen some really cool things though that incorporate growing under solar panels so that you can increase your agriculture while you're increasing your solar. So that's really cool. And then just finally council member do I think we're trying to get get wrecked up here. You're a little finally just want to leave you with a comment about the water. Thank you. You know from Tomwa we're so concerned about bringing in businesses that are heavy water users aside from data centers but it could be a bottling plant. It could be something else. So I hope you just keep that in mind as you keep going. We we added to our strategic plan and have a hard rule in our office now. We do not we do not we do not pursue major water users. Yeah. Period. It just is just as a rule. We recognize the need to safeguard the region. Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mr. Adams. We welcome you to come back anytime. Keep us posted. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here. We appreciate you. And tell your beautiful wife we said hello. I sure will. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Okay, council. We're going to take a quick 10-minute break and we'll be right back. No, I apologize. We are going to take a a 20minut break. A quick 20-minute break. Sorry, everyone's got to get up and we've got to um transition into our next presentation which will be on property tax. I hope everyone sticks around for that. It's uh very very critical information and then after that we will go into uh item D1 and then item D2. All right. Thanks everyone. Thank you everyone for joining us coming back. Madame clerk, is everyone connected? Yes. Okay. Well, then I'm going to jump right into item C2. We have the one and only Jeremy Aguero here with us and we're excited for this presentation. Um, so Mr. Aguero, the floor is all yours. Um, Madame Mayor, first of all, thank you so much uh for the opportunity to be here and thank you to your staff and team. Um, this is the second in our series of presentations to to provide some background information on some of the revenues uh that the city benefits from. Today we're going to talk about uh property taxes, real property taxes, and what they mean. And you you'll recall last time we talked about the C tax, the consolidated tax, and some of the challenges with distributions. Um, in this one, we're going to talk a little bit more about some of the challenges with structure of the tax because way back in 2005, and I can't believe I I perhaps I was younger once, but 2005 when we were working on it with the legislature, we created these abatements that we benefited tremendously from. And the state of Nevada today will abate about one and$1.8 8 billion in taxes, the single largest reduction in taxes that we have. That was all predicated on an emergency provision in the Nevada State Constitution. Somehow that emergency has continued to exist for 20 years and we're still here today. And in some ways, it's been great for us. It's operated exactly as intended. In other ways, it creates a situation in which we have some degree of economic instability points in which the economy may not be may not be growing as quickly and the result of that is less revenue for local governments and the state and school districts. So why property tax? I mean why why do we start there and what is property tax? You all know this is the tax that is imposed on real and personal property every single year. Cessor comes around Cessor says hey look this is what the value of that property is of placement value. We'll talk more about that. And then the the taxpayers get a bill that goes to fund almost everything we talk about. We're going to talk about all of those pieces. Property tax in the United States is the single largest source of revenue for local governments, sub federal governments along those lines. It generates about 70% of all the taxes they generate. It's hugely important overall, right? Why do local governments care so much about these? Because they fund almost everything. This is the city of Reno's budget. The last time we got together, we talked about a hund00 million in consolidated tax and um maybe the need for that to to to to to change a little bit. Now we're talking about property tax. It's not that far away. It's about $83 million a year in the FY2025 budget. And you'll see, you know, it starts to to drop precip precipitously uh after that. In terms of your budget, this is what it looks like in terms of your street fund revenue resources. We often spend so much time talking about the general fund. We don't talk about some of the other funds. And of course, property tax is the single largest source of revenue for the street fund for the city. This is what it looks like in the city of Sparks. This is what it looks like in Wo County. Right across the board, pound-for-pound, that property tax is almost as important as any other revenue source that we have in the state of Nevada. And and and oftentimes it's among our most stable sources of revenue, which is also incredibly important. And you know, in some ways, it's also one of the more progressive sources of revenue, right? As values go up because you own something that say a house that is worth more, you will pay more in property taxes. Why should then um the public sort of care about property taxes? And again, I'm going to sort of spend this chart is very similar to the one that we saw before. You see that I put the city streets over there in the right hand corner. But almost every service that is provided at the local government level, matter of fact, I think you would almost say every service that's provided at the local government level, this is Reno and Sparks, is supported by those property tax levies. And if we look at it in terms of county government services, all of those regional services, as you saw for Wo County, it's at the top of the list of those revenue sources. So it probably goes without saying that property taxes are important. a large large share of revenue. Now, nobody likes to pay property taxes, but I suppose nobody likes to pay taxes generally, but nonetheless really important for all the services that we as citizens benefit from. So, here's where things get a little bit more exciting in terms of how property taxes are actually calculated and determined, right? Maybe more exciting for me because I love this kind of stuff, but you you get it and we're going to talk through it and we're going to go through it because there are three major steps that we're going to spend time on. Sometimes I like to refer to this as a breadcrumb. We're going to come back to this slide as we go through the presentation because it's three really important parts or steps or phases, whatever you want to talk about. The first is property value assessment. How is it that we get to the taxes that we have? How do we determine the value for all of that property that's out there? How does the assessor kind of go through that process? And obviously the assessment is much more complicated than we're going to get into today, but the pieces and parts matter relative to that. Then the second step is all those property tax rates. And this is where it gets a little bit tricky because $3.66 per $100 of value is the maximum amount that can be applied in the state of Nevada by any local government. If you wanted to raise it, you couldn't because you're statutoily prohibited from doing that. And even if you did today, it would generate almost no money because at the end of the day, the abatements exist. And we're going to talk about all of those things today. Then the third piece we're going to talk about is those property tax abatements. And again, they they're doing exactly what they were designed to do. But as you're going to see, they've continued to grow even during periods of prosperity. And I will end I'll begin my presentation sort of where I'll end. And that is to say, um, they're a big reason why the revenue that you're generating today on an inflation adjusted per capita basis is about the same as you were generating a decade ago. And I'd be willing to bet all of you that the cost of providing services to the city of Reno has gone up during that period. all property taxes have effectively remained flat. So we'll talk more about that as we go through. So property value assessment this is the process we go by. I talked about the WO county assessor's office. They go through every year. They look at all land, all structures and essentially determine the value of those. Under state law, the county assessor is actually required to reappraise once every five years. But in Wo County and Clark County, it's done every single year. Those new appraisals can be conducted with new improvements, structures, those type of things. Oftentimes, you'll see on the property tax rule, new value because I added an addition to my home or something along those lines. If the house is sort of materially changed or, you know, you turn an office building into a retail center, maybe it'll go through an entire reassessment. And that gets very, very complicated. But nonetheless, every year, Wo County Assessor is going through all of those properties. They look at the land value. They look at the improvement value to get the taxable value. Now, these are important distinctions because we treat them differently in the state of Nevada. Land value is at the market value of the parcel that when your land is assessed, whether it's your home or your office building or whatever it is, your hospital, right? Those are assessed at market value. It's essentially the cash value if you were to go out and sell that. But when we think about the improvements, it is not that way. People often believe that their house is essentially, oh, my property tax is determined based on what the sales price of my house is. That's not true. In the state of Nevada, it is based on replacement cost. Essentially, what would have to cost you to replace that? And then we do this thing that I'm going to show you in a moment that nobody else does. And we apply a depreciation factor to the improvements of that home. 1.5% every year for 50 years comes off whatever your value is until we get to what's referred to as a salvage value. That just means you've depreciated it all the way down to the bottom amount uh of 70 75% of that value comes out. And we're going to talk about more about that as we go. And as you can imagine, you're like, why would anybody do this, right? And I suppose if we look at this, you'd ask that same question. We are one of one in this. I guess in this case we're one of 50, however you want to look at it, but we are the only state anywhere in the United States that applies an appreciation factor to residential housing units. And you would imagine why folks haven't done this because you create a disconnect between the demand for services that has no relationship to how old a particular piece of property is to the amount that that is going to generate and provide funding. And that creates a bit of a problem for us overall. So this is what that depreciation looks like and again very sort of simple year 0 10 20 30 40 and 50. So you get an idea. So you are essentially starting with only 25% of the the the the replacement cost of that asset by the time you get to that year 50. And that's that's a challenge for us. Jeremy, can you repeat that? I just need everyone to hear that. Yes, I am happy to repeat it. By the time you get to year 50, you are starting with only 25% of the improved value of that asset. Right? So you let let's let me just take this slide because I think this one emphasizes the exact same point. Let's say we start with a $400,000 home today that has a replacement value of $400,000 and we imagine that that home just goes up by 3% per year. If it just goes up by 3% per year, by the time we get to that year 50, it's got a replacement cost of about $1.8 million. I think most of us would believe, oh, well, then my property tax would be based on $1.8 million. No, it is it is based on 25% of that, which is $440,000. And so, Mayor T, the the point here is that while the value grows, the um the property tax revenue does not grow. And in some ways, this is why communities in the state of Nevada sometimes feel like they're addicted to growth. Addicted to growth. Why? Because a new property that comes online, well, hey, it hasn't depreciated at all. I get a bunch more value for that than I would if it's completely depreciated. And as we're going to continue to go through this, what you'll see is that the aging nature of our community. This is not just a city of Reno thing. Obviously, in north throughout northern Nevada, this is a challenge. And throughout southern Nevada, we've seen that this is a real challenge to us. But let's just look at some of this for a moment. This is property value assessment properties by age. And so essentially what you have there is the city, unincorporated county, and then the city of Sparks just to sort of show us where that is. And then you got the number of parcels. And I've shown how old those parcels are, how aged they are. And you'll see that the city of Reno looks very different than unincorporated county or the city of Spars, right? It's got more of these properties that have aged, which means that poundfor-pound, you're generating less property tax revenue than your counterparts would where the property is old. Now, there's all kinds of other factors. the value of the property, the value of the land, the mix between residential and commercial. We're going to talk about all those things as we continue to go through. But in our last presentation, we talked about consolidated tax. We talked about the potential for some inequities that exist. And those were structural ine inequities that took place. These are inequities that are made also structural, but based on the structure of the timing and the age of development between areas, right? This creates the potential for a fiscal cliff. 24% of the properties in Reno are at least 50 years old. 24% of them. Right? If we go and we say 20 years old, over half of all the properties. So imagine you've then just started with all the improvement value and you've reduced it by that depreciation for more than half of all of those properties. What about this? those that are that are the next in the next 30 years 75 73% of all of the properties will be fully depreciated. Now obviously you'll have stuff that gets constructed at the front end but this is the the the sort of magic of relativity right if I have a 100 units and I add 10 that's 10%. If I have a thousand units and I had the same 10, obviously it's a very smaller but smaller percentage relative to that. That's the challenge that the city of Reno is dealing with is that, you know, a lot easier when the city was smaller, younger, a lot easier before we had property tax abatements, not as easy today. So that gets us to the property value, right? You got the land value, market value, you've got the improvement value, and you add those two together when somebody gets their tax bill and they see this total taxable value that I have. This is essentially the the the value of what's there. And if we look at this and we start to make our way through it, we then have to get to this thing called assessed value. Taxable value times 35% gets us assessed value. And I know I'm going to get the question, why 35%. Why not 30? Why not 18? Why not 22? And the answer is no one has ever been able to tell me. I believe it is nothing more than a political compromise that got us to 35%. Because remember this is 1979 that we're going through the tax shift in the state of Nevada and we're trading things off and we don't want to become like like California was doing some things we didn't want to quite emulate those type of things. So we we get this idea and so everybody sees these tax rates as $3.66, but that's not really $3.66 66 cents applied to every $100 of value because you're actually taking your value, you're multiplying it by 0.35 in order to say you're only going to pay that tax on the 35% of it. So you we have some of these things that are really kind of pro taxpayer, right? Number one, it's not necessarily tied to market, it's tied to replacement costs. Number two, you get this depreciation. Number three, we drop that rate from that value all the way down by 35%. So, what if we look at the property value assessment in Wo County? There's almost 32.5 uh billion dollars in value for FY2025. That's a lot of investment within the community. 70% of that is either single family or multifamily. And we could probably spend mayor, we could probably spend an entire day just talking about the mix and jobs, housing balance, and what that means in terms of of tax collection and the cost of providing services. And I'm going to touch on it a little bit as we get to the later areas of the presentation, but I would impress upon those that are watching this presentation, others, this matters, right? When we look at where that value is, the idea that residential is not part of the mix is problematic for us. In addition to that, we have this pesky piece of the Nevada state constitution that says that everything has to be uniform and equal. You've probably heard about this before. And that uniform and equal provision means that whatever the rate is that is applied to residential also has to be applied to commercial. You cannot have different rates in the state of Nevada. We can't have a split role like exists in other areas. If we look at the property value assessment by jurisdiction, you can also see the city of Reno makes up a pretty good chunk of that. Now obviously we could take the county and would be the entirety of of what is up there, but you get the idea in terms of what's there. Not only is the city um uh aging more, it also has a disproportionate share of the municipal value that is created within the community, which is probably also linked to the services that you provide. Now, I really like this chart. I forgive it's a bit of an eye test, but you'll forgive me for that for a moment. But I liked it and I asked my staff to include it because this shows the assessed value shares by jurisdiction. And I like it because it shows the city of Reno right there. And then you can kind of see how it's a little different than the unincorporated county. You can see the city of Sparks. You can see uh the the county's over overall total. And what you see is that there are certain areas that are overindexed. I would imagine and I have not had this conversation with the city of Spark, so I say it with all respect that they would be running into different sets of challenges, larger sets of challenges because of, you know, 80% plus of their development uh is single family. Now you you or or or I guess I should say it's not quite 80% plus 78.5 uh%. Right? You can also see the differential in commercial the idea of jobs housing balance. Where are people going to work? Where are they living? This chart I I would you if you need it you have it but it just tells a remarkable story about the distribution of uses and where you have different allocations. Where is the industrial? Where is the commercial? Because where the services are needed and where the demand for those services are created or where the funds are created and where the demand for services is probably a better way to say that are not always the same thing. And I I you probably have found in many ways that consumers don't understand necessarily a line between where unincorporated county is or where the city is or where one city is. They just why would they? So that gets us through part one, right? Part one, relative to property tax assessment. So, we've gotten to this idea of this assessed value. We've looked at this distribution overall. I wanted to spend just a little bit of time on the property tax rates themselves. And there are two sets of property tax rates caps that we have to be aware of. One is the legislatively uh mandated property tax limit at $3.66 per $100 of value. The legislature specifically says no jurisdiction anywhere in the state of Nevada can be higher than that. The Nevada state constitution indicates that the constitutional property tax limit is $5 per $100 of value. And oftentimes I get the discussion, well, why would they do that? And we we could have a long conversation about what that is, but obviously it is the state, you know, being the state and and and and applying its will here. But the $5 that was put in the Constitution applies in a very important way in the state of Nevada. And that's that it applies to the net proceeds of mines, right? Which is also a property tax that folks don't always associate with being a property tax, but that allows it to be at that level for that type of property, which actually can be treated differently in our state constitution as opposed to what we do here. If we look at the property tax rate, we talked a lot about this when we got into the consolidated tax. I wanted to make sure to also touch on it here because I imagine that often times people get that property tax bill because they live in the the city of Reno, they believe, "Oh, look, you guys are getting all of this money." Not true. Not true. We have something in the state of Nevada and most certainly here in the city of Reno that's called an overlapping tax rate, which means that you have all of these districts. Oop, I dropped that. You have all of these districts and they kind of overlap. You have school districts, you have the state, and all those type of things. And I know if I live uh in the city of Reno, I live in the city of Sparks that I'm, you know, my my kids are going to the schools that I'm also getting services from the state and they're all benefiting from this in one way or the other. The city of Reno actually only gets about 26.2% of that $3.66 rate. So 26.2% of the 100% tax rate that's imposed on property taxes. So you know the the others include Wo County, the school district, the state of Nevada as I mentioned before. Now, I created this slide just to sort of show how it's a little different in different areas and also if I live in the city of Reno, I live in the city of Sparks, I live in, you know, different areas for examples of the unincorporated WO county and you can see a couple of things. Number one, the county itself continues to benefit significantly across the board uh from those taxes. Obviously, providing uh regional services, but the the the county, that's why their property tax revenue, you noticed when we looked at it before, was their number one source of revenue because everybody contributes to that county source. And it's about a $1.40 of that $3.66 rate. And then you could kind of see some of those operating rates and those local rates that are there. I put in the one for the city of Reno, which we talked about, and you see the city of Sparks, which is a parallel uh to what you see in the city of Reno, right? Then you see some of the unincorporated areas and the like, and just kind of get a sense of how those kind of play out. And you'll notice that three of the four at $3.66, one of them is not. And that's because there's chunks that are not included there overall. Now, if we really want to get crazy, we dig in to each one of those rates. And I won't spend a whole lot of time here. But over time, the property tax levy that exists in the city of Reno had something else added to it and something else added to it and something else added to it and it just kept growing and growing and growing and there was a lot of restructuring that happened way back in the 1970s and 1980s and that gives the rise to what we're looking at today. So well people generally believe oh my gosh well this money is all going for example to just operate the city of Reno. Of course it's not. It's going to the general fund. That's a smaller portion than what we looked at before. It's going to roads and streets, going to public safety directly to public safety. These are those allocations. And if you look at the Wo County side, it's it's it's large. It goes from everything from the jail to youth facilities that are out there. And so it has a dedicated source of that revenue in order to support those dedicated services. So we take that assessed value that we talked about before, we multiply it times that $3.66 66 rate for every $100 of value and that gets us our taxes as assessed. There are property tax exemptions and we could spend a whole lot of time talking about this. This is also an area of difference between the city of Reno and other areas. There are some partial exemption categories, things like veterans and disa and the disabled and the blind. They get property tax exemptions. But then you also have government entities. you are not collecting taxes for example from the other government buildings that are within your jurisdiction including like the University of Nevada. And so if we look at what that value is in terms of those big uh values that are within your borders at least ostensibly creating some demand for services that are out there maybe not the same breath of services but this is the top 10 total exempt value in the city of Reno and you'll notice that you know it's about 1.6 6 billion. That's about $15 million that you're not getting from value that's inside your jurisdiction that is exempt from that tax. Now, again, we could spend a lot of time talking about this, but I think we'd be remiss and I want to say thanks to the staff that said, "Hey, we ought to spend a little bit of time talking about this because it's a lot of money that is essentially sitting on that sideline." And I think this is a good way to look at that amount, right? So this is exempt tax share as uh as as assessed of taxes as assessed and then it's per capita. And so what you'll see is that the exemptions that are u required by the city of Reno is about 12.2% of all of your assessed value. It's about $74 for every man, woman, and child that lives within the city. And I think it's the highest anywhere uh in the state of Nevada, although I don't know that we looked at every single jurisdiction in terms of going through that. But in terms of major jurisdictions, you get the idea of what's there. And I'm not here to suggest that this is money that you're going to sort of naturally recapture. But when you're thinking about the balance in terms of the revenue that's coming in versus your portfolio of value within that's within the city if you add all the exempt value and less of the commercial value, for example, you're not going to generate nearly as much in terms of revenue, but you're going to have at least some of the services that are required. So that's step one. We've got to assess value. That's step two. How do we get to the taxes that are there? Then we get to the this is you know the best part of the entire presentation which is the abatements themselves and everybody loves the abatement. I have learned this. There is nothing that people like more than to pay less property taxes, right? And and so in 2005, we create this construct that Carol used to call the partial uh property tax abatements. And I I think that is the perfect term for it uh in terms of what's there. In residential, your property tax cannot go up by more than 3% per year. If it's commercial, it cannot go up by more than 8% per year. And I should say that's general commercial, right? If you renting your home out, for example, it could go up by 8% because it's not owner occupied. If you have an apartment, that could go up unless that apartment is being uh rented at below the HUD standard, in which case you can qualify for the 3% cap instead of the 8% cap. Again, complications. 3% residential, 8% for all other types of property, owner, occupied residential, all other types of property. Now, you ask the question, when is 3% not actually 3%. Because there's been times when you're going to say, "Jeremy, I know for a fact that I've been sitting in this chair and there have been times when 3% was not 3% and there have been lots of times when 8% was not 8%." And why is that? That's because in 2005 there was a compromise at the legislature. And that compromise at the legislature is that it would be 3% and 5%. But it could not be greater than the 10-year average of of assessed value or two times the CPI. And that's because we didn't want it to be out of whack somehow. And if that was really low, for example, in periods we had near deflation in the state of Nevada across the United States, we didn't want property values going up. And so we wanted to protect taxpayers against that. It's exactly what it's done. And so you'll know that we were in during this period of very low inflation for a long period of time, about a decade, right? We had a period in which assessed values were really low coming out of the Great Recession. We had some of those where they went down. And so you'll see here that there have been a number of times where those two limiters have kicked in. Now what we've seen recently is that 3% has actually been 3% and 8% has actually been 8% but nonetheless these continue to exist and it's something we have to keep an eye on. Now I've just created this example and we're going to go through an example that's a little bit uh more comprehensive than this as we think about some real world examples. But I wanted just to start here, right? So my last year's tax property tax bill was $3,000. That means that in the next year it can only go to 3,000. It doesn't matter if the value goes up, if the land value goes up, it doesn't matter any of that. Now, it will certainly matter if I add something to my home or I build something different or something along those lines where you have new value. But the if the structure itself doesn't change, even if the taxes would have gone up by 5% because the replacement cost goes up and the land value goes up, your tax bill can only go up by that 3% in the example that we're showing here. And therefore, you have the abatement, which in our example is the difference between $3,90 and $3,150. the tax that would have gone up if the abatement didn't exist versus the tax that can only go up to that level, which means the taxpayer benefits from a $60 abatement in that year. And that is lost. It is never ever collected again because then you go to the next year and you do the whole process all over again. And we're going to talk about what that looks like today. But the end of the day, the fiscal impacts of these caps. So you see the taxes as assessed. You see kind of where they are in Reno. The abatements reduce the median homeowner property tax bill by 32%. That's pretty good. That's pretty good overall. As a matter of fact, it's the single largest tax abatement that we have anywhere in the state of Nevada and it's benefiting almost every property owner throughout the state. So, we have assessed taxes. We minus the abated taxes. And that's what we actually pay in terms of our tax bill. We've gone through a lot. I'm going to take you through it in a little bit more detail as we go on to sort of look for some examples, but I want to just recap all of our little badge graphics because I really like this slide. So, I want to pause here for a second. On the top is the property value. How do we create it? We've got some things that are good for the taxpayer in terms of lowering that. We have some things that aren't so good in terms of the stability, things like depreciation. When we get to those property tax rates, we have some handcuffs, if you will, that are on the city because you can't really increase that tax. And with depreciation and with the abatements, it would largely get you no money anyway, even if you did it, unless the voters actually approved it and you went outside of the abatements. And the third period is really calculating those abatements. Remembering that an a typical taxpayer in the city of Reno is actually only paying about 70% of the taxes that you would expect just based on the way our taxes are structured. The tax rate times your assessed value. That's what it would normally be. But the abatements lower that because of that 3 and 8% which is sometimes 3 and 8% caps. So, let's jump into this sort of last major section here talking about these real world property tax examples. I've got three, excuse me, four properties here. A, B, C, and D. A was built in the current year, built in or last year, 2024. Um, uh, the the B was built in 2014. You get the idea. They're just older than each other. All of them have a property value of $600,000. We look at that and we say, "Okay, it doesn't matter when the house was constructed, ABC, B, C, and D. One's a little older, one's a little newer, you know, that kind of thing, but the property value is all the same." We take that replacement value, we multiply it by that depreciation factor to determine the depreciation. And that calculation has to go in there in order to make sure that everybody kind of gets that. And and mayor, I know this is the question you asked and so I'm going to go I think this detail is going to help um further underscore that point, but let's just make sure that we are clear here, right? The house that was newly constructed gets zero depreciation in that first year. The one that is 30 years old is now we're taking $23,000 off that property value in order to get there. Right? So you take that property value, you minus that depreciation, and that gets us the taxable value, right? So now the taxable value is $600,000 for the newly constructed home all the way down to three, let's call it $400,000. Big difference overall. You take that taxable value, then you multiply it by that assessment rate. Remember that 35% that we put in there, and then that gets us our assessed value upon which ultimately the tax rate is going to be applied. So, for every one of those that we've already discounted by depreciation and and and taken all the way down, we now are going to apply $3.66 for every $100 of value overall. And what you can see is that those taxes assessed are a lot higher for the new house than they are for the house that's a little bit older. Now, we have to add a new piece to this, right? And that's taxes due the prior year to get the tax cap factor. What's the maximum amount that that property can go up at that 3% level, assuming we don't have some of these other gaps? So, that means that our guy here can only go up by $6,230. But our remember our guy all the way on D, they can also only go up by 3%. So, they're already lowered and now they can only go up by 3% which means that their ability to grow is even less. So, that gets us ultimately to the tax cap and the abated taxes. So you'll note here that the abatement the amount that comes off also pretty significant that ultimately gets us to the bottom line here which is those taxes that are actually due. So at the end of the day the newly constructed house is generating it's not quite double but it's pretty close in terms of that property tax. And so if your commercial pro if your residential properties are aging, your commercial properties are aging, you're getting a lot less than you are for every newly constructed dollar that's out there. And so if we just look at it here, older homes may pay significantly less in property taxes and commonly do, but there is no evidence that I am aware of to suggest that the demand for services is actually less. And I would even respectively submit that in some of the work that we've done and others have done that there's actually some higher demand for services particularly with like things like infrastructure demand for other types of services that are required in older neighborhoods. So what's the impact of these debate? What's the bottom line here when we put it all together? So this is taxes as assessed and there's the abated taxes in the in Northern Nevada overall. $265 million are abated this year alone, right? 24%. And I was really interested to see whether that abatement share was going to be higher or lower in one jurisdiction was actually very close across the board. So take that for what it's worth. But some of these slides, I think, may be very uh helpful in illustrating this to get folks to understand the pressures that this is putting on jurisdictions around the state, including the city of Reno. So, this is property tax revenue every year from 2000 all the way up to 2025. And if you look at that, it's grown at a compounded annual rate of 4.4%. Not bad. You see the effects of the Great Recession. Property values go up, they come back down, and then they've grown. And certainly, we've continued to grow. If we add the abatements on top of that, the growth would have been 5.7%. And while the difference between 4.4% and 5.7% may not seem like that much money, I assure you it's a whole lot of money, particularly when the magic of compounding happens over a 20-year plus or minus period. Now, let's look at the piece that probably will keep us all up at night, at least in some way. This is every entity in Wo County and it is the amount of property tax revenue that is not collected as a result. And what you're going to see is that we had the abatements kind of went up there a little and then we have the great recession and values come down and essentially we burn through all of this abatement that existed and since 2015 it has continued to grow and grow and grow and as we've seen recently values have continued to increase and those abatements have absolutely skyrocketed where today roughly 25 cents out of every property tax dollar is not being paid in Wo County. If we look at that in terms of all the entities and now I'm going to look at it in terms of inflationadjusted terms because let's be honest a property tax dollar in 2009 is not the same as a property tax dollar in 2025. It just goes a lot less f it doesn't go as far as it would otherwise. If we look at that and after adjusting for inflation and taking the abatements off in Wo County, the amount of revenue that's generated in 2025 is roughly equivalent to the exact same amount of revenue that was generated in 2009. You are about exactly where you were uh 15 years ago. If we look at that again on a per capita basis now because obviously you have a few more people living here in northern Nevada than you did uh in 2009 or 2000 if we look at that that way right after adjusting for population you have 18 you're 18% lower than where you were in 2009 that's the problem that you are running into today and that is the challenge that will continue to face this community and this state as long as we go forward so as long as this disconnect continues to exist. So what if we look at some of the same thing but we look at it for the city of Reno. City of Reno's had a great deal of investment that's been great. You can see what the property tax revenue you can also see the amount of revenue that is abated there in that blue right if we were able to go back and wave a magic wand and I would not suggest that we do this. The property tax abatements have played a very important role in the state of Nevada, but you would have $30 million more today to provide that level of service and you wouldn't be essentially in a position where you're being asked to provide services at either a lower cost to a greater number of people which is always very challenging and we have the data going back to 2011 in a constant form. So forgive me for not going all the way back uh to 2000, but this is the property tax in inflation adjusted terms as I showed you for Wo County in which you are essentially 20% FY2025 is only 20% higher than where it was in 2011. But if we look at on a per capita basis, right, you are about 8% lower than where you were in 2011. So on a per capita inflationadjusted basis, you have 8% less property taxes to provide services to the people living in Reno than you did in 2011. That's a challenge overall. So it creates the growth paradox, right? And I realize this is a sensitive issue for any number of people and I offer it from that point of view. Growth creates challenges and frustrations in the community in many communities. I think this is a debate that's going on throughout the state of Nevada and in some ways around the world in terms of growth and what growth means and what's responsible growth look like and the the pains. But the other part is is that our tax system is designed for growth is in some ways our tax system is addicted to growth in some ways. We talked about it a little bit in our consolidated tax relative to building materials being subject to tax and being a big part of it. And here we talk about the benefits associated with a newly constructed building versus an aging building and the difference. The property tax system in and of itself incentivizes growth to take place and it benefits jurisdictions that have more growth over less growth. Respecting the fact that the externalities associated with that growth that is to me providing all of the services and making sure people can get from point A to point B and that my classroom isn't overcrowded is a real challenge. And when you look at it, because I I'm sure I'm going to get the question, okay, what do we do next? What do the challenges look like? And I didn't want to essentially identify a problem without at least discussing what a solution may look like. You've got legislative action, right? The ability for the city council to take aggressive action is extremely limited. Right? You could amend the state's constitution, which is arduous and very difficult and obviously going to a vote of the people would be hard, or you could take it through voter initiative where the voters actually bring it forward and then take it uh to the legislature or something along those lines. Those are the ways that it could be done. Even if the legislature, however, was to wave a magic wand and was say, you know what, we're going to increase that cap from $3.66 to $4 or something along those lines. Even if you generated for every one penny of penny of property tax, so long as those abatements continue to exist, you're going to generate almost no revenue. You could say, well, why don't we just get rid of the the depreciation? We at one point the depreciation was actually 2%. The legislature dropped it to 1.5. We could do something along those lines. Why don't we drop it to one? Maybe that's a little more fair. We generate almost no revenue as a result of that because the abatements are going to create this cap on the top of that. Now there may be a time in the future where that could happen when we burn through all of the abatements or something but that would be bad because values are going to have to drop. The other part of that is that as we go forward, finding a balance to all of these things and thinking about what it means for our schools, right, that that benefit tremendously from property tax from the state which uses it for capital or for jurisdictions, municipalities like this one that provide such important services to the citizens and when those citizens expect that they will continue to be provided and frankly you have a few less dollars uh you'll have a few less dollars next year than you had this year and that's when things are good. when things are bad, it's going to get uh real difficult. So, Madame Mayor, with that, I really appreciate the opportunity to be here, members of the city council. I'm grateful the opportunity. Again, I'd like to reiterate um the remarkable help of uh staff and uh the city manager for helping us collect all the information that made this presentation uh possible. If there's questions, I'm happy to at least attempt it. Thank you so much, Jeremy. I always appreciate your colorful commentary. Always, always, always. Um I I now we're going to have a quiz. I'm going to start with you, Councilwoman Eert. So, now um because I think it is so it's it's also super hard to talk about why it is, how it is, how we got there. I mean, last night I was just speaking at um at the honors college and uh you know, they were asking me some of the you know, the greatest challenges, right? Um, and I think the hard part is that your citizens, your community does not know the magn the magnitude of the challenge, but they expect to have every single um, service, uh, protection, the things that they want out of a community and I think we all want that. Um, but it also comes with a cost to pay for. You know, there is a saying, I hate to say this, but it can be very true. You get what you pay for sometimes, right? That's a a very valid saying, and I as as policy makers up here, um, we really really struggle with it. And you go to other cities, you talk to them, and they have, you know, we always say, why can't we have nice things over here like that? But it doesn't allow us to do that. because we are the only state uh that does this, it makes it so so challenging. Our jobs are stressful enough as they are, let alone piling this on top of it. Um I'm curious in your crystal ball, do you think this ever changes? And and here's my obviously the political side is why it doesn't change is that it's so unpopular to raise taxes, right? A politician doesn't want to touch that unless you have maybe someone that wants to be a one-term governor and maybe that sort of turns it around is what I'm going to say politically. And I'd love to know how many people would you say out of 10 would know that this even exists that Nevada is the only state that does uh depreciation? Oh, I'd guess a very small number out of that. Um to answer your question more directly, does it ever change? I think it does. And I think it does because we are changing. We are not the state that we were 50 years ago. We're not the community that we were 50 years ago. you know, and we think about it in terms of things like economic diversification. Economic diversification in absence of fiscal diversification creates big problems. We know that. Um I I I think that the state of Nevada is going to have no choice at some point other than to reform many elements of its fiscal system, not just this one, but probably most importantly for this one. And I think it's because exactly what you said, although I'm going to say it just slightly differently. I I think the state of Nevada, this community, and others are going to be faced with a choice, and that is you either pay for the community that you want or you're going to end up paying for the community that you get. You're not going to get out of paying. And so, we're already seeing that start to manifest in communities throughout the state of Nevada and frankly across the United States. There's some hard choices that are in front of us. And I wouldn't suggest to you for a moment that somebody's going to come and wipe out all of the abatements. I think that would be terribly irresponsible, but I think you could at least have a question about whether we should give the next abatement and that I think is a reasonable conversation and I think uh it's likely to be had. Well, excellent job as always. I I'm always so glad to have you here and explaining it and breaking it down. I hope a lot of people, especially on Zoom, were paying attention um because I think it's really helpful to understand how we got here, why we got here, and what we're going to do next. I'm going to start um with my council members, uh Councilwoman uh Taylor, go ahead. Sorry, I I thought that Brandy, I can't tell if that's blue or green. Okay, let me know. All right, go right ahead, Vice Mayor. Thank you. I love the enthusiasm at which you tell us that our revenue stream is broken both times. At least you do it with a smile and energy. Thank you. Um so what you said at the end, there was a lot of information. I'm trying to recap. Um the the abatement is the real challenge. So, if we were to get that $1.34 between the 366 and the five changed at some point, that would still net us nothing in the long term. Um, but the three the cap is in the abatement is the challenge is the big challenge in this structure. Is that correct? Generally speaking, yes. I don't want to leave you with the impression there would be zero. It would just be very little. The juice wouldn't be worth the squeeze. And there could be at some period way out into the future when you've burned through a 100% of that abatement, then that rate would come into play and you could have that. I I I I think in the foreseeable future, it's highly and I guess if we were going to try and move forward with one of these strategies, that is something that we would really want to attack to get the biggest bang for the buck that we don't have. I agree 100% with that statement. That that's where you want to focus your time. The other thing I'm curious about is you said something that was really interesting, addicted to growth. But I'm imagining that the cost of the way that we're seeing our services and the cost of services that we're seeing that new house at day zero in I don't know day to day year seven, they're not going to be paying as much to keep up with the cost of services either. So, we have to continue this cycle of growth to even keep it within that first 10 years to where we're actually getting property tax. And I guess I don't know where that number actually resides with where a new house is generating property tax at the rate that I guess it's decreasing where we're abating every year. Yeah. When you get to year two, it's 1.5% less and then it comes down. Now, granted, that property can go up in value. It's capped at the 3%. But you're starting at minus 1.5 to start. So I bet we don't actually know when that year is. Um Jeremy, I think what the question is because we've had some internal conversations about this is that at what point, let's just assume police, fire, and parks. At what point in a new development of a thousand homes is there no longer enough money to help pay for those things? Have we done that analysis? Um, that was the question. Thank you. You bet. I want to be very careful about how I answer this question. Um, we have done some analysis along those lines. It's complicated in terms of what the answer is. There's another dimension, Councilwoman, that I think is important. And that other dimension is you have property that's developed that is not residential property. You have a jobs housing balance within a community. There's a distinction between where services are demanded and where services are created. You also have a challenge with there are revenue sources that are generated because something is built. The building of something generates a lot of revenue. Once it's occupied, the calculus is very different. So to the the yes, we've done some of that. I'm happy to try and work on a better answer than the one that I gave you. probably the best that I have is that it's complicated and that I would be very cautious about being a community that's 100% residential. And then I would just um end with I know our manager has been doing a lot of outreach to try and educate people on this and saying we need help in this in this whatever we decide to do moving forward. So, thank you for all of the information. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Mayor. All right, Councilwoman D. Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much. Um, this is something I've been studying since before, you know, when I was first running for city council and when I discovered 10, no, much older, but since um, you know, I became aware of the problem with the depreciation and how we do these calculations. You you sounded an optimistic note a minute ago that yes, it will change because it must change. We had these two, you know, we're either going to deal with it or not deal with it. We're going to deal with it on the back end, I think you said. But what gives you the hope? Because legislation, legislature after legislature for the last five have had a bill or an effort to deal with the depreciation and at every turn it it doesn't make it through. And usually politics, right? People are getting up for election as the mayor already said it. Nobody wants to be the one that raised sales um raised taxes. So what gives you that inspiration that things could change because they must or were every community is going to face the cliff the same? I I it's a bit of a difficult question to answer only from the standpoint of what's the thing that's going to create the impetus to make Well, you sounded an optimistic note and I am I I I am optimistic and the reason that I believe that is because I believe that the state's fiscal structure is failing. Right. I I do too. And I think that that's going to force the hand of the legislature. Many of the conversations we've had have been during a period of prosperity. Um I I think we've also had a period in sort of this postcoid environment where um this community, our state as a whole has benefited tremendously from $5.3 trillion worth of stimulus that was floating around. And to be honest with you, I think that masked many of the problems that we have. It certainly hurt us here. Yeah. From from from what you all see and what I sometimes have a a view to that maybe more than I would like. You you're starting to see how the fabric of it is starting to untether, right? The retail sales and use tax, for example, we're generating more than we should be on a per capita basis, and we know that's starting to decline. We know the tourism base has shown some signs of instability and that's putting the impact on our gaming industry. We know we've diversified. We're not a diversified state by any stretch of the imagination, but we know we've diversified and that's means we have less gaming dollars to spread over everyone. There is only so long that you can continue to stretch that blanket before it just tears right down the middle. And Councilwoman, I think we're starting to see that. I think we're starting to see even the most basic elements of what we need to provide in the state are going to feel stress uh in a in a pretty tremendous way. Now, in 2023, we benefited from all of these dollars that were available at the state level, $2 billion, and thank you to the governor due to stimulus and due to the fact that we've made all these cuts and we made all these changes, you know, but I I I think I think the people that are providing the services are starting to get stressed. I think the people that are receiving them are starting to get stressed. And all of a sudden, my roadways get clogged and my schools are overcrowded. You know, I hate to say it this way, but at some point there's going to be a crisis that causes people to take a look at it and frankly looking at the abatements and saying, "Huh, I wonder if we should let it go from 1.7 billion to 2.7 billion." Maybe not. Maybe not. It just feels like the right place they'll put. Just one little followup. So, um, a lot of the people move, you know, that our growth is due to a lot of people moving in from other states that have different tax systems. And I often get the question and we all do, how come we don't take better care of your parks? How come this? How come there's potholes? I mean, it's a constant there expectations here and the reality is here. And I've had to have this conversation with so many about what our tax system is and what we can and can't do. And that did you move here because we're a low tax state? And they look up at the sky. Yes, I did. They finally admit because they're usually retiring and this is what they wanted. But I go, "Well, but I can't replace the slide." Yeah. If if I can just offer one comment, please. We are not a low tax state. If you add up all the taxes we collect from all these things and you divide it by all the people, we're about in the middle of the pack. Ah, where we are is a low tax state for individual residents, for small businesses, m businesses that aren't in the gaming or mining industry because we export a greater share of our tax liability than almost anywhere else. What does that mean export? Means when we have visitors come here. Yeah. Like you're a visitor. An average visitor spends about $1,000 per person per trip. They check into a hotel room. We charge them room tax. They eat in our restaurants that we charge them retail sales and use tax. They game at our tables. They go see a show in live entertainment tax. About 87% 87% of the taxes the the expenditures of a visitor are subject to taxation in some way or form. represents something like 40% of the state's general fund revenues are either directly or indirectly associated with that. So that that ability to to offset some of that tax allows us that live here to have among the lowest tax burden. So what you said is exactly right and I'm not here to suggest that it's wrong because for that person moving in they do bear a lower tax and for that business moving in it's very competitive in comparison business if it's not a gaming business or it's not a mining business. Now granted, we've changed some of that and you could be very labor intensive or very capital intensive and it could be different depending on the tax liability. But if you add up all those taxes, we're about in the middle of the pack. The other part is, I suppose, because we've been growing so much, we've had to defer a whole lot of those taxes that have come in to building new schools, to building new roads, to doing all of the things for the next people that are moving in. And this would go to what I said earlier about being a bit addicted to growth. Thank you so much. Yes, ma'am. Thank you. Okay. Uh, Councilman, any questions? I just want to make sure I'm understanding. So, the depreciation of 1.5% that starts at what year? Uh, it's the second year. The year you're constructed, you wouldn't get it. The next year, it's going to be assessed and that happens before they calculate your property taxes. So, it's based on that depreciated amount. Correct. But if the property value goes up, offsetting factors. Yeah, you're thinking about it exactly right. They're offsetting factors. Does um does the fact that a lot of properties in Reno are owned um as rental properties and they have an 8% cap. Does that factor in at all? Like should we include that also? Yes. So, if it's not owner occupied, and there's some exceptions that I talked about, but if it's not owner occupied, it's subject to 8%. So, if you if it's a single family residential home, but it's rented, it's subject to the 8%. Okay? So, it's still only has the 1.5% depreciation, but the tax rate can go up 8% annually. The tax can go up by 8%. The tax rate I think about is that the rate that we apply, but the tax bill can only go up by that by 8% on the new value after the 1.5% depreciation. You got it. Okay. Okay. All right. Um, do you have any kind of recommendations or opinions on how to kind of write the ship on some of this? Would it be easier for Reno to review services that we're paying for maybe twice that residents are paying property taxes that go towards Wo County and then the city of Reno is also paying Wo County for some of these services? Do you think that would help at all or do do you feel like it needs to be kind of a restructuring of property taxes? Yeah, look, I I don't know that I can answer the question other than to say at least as the city manager impressed upon me, this is entirely an exercise in fiscal responsibility. understand all of the revenue sources. Look at everything that's out there. The one piece that I would offer you is that making any changes ad hoc I think is the biggest challenge. Understand all of the moving parts and then evaluate what the game plan should ultimately be would be my recommendation. Could property tax be part of that? Sure. But I would not focus only on the property tax or only on the se tax or only on expenditures. I would have a plan and then work that plan because there's there's the level of complication and intersection between all these things that I think matters. Okay. Thank you, M. Madame Mayor. Yes. Go right ahead. Okay. Sorry. Thanks. Thank you for the education. I am really really appreciative of not only the work for to help us understand this, but hopefully for the people in the community that have a stake in this and have a a desire to understand this. This has been exceptionally helpful. Thank you. Um, I wanted to get down to the local calculations a little bit here and ask you, um, let me let me back up a little bit. So, based on this presentation, it looks like the city of Reno is responsible for um, the majority share of not only population, the the actual property parcels that are kicking off property tax. Um, we have the majority of the population and the property value. Yet we get 29% of the assessed property taxes. Is that correct? Did I understand that correctly? Yes. I mean, of the rate that's opposed, you're getting the 26%. And yes, you do represent a disproportionate share or the largest share, I guess I should say, of both population and and property value. The all three of those things are correct. Yes. Okay. And do you know of any other communities in the state of Nevada? Is this typical for communities in the state of Nevada where the majority population and property value gets such a small amount of the property tax distribution? Oddly enough, it it's common everywhere, right? Because that's the the math that underlies the property tax because that value the the people living in that house in that jurisdiction are generating that rate. Now, um, that can be a little higher or a little lower based on the operating rate or in the case of the city of Reno on the rate that's imposed for streets and roads, for example. But that rate that's applied is really not that dissimilar um because if it's any jurisdiction anywhere, it's only going to get its piece of all of those overlapping rates. So what you're seeing is relatively common in terms of that rate being applied, but that's you're getting 100% of the city's rate that is applied to all of the property in the city, if that makes sense. And so there's these other folks that are also applying taxes on there. And if what you're asking is are we as a city like really different than the Sparks or the city of Henderson for example, and you're not. you it's it's similar in that way because of the structure of the property tax. There's not like a distribution formula like what we saw in the consolidated tax except for just reiterate you're just talking about the state of Nevada, right? I'm I'm sorry. We're talking about the state of Nevada. Yeah. No, whenever you said it's everyone else everywhere. I want to just be clear because Yes. Thank you. I I know I'll get see Hillary, you know, and for those that are listening online too, I just want to be clear that this is we are only talking about the state of Nevada. We are only talking about and so yes, it's very different than other states and cities. Yes, we are the only one, if I heard you correctly, that has depreciation that way. Sure. Yeah. It's Yeah, the things we do in the state of Nevada, I have never seen in other states. It's, you know, and look, I bear some responsibility for Are you from Nevada? Yeah. My family moved to Nevada in 1905. Oh my gosh. I did not know that. So, um, and and you should just give a little bit of background of who you are if, um, anyone missed it, but Jeremy is probably the go-to expert in the state of Nevada on what do you what do you call it? It's like we're an economic, fiscal, and policy consultancy. Mayor, that's very very kind of you to say, but I would be remiss if I didn't, you know, I I stand on the shoulders of the folks that came before me, the Marvin Levits, the Guy Hobbs, the Carolos, the Mike Alisttoys. These are the folks who are the the the forefathers and mothers of the tax system that we have today. And I I stand up here because they were willing to help me learn along the way. So, I'm grateful for you to say that. Um we've I'm proud to be here and hopefully a credit to their confidence. Yeah. Fantastic. So anyway, Jeremy is very very wellresected um in our circles at least and there are a lot of people watching that probably don't hang out in a lot of political circles which is probably a good thing. They leave that up to us but um for those of you that don't know Jeremy, he is incredibly talented and we're super grateful to have him in the state of Nevada. So thank you mayor. Thank you. Um, any last questions and then we're gonna let you get out of here. And also, I'm just gonna say he also is a resident, I believe, of the city of Las Vegas. I'm a resident of the city of Henderson. Henderson. Okay. Henderson. Um, mayor. See, because it's very different. I have learned that you I love them all, mayor. I love them all. The reason I pointed that out is I didn't want anyone to think he was biased as a Reno resident. He is not a Reno resident. I am not a Reno res. Okay. Madam Mayor, oh, and I'm so sorry. Devin is um online. I completely forgot about him. I'm so sorry. Um Devin, I'm gonna uh run over to Councilman Martinez and then I'm going to then I'm going to come back to you and then we'll we'll wrap it up. Go ahead, Councilman Martinez. Thanks so much, Madam Mayor. Thank you, Mr. Guo, for the presentation. I think as always, your enthusiasm that I want to highlight, like my colleague said, is very uh energetic and touching. I appreciate you coming at it with a smile and with energy that you bring. My only question is about the tax abatements. You mentioned sort of that them the tax abatesments running out would be the impetus for the state to actually move on this issue and sort of change the financial structure that we have in the state. And I I guess I'm having trouble understanding how you run out of abatement when you're not necessarily collecting that money. or if I'm misunderstanding that, I just want you to expand on that point for me a little bit more, please. Thank you, Councilman. I I want to I should make it clear. I don't think you ever sort of run out of abatement. What could happen is that you remember the chart that I showed that showed how much the abatement had grown. The reason that that abatement has grown is because property values go up and the abatement gets percentage-wise bigger and bigger and bigger over time. What the state of Nevada could do if it ran into a fiscal challenge and was looking for money or or wanted to work with state and local governments collectively is it could essentially come in and say, "We're not going to allow that abatement to get any larger. We're going to draw a line in the sand and we're going to stop it right here and everybody gets to continue to have the abatement that they have today, but they don't get more abatement. We're not going to let it go from 1.7 billion to $2.7 billion because at some point we have to provide these services and these services have a real cost. There is a nuance to your question that I I'll be brief on to try and answer and that is imagine that tomorrow property values started to go down. Right? Your property taxes can still go up by 3% or 8% even though your value is going down. That's a recapture of that abatement over time that could cause it to shrink over time. The amount of the baitment could go down. It's also pretty frustrating to taxpayers when their value of their land or the replacement cost of the asset is going down and their tax bill is going up. But that has the potential to occur, too. And that's only if property values dip. You got it. So long as we're on the current trajectory, that abatement is just going to get bigger and bigger and bigger. Okay, that makes sense. Thank you so much. That's all I have. Thank you, Councilman. Yep. All right, Councilman Ree. Thank you, Madame Mayor. Mr. Aguero, thank you so much for the presentation. Always informative. I apologize I've missed being in person for both of your presentations. That's no reflection on you, but just uh some extreme travel schedule. Um, I wanted to ask about a comment you made and it was both in reference to the city of Reno and also uh sort of in a way towards the city of Sparks and the concept that you raised was about maybe the false claim that people make that cities are addicted to growth. I I I have to say that this is something that I hear sometimes by opponents of projects that imagine that the city council members uh desire to see a particular type of growth because we think that that fuels services. I I know from my experience that every member on this body I've never heard an elected official evaluate a project based on its ability to generate additional property taxes. So, this is something that is sort of anathema to me and in your presentation you raised the issue. Um, can you address that? Sure, Councilman. I I'll make every effort to. The point that I was attempting to make is that the revenue that's generated is greater when construction is new. And this means that from a fiscal perspective, we are that that growth is more beneficial than no than not having growth. And that's a legacy that we've had in the state of Nevada for 100 years. Not as our tax system evolved, it reflected that and that will continue to occur. The second half of your question was really specific to does anyone make the determination about growth based on the fiscal implications? I I have never seen that happen. I suppose I've never said never seen that happen. Obviously, there's probably been some instances, but I would be really surprised because I think if the city council was actually to do it mathematically, I think it would actually be inverted because the challenge is going to be created by residential development, which is going to have a higher service cost than employment generating, which is going to have higher property tax values and lower relative service cost. So, the incentives would be somewhat different than I think you were alluding to that you may have heard from a constituent or two that may have brought up a a counterargument. Um, I think that there's importance in having a jobs housing balance and if that gets out of whack in one jurisdiction or another or crosses a border somehow, it can get really difficult. Well, and I think you anticipated my question because the second part of it really answered the question. It's about this inversion between what residential property generates relative to the services it costs and that being different than you know say um industrial or commercial or employment related spaces. I think that for our council we have always balanced this concept of smart growth. Um we don't choose the projects that come in front of us. It's not that's not really the way that the projects appear. they come because someone owns a piece of land and they want to put it to beneficial use and then we are reacting in real time to that pressure. And I think for my part, I I've never contemplated the impact or the way in which property tax either is or is not benefited by the project. You know, our our findings are all very legal. And so when you said that, you anticipated my question and and in answering it, it sort of explains why I think that there is more than just the allocation issue involved. But there's also this question of what our tax structure does to the planning process and zoning process. I think it's a different question. I'm certainly not asking you to be the expert on that. Uh but I do think you've identified a component of it that is sort of one step beyond what is just the fiscal impact. And so for that I thank you. Thank you sir, madame mayor. Okay. All right. 30 seconds. Okay. A quick followup to my colleague. Um I think he makes a really good point. I mean you implied that we're all making decision the way you said it. It implied that it's all about growth for us and we just want the money. But my colleague points out and you did ear later that residential housing costs us. It's not bringing money to the table. It cost us to provide services to all of these folks. And I've never heard anyone say, "Well, we got to approve this, but we we need the money." I've never heard that. What what I've heard is one thing that you didn't mention was when we annex property, they have to do our staff through a third party consultant often has to do a financial proform showing that it won't cost us money. And I question those often because it shows that we're going to be net positive maybe by $10,000 is all. But it's rarely, you know, these are like theoretical and they just don't really work out. But it's the only time I know in development world that we have to make an assessment. Will this end up costing us money or bring in money? Yes ma'am. So, I don't know if you've run into that whole annexation question, but that's I realize our time is short. Yes, I have run into it. I'm happy to talk to you about it anytime you'd like to. You just like you said, it's just another level of complication. And I think sometimes it is. Yeah. It's just kind of sometimes different than what we think they're going to be. Yeah. Right. Okay. Thank you so much, Jeremy. When are we going to see you again? What's our next I I will defer to the uh city manager in terms of fuel tax coming to you. Okay. Good. All right. Well, thank you so much. We'll let you get back to the city of Henderson. You are always welcome in the city of Reno if you want to move. So, thank you. Anyway, um thank you so much. Appreciate you. Appreciate it. All right. [Laughter] Anyway, okay. Um Madame Clerk, we are going to get moving here and um it is 2:00 and we have really not uh been um we have not dove into this agenda to the level that we need to. With that being said, um I hope my council can understand that we are going to stay um within our council rules. So, I'm going to push everyone along because we still have a lot on this agenda to go to go over. So, madame clerk, um I just want to let you know because usually we have more time to kind of discuss. Anyway, okay, we are heading into item D1. I'm going to send it to you, Madame Clerk. Do you have any public comment? Um, well, first we're opening the public hearing. Oh, hold on one second. Sorry. Sorry. All right, Madam Clerk, we will now open the public hearing. Has proper notice been given and any correspondence received? This item was properly noticed and we did receive correspondence that was distributed as um eight letters in opposition and four neutral or concerned. Okay. Thank you so much. Um, you know what? I need to ask council. Anyone have any disclosures? Any disclosures on this item? No. Okay. Uh, then I'm going to send it back to you, Madam Clerk. Public comment. U, can we have the city attorney read the title in first? Yes. Oh, sorry, Carl. Mr. Introduction. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Uh, bill number 7317 for possible action. Case number TXT24-0000002 accessory dwelling units ordinance amending the Renom Municipal Code Title 18 annexation land development specifically in chapter 1803 use regulations section 1803206 entitled table of allowed uses section 1803 402 entitled accessory buildings and structures and residential zoning districts. Section 1803 405 entitled standards for specific accessory uses. Chapter 1804 development standards. Section 180475 entitled off- streetet parking requirements. And chapter 1809 definitions. Section 1809302 entitled accessory uses to add use standards. 5,000q ft lot minimums, parking standards, design criteria, short-term rental regulations, and definitions as they relate to accessory dwelling units together with matters which pertain to or are necessarily connected there with words 1 2 3 4 5 and six. Okay. Thank you, Madam Clerk. Yes, Connie SA followed by Greg Evangelos, followed by Brett Scaleri. Connie, you have been amazing. You've been here all day. How you doing? That was a tough act to follow, right? Did you Did you feel like it was informative? Yeah, very much so. I'd love to get the slide deck. Yeah. Great. Yeah. All right. Great. Okay, my friend. Take it away. Yeah. Connie SA. Um, I just wanted to thank you all for the ADU ordinance and I feel like we're almost at the finish line. So, I'm very excited. Um, again, I know you've seen this in the past. this is what I would like to build in front of what is existing. Uh, one concern I have is uh the design standards. This doesn't have the same roof line or window trim. So, I'm concerned would that kind of thing be okay. Um, the other thing and I in your letter that I sent you all u whether or not I could build in front. Grace has assured me that I probably could, but I would just love to see something in the ordinance that actually states it. Um, where I don't see that now. Um, the other issue is the fact that I would have to build something um, so that the tiny house is only 50% the size of the larger house and mine because I want to build something slightly smaller than a 12,200 foot house. it would be more of a 60some percent um rather than the 50%. So that's the other thing. I'd like to see some leeway in the ordinance that says it's not hard and fast 50%. Um and I I realize there are things like I don't know variances and things you can do, but they all cost money and lot more time and energy and and I guess also that I don't know would this mean I'd pay more higher tax? I now enjoy the cap that Jeremy was talking about and this would give more tax to the city that might be helpful. And that's about all I have on ADUs, but I do want to tell you um I wanted to thank Nathan. I spoke to him earlier on Wilkinson Park on the remodel they're doing. It hasn't started yet, but they did go ahead and temporarily replace the slides, so they're all safe now. So, I was super excited to see that. So, Thank you all for a good job. Thank you so much. Well, it's really been a lot of your advocacy. So, thank you. Thanks. Okay, Greg Evangelos, followed by Brett Scaleri, followed by Donna Keats. Good afternoon, Madame Mayor and members of the Reno City Council. I'm here to follow up uh and since uh Mrs. Syla has a lot of cred, she and I have been friends for a really long time. Um, but uh kind of following up on her her condition, her situation, and I understand you're looking at the general health and welfare of the community, but there's a specific challenge here because the way you've defined it, and I'm I appreciate the work and the public hearings and the revisions and the effort that Grace has done, the planning commission and so forth, but it says accessory buildings require a principal building. this this building this structure is, you know, under 600 square feet. I I I don't functionally understand the difference that if you if you've switched it and you made this the primary and this the accessory, what what the the difference is in substance and and so the question becomes, can there be any latitude there? Because I think what what is the goal? Why are you doing this? You're doing it to to do infill to strengthen the community. Uh Mrs. Syla lives, you know, in an area that needs revitalization. Let's be honest, I live on Hilltop Road. This is going to work perfect for me. I don't need that. I mean, this is the area that you need reinvestment in. And I think uh and she's multigenerational in terms of her uh desires to protect her family and her grandchildren. So, there's a passion here. there's an emotional connection as well. Why are we why do we make laws? Why do we make ordinances is to serve the public. So that's the the other only element I'm asking that you give it some flexibility if the staff can do this with an administrative deviation or whatever. Allow for that opportunity so she can reinvest in her property and that's it. All right. Thank you so much. Thank you. I like your colorful tie. Yes. It's uh yeah, it was from the m it's actually from the museum store in Las Vegas that's quilt. Yeah, it's our it's one of our friends. I can't remember the the artist. It's not Picasso. It's uh it'll come to me. Well, it's very cool. It's very Nevada. Brett Scaleri followed by Donna Keats. All right, Brett. It's all you. Thank you, mayor. Members, Brett Scaleri with Strategies 360. It's been a long time. Um, but I'm glad to be here. I got the added benefit of uh Jeremy. So, presentation and usually he's at the state. Yeah exactly. That's why you never get to see this guy but I appreciate it. Um, we um our firm represents Airbnb and um I'm here just to talk about one provision in the ordinance, and that's the prohibition of short-term rentals and accessory dwelling units. And I did submit written testimony. Um, so I'm not going to belabor it today. It's been a long day, but I did want to echo the comments of Mr. Irwin earlier. He couldn't have said it better. Um, it really is all about the host and having um the flexibility um to get that supplemental income. So, I just want to make a few points. Um, the prohibition that's in the ordinance currently that we would like stricken, it was not mandated by AB396. It was an option for the local communities or the local governments. Um, but it was not mandated that you do that. there's a may in there and I did provide that language. Um, Reno's STR market quite frankly is is really modest. Um, it's not a tourist destination for for short-term rentals. Um, there's only about,00 units um, listings that are that are on the at least on the Airbnb website. Um, and 76% of the Reno hosts, it's a single listing for them. So that tells us that this isn't commercialized or corporate here in the city of Reno. So I just wanted to make that contrary um note um because I think there's a big scare that all of a sudden ADUs are going to be built and there's going to be this proliferation of STRs and I just we just don't see the connection. In fact, we didn't engage on AB396. I didn't get the direction from Airbnb go in there and support that because we want to proliferate STRs in the city of Reno. I didn't get that direction. and we didn't engage on it. So, um, and as I mentioned, the what we see in ADUs for short-term rentals is non-ourist use. It's traveling nurses, um, temporary workers, it's families coming to a sports tournament. Those are the users you typically see in ADUs for short-term rentals. Um, and then I just wanted to reiterate that short-term rentals do provide that supplemental income. We hear the stories every day. bus drivers, school teachers, they use that. And 42% of our um hosts in Reno have said that their short-term rental income um allows them to stay in their home. So, we think that's very important to note. Thank you very much. All right. Thank you so much, Donna Keats. Donna, good afternoon. Uh, nice to see you all again, I guess. Hope you're happy to hear from me. Yes. Don't I had a lovely little sweet presentation prepared about to express my gratitude to staff for listening to residents and putting things in here that had been taken out and going through this whole process, which by the way, I started in the year 2000. So, this will be a nice year to end it. just as anxious to get through it as everyone else. But I'm a little concerned that this rush to expediency that you're having going on now, meaning let's adopt it in two weeks is going to keep you from having the exemplary ordinance that I know this city needs wants and is capable of doing. You some pre someone previously said you have until next July before the state law takes over and tells you you've got to have them in your backyards even though you have CCNRs. That'd be okay with me if we shared the burden or shared the wealth, whatever. But we have some time here. So, this isn't really what I meant to talk to you about, but I hope you consider that because there's so many ways that this could be tweaked slightly and be turned into an exemplary ordinance instead of these pieces. So, that's not really exactly how I wanted to begin, but I did. So, can I do this overhead? Yes. Go right ahead. Is it there? Hold on. Like it to be there. Give it one minute. Second. Okay. Can I have that minute back on the clock? Sure. Okay. So, okay. Here we Do you see it? There you go. Kind of see it. Can we blow it up a little over there? Yeah. Lauren, is it possible to blow it up a little? Yeah, it's kind of hard to see. So, I want to just go back a bit and remind you uh as if you need it. Can you move it down, Donna, a little? This is not critical because I got to respond to these to somebody else. give me. Anyway, in order to do an amendment to title 8 text amendment to title 18, as you all know, it's supposed to protect um it's supposed to um be in substantial conformance with the purpose and intent of the title. So, this is the legal background because you're looking at my slide, I'll tell you this. So, the general purpose of the title, this is from Grace's staff report to planning commission, is to promote public health blah blah while also protecting the rights of property owners. Go down through a few findings. You have to make finding E. conserve and enhance the character of Reno's established residential neighborhoods through mitigation of adverse factors, promotion of the balanced mix of housing type and appropriately scaled and planned infill development. That's your finding for this text amendment. So my point here to you, I hope you give me that time back or I'm going to run out is um these issues that people are talking about the these are standards left my paper of course about the design standards that Grace has put back in the dimensional standards that have been proposed by the planning commission that they want to put in the short-term rental restriction, the restrictions on heights, the on-site parking requirement. These things speak to quality of life for the people who are going to live next to them and for the people who are going to live down the street from them. These things are what's going to enhance the compatibility of the p with of the ADU with the primary residents and promote the integration of ADUs and their tenants. By the way, you don't want them to be paras. So the tenants also it will help them if we have these things that are currently in there. So you're reading what I wrote so I don't need to talk about it. So that's good. But they also helped to mitigate some of the concerns that were expressed by a magnitude multitude of residents who live in the neighborhoods that this council has decided these things should go more or less. You have a direction you want to infill. Lots of neighborhoods don't know they're going to hit get hit with it. We've got to protect the tenants who currently live there. We've got to help them help gentrification, not kick out people as investorowned properties become more prevalent because you can have two houses on the property now. It has happened. It's happened in my area. it'll continue to happen. So, these are the things that we're that we're talking about and and that can do can help you make this finding if you keep these in here and don't mess with them. As far as the short-term rental thing goes, this council has been asking, the public has been asking, this council has supported developing an STU ordinance for at least five years. The mayor in April requested that the ADU ordinance come back to council at the same time the ADU ordinance did. Okay. Well, now it's been shelved for some reason or another. It's going to be it's way at the bottom of the list of your recent development memo. It's not happening anytime soon. So, you really regardless of what he says, you have constituents who are counting on you. And that was a huge thing for them. All you have to do is not here. I'm going to give you this other one which actually has this. No, it doesn't. Anyway, my point was it's not a beall and endall. You put it in here now for future ADUs, then you get your ordinance, then you have rules. You do the same thing with mitigation. I want my minute. Okay. So, if you um do this extra stuff, this will help you with an excellent ordinance that everybody's not going to hate you for passing. I mean, we want people to like them, and they don't want them. You've had hundreds of people tell you, "We're going to really not like you if you do this." And you've made promises. We're going to have an ADU ordinance. We're going to make sure it's compatible with neighborhoods. We're going to make sure your grandmother will be happy and your child would be happy. And that's not what's happening. And I I'm going to sound a little bit nasty here, but residents do not have the same capacity and access to city council members as lobbyists do. We don't have the same leverage. We don't have the same power. We get three minutes to come here and tell you what we think. Most people are terrified. A lot of people are very fluent, but this is the opportunity. I have to say that Councilwoman Door, the mayor, and the city manager have all given me time. So, there's good personal contact for me, but this doesn't happen for everybody. And so, we don't have the lobbying power. These people, you know, they can keep doing what they want to do. Anyway, I have lots of suggestions. Donna, you got your minute. I got my minute. I'm leaving now. And we had a great conversation. I was super impressed. We did have a great conversation. I do want to tell you cuz you just made a statement and I I want to point this out. Mr. Scaleri talking about over here generic lobbyists. Madame Mayor, I'm not actually slamming. So I I just want everyone to know because then they should know. Then there's the you know, oh those, you know, I agree. Corrupt policy makers and you guys are all cozy with the lobbyists. Well, Mr. Larry over here has been calling me for three weeks. Have I have I returned your call? Nope. Have I met with you? I just want to make it clear. I'm not talking about So he's probably his feelings might be hurt. But I did meet with you, Donna. And and he's right. I'm sorry if I hurt anybody's feelings. I'm just saying people have power and the people who live down my street don't. And you don't hear from them. That's all. Thank you, Donna. All right. Okay. All right. Okay. Hey, guess what, Grace? I think it's all you. Oh, I forgot. What did you forget? I didn't say my last sentence because the time went off. Can I Yeah, hurry. Come on up. Okay, hurry Tony. You know, Tony used to be a council person. So, here. Right. Right. She knows. She She's very skilled. Go ahead, Tony. Very briefly, you know, they'll kill me over here. They're like, "What are you doing, mayor? She's out of process. I will turn it in." Yes, I have spoken to some of my council people. I've spoken to uh Deon Megan, Hillary, most recently Miguel. And again, I said we really everybody focused on their neighbors. Um when I have gone about about this, my focus has as you know, are short-term rentals. I am the broken record on short-term rentals. I carry that mostly because of John Ferrari and the Atlantis and the National uh Resort Association and oh by the way Caesars might come in here too. They all are waiting for short-term rental um law. Um I did have an opportunity to talk to the Marsho County about the man that really was engaged in making that um law. I understand a lot of time went into it. I spent an hour and a half asking him, "What would you do differently?" And he said, "If you don't have a short-term rental law before an ADU, you are crazy." That is an exact quote. So, be that as do what you will. Um, but I don't want you to be crazy. Um, okay. When I have spoken to the council people up here, um I have said, and I'm my fellow residents will not agree with me on this, but I have said no new shortterm rentals. No new short-term rentals. And bring the ones that are already in existence into compliance. make sure that they followed the guidelines that Grace has listened to the entire community. So, um I I bring that forward um as a thought and again I'm bringing that forward on my own. So, um I have listened to all of you and I appreciate all of the conversations. All right, I know you care about this. All right. Thanks, Tony. Thank you. I will go sign. Good job. Thank you. Okay, Grace. Here we go. All right. Good afternoon, council members. Grace McAdin, senior management analyst for the record, here to talk about ADUs. All right. So, this is obviously not my first time presenting to this body on ADUs. Um it's been a very long and comprehensive process and so I think it's worthwhile to kind of go over what that process was um where we've presented who who's participated and where we are right now. So with this particular ADU ordinance, we started in November of 2023 when this city council initiated a text amendment to allow ADUs. In January of 2024, we conducted a survey that was general in nature and we asked the community what concerns they might have if ADUs were allowed. And just to note, we did this because in 2018 an ordinance failed because we didn't get enough public process or public participation. And so this was just that first step. Let's just start by getting that public feedback um before we go into an ordinance. So in March of 2024, those survey results where over 2,000 people responded were discussed with this council. And as a reminder, a majority of the respondents were generally in favor and excited about the idea of ADUs. In July of 2024, staff went back back to council to discuss potential regulations of the ordinance. Then from January to March of 2025, the first draft of the ordinance was created and the public outreach process began. In March of 2025, staff took all of the feedback and the draft um ordinance to planning commission for their feedback. And then in April of 2025 or this year, staff took feedback from the community and the planning commission on the draft ordinance to city council. this body where we looked for some policy direction on that ordinance. In July of 2024, AB396 or Assembly Bill 396, which this body has heard about in public comment today, was signed into law. We'll discuss that in a little bit more detail, but ultimately it required us to pause the process and ensure that we incorporated all of those requirements in this current draft. Staff then took all of our feedback through this whole process that was received. any requirements from a AB396. We modified the ordinance. We created a second draft and we went back to planning commission for a formal recommendation. In August of this year, we got that formal recommendation from planning commission for approval um with one modification and we are now at the ordinance introduction. So, we're almost to the finish line, but I just want to make sure that we don't skip over and that I highlight kind of what this process has been. So, as mentioned in the previous slide, staff came to council April 23rd of this year, and we asked for feedback on the first draft of this ADU ordinance. And I want to remind this body before we get into the presentation of what that feedback was um because April was a long time ago. So, this body discussed the ordinance that was in front of them. Um, specifically, we discussed lot size, short-term rentals, parking, public notice requirements, and private restrictions. There was some dis disagreement on how to proceed. So the motion asked staff to take into account all of the feedback we had heard through our process and find some compromise or middle ground with kind of both sides of the aisle and create a second draft. And that motion got unanimous support. After that city council meeting, staff started amending the ordinance based on city councils and community's concerns. Also, AB396 was signed into law and this requires us to adopt an ADU ordinance by July of 2026. Luckily, we have been working on this process for almost three years. So, we feel like we are ready to adopt an ordinance. We're not um starting from now, but there were some requirements that the bill had that we had to amend um the ordinance to include. The second draft of this ordinance has gone to the planning commission and like I said, they recommended approval with one change. So, some of the changes that were made based on council feedback were the following. ADU height must be shorter than that of the primary structure. And this was a result of concern about structures towering over a neighbor's yard, sticking out like a sore thumb. Um, this ensures that they stay accessory in nature. They're smaller. They're behind the primary structure. Um, and so they're really uh supposed to be accessory in nature, but the the height making them smaller than the primary really ensures that the lot size was reduced from 9,000 ft minimum to 5,000 square feet minimum. So, as a reminder, this was the number one concern staff heard from the public and this body um during the first draft um in public outreach review. And each member of the body was in support of amending that minimum lot size, but we didn't have a number at that time. So staff did an analysis of some infill neighborhoods. Um as an example, Wells Avenue where ADUs are desired by the community there. 5,000 square feet lot size was more appropriate. Um and just a reminder, these ADUs will still have to meet other standards like setback and lot coverage for each zoning district. Uh staff believes that this 5,000 foot minimum is a compromise between those that wanted a smaller or no minimum lot size and those that wanted it to stay at 9,000 or even larger. A prohibition on ADU's uh short-term rentals was added to this ordinance. This was probably the number two concern that staff had heard during the first draft of the ordinance. Since we are working on a short-term rental ordinance, but we're not there yet, this prohibition was added um to help mitigate some of those concerns. And again, this was a middle ground. People don't want short-term rentals. People do want short-term rentals. And so staff thought that this was appropriate. This can always change in the future if we do get a short-term rental ordinance um in place, but because we don't have one today, that's why that was added. Lastly, there were additional design standards added. Again, staff believes this strikes a balance between those that wanted the design standards removed, and those that wanted to see really strict, stringent requirements. And so, this allows staff to review ADUs more similarly to guest quarters, which we currently allow. Um, and those are that's probably what ADUs are more similar to. So this allows them to be um built and reviewed similarly. All right, let's discuss Assembly Bill or AB 396 and those requirements in a little bit more detail. This bill requires the ordinance we adopt and there's double negatives and so it gets kind of confusing, but it requires us to not prohibit separate kitchen facilities. We cannot require more than one parking space per ADU. We must not require any side or rear setback larger than that of the primary structure. We must not require any improvement or repair to a public street unless necessary. And we must not prohibit the owner from using the ADU as long-term rental housing. The ordinance that we have in front of you today meets all of this criteria. All right. So, we've discussed the process. We've discussed the reason for some of the changes. Now, we'll get into the details or the key components to this particular draft. Ultimately, there's four key components that we've identified in this draft. Lot size, parking and design, number and dimensional standards, and short-term rentals. Let's start with lot size. This comes up um quite a bit. I think it was, like I said, it was the number one feedback we got when it was 9,000 square feet. People wanted that reduced or removed. Uh we didn't think it might be appropriate to totally remove the lot size requirement, so we reduced it to 5,000 square ft. Like I said, we still have lot coverage requirements. Typically for most single family districts that lot coverage is 40%. And so what that means is you can't cover more than 40% of your lot with a building. So it ensures that you still have some usable yard. Um you there's some privacy there. You can't just cover your whole lot with with building. The next component is parking and design of the ADU. The parking requirements have not changed from the previous draft. Um this was a concern people had. They wanted to make sure that people weren't parking on the streets if they established an ADU. And so we worked with the bill drafters originally. They wanted us to not require any parking. Um we we worked with them to work put this into the bill because we knew it was important to people and important to the constit uh to the people the citizens. Um but we cannot require any more than one space. So we're kind of meeting the max that we can. We're regulating the most we can and we can't go beyond that. As for design, we did add in some design standards based on feedback from the community and this body. Um the design standards ensure compatibility of these structures with this neighborhood and they also kind of ensure that these structures if you have an attached ADU, it doesn't appear as a duplex. They make sure that the front doors are on different sides so that you're not seeing kind of a multifamily look. All right. Number and dimensional standards. Um this didn't change from the previous draft. one ADU per lot. This is best practices consistent with most jurisdictions that are doing ADUs. Um like I said, height cannot be taller than the primary structure. And so this just ensures um that if you have a detached accessory dwelling unit that it's going to be shorter. It will kind of blend in or or be hidden from the the street level. And then setbacks, same as accessory structures. Um, we can get into detail of the setbacks for each zoning district, but for each zoning district takes into account the height of an accessory structure, and I know there's been some discussion, why are these considered accessory structures, someone's living there, it's not a shed. Um, a couple reasons, and I'd like to hit on that. Accessory structures are also guest quarters, offices, gyms, anything that you wanted to build, a play structure, um, a treehouse, anything you want to build in your backyard is an accessory structure. We don't want it to look like a primary structure. We don't want there to be two primary structures on your lot. So, we wanted to ensure it was shorter, it was smaller, um, and it was in the backyard like the accessory structure standards. Um, additionally, any other most every other jurisdiction that I've looked at considers them in accessory structures for this reason. It's an accessory dwelling unit. It's in the name of that. Um, and so these setbacks that we already have in place today take into account there might be somebody staying in that structure. There might be somebody playing on that structure. There might, you know, there might be impacts there. And so the taller it gets, the further it has to be from that property line. All right. Now, for short-term rentals, the direction from council when we came to this body in April was to do a separate STR ordinance. However, since that's not in place yet and we're still these were still a major concern of the community, we added in this prohibition. So, like I said, we can always take this out if we do a short-term rental ordinance in the future. But what we found was this mitigated some of the concerns that the community had um regarding short-term rentals. And we basically what that means is you cannot rent it out for less than 28 days um but you can rent it out for longer. So these can be used as 28 days which is required by AB 396. All right. So I've touched on I know I've touched on the process but I would like to specifically call out how much public outreach was done. Um when two ADUs were discussed in 2018 like I said the concern was regarding the lack of public outreach. Um and so staff wanted to make sure that this council had ample feedback to make a decision and make an educated decision today um in the future meeting. We presented to all of the NABs. Um we did W six did not meet last night or I'm sorry W five did not meet last night but we did go to W six this month. Um we did three virtual stakeholder meetings. There's been media coverage, press releases, emails, social media posts. Um and we've been to both planning commission and city council multiple times. So I'd hope whether you're in support or opposed to ADUs, um you could say that you've heard about this process. You feel like you've been heard. Um you feel like you've had the opportunity to weigh in. All right. So, going to planning commission's recommendation. Like I said, they recommended council adopt the draft ordinance in front of you with one small modification. Um, and staff does support this modification. They would like to see attached ADUs meet the same size requirements as detached ADUs to prevent the appearance of duplexes like I talked about. And so, what that does is a detached ADU can't be larger than half the um the size of the primary structure. And so this just ensures whether or not they're attached or detached, they'll meet that same size requirement. And like I said, this will vary per zoning district. Um but ju but that's generally how that will work. And if council would like to add this in, I just ask you include it with your motion along with any other changes you might like to see. All right, that's my presentation. The recommended motion is on your screen and I'm available for questions. Okay, thank you so much. Um, first of all, I want to say thank you for all your hard work. Um, you know, I think when things are somewhat controversial, it seems I always hear, "Oh, slow it down, slow it down." This is something we have worked on for a long time. And so I appreciate um, you know, all the time you've spent on it. And I appreciate the feedback um, from the community too because it's so difficult hearing both sides, they they both make sense. Um, and so I I just know that it can be incredibly challenging. So to me, um, as much as some of that stuff I don't love, I feel like you really tried to hear both sides and took that in. And then and actually I think Tony, you did a good job of saying, "I can live with this. I know they don't like this." and but she's been a council person before, so she kind of she gets it. Um that it's not it's not ever easy and it's not cut and dry. And uh some of that stuff I I don't love. I don't know where this will end up going today, but we'll we'll see how we can get there. But I want to commend you because I know it's not easy and you spent a lot of time doing it. Um and so thank you Jackie for getting um everyone aligned, you know. Okay, we are going to start off with Does anyone have their usually Okay, I'm going to start with you. Go ahead, Councilwoman Eert. Go ahead. All right. Thank you. I had some um specific questions. Um one of them being um for mail delivery. Does the ordinance cover things like how many mailboxes there will be? Will it change addresses or can you just kind of touch on that a little bit? Sure. So, Wo County addressing does handle the addressing of ADUs. Um, when I've reached out to them, I think it depends on if they would like to put in a new meter um for that accessory dwelling unit. We don't get like to get into those things with our zoning took code just because it depends on, you know, the electricity that they're generating or or um the existing capacity of that house. Um, but it doesn't sound like they're usually getting a separate address. Okay. So, probably not a separate mailbox. Um, another question I have is about sewer connection. Um, I know that we have a lot of projects out there that we've already accounted for to provide s uh sewer services. How will that factor into the decision-m with ADUs? Sure. So, um, we have talked to, uh, utility services about this and how it will work once something's adopted and it it will be somewhat of a case by case basis. Um, if it's attached ADU, u, most likely they could tie into their existing line. Um, and if it's detached, they'll probably be required to do a separate connection. Uh, it's difficult because you might have a really, really small house with two bathrooms or one bathroom, which is really different from a large house with four bathrooms. Um, so we'll have to kind of look at those on a case- by case basis, but they they let me know. Generally, that's probably what we'll see. Okay. And I know something that I see a lot in in my ward are these detention and retention ponds for uh addressing runoff when we cover you know impervious services. What triggers that the necessity for those ponds? Are we going to be in a situation potentially in um closed basin areas that have flooding where they need to also offset um covering of you know more surface area on their lots? We will look at all of those things during building permit review. Um because these lots are already established. It's not a new tenative map. Um they won't, you know, I don't want to say ever, but most likely they won't require any new um retention or detention. Um but if we look at it and it does kind of look like it's going to require some sort of mitigation, then we'll look for what that mitigation can be. Okay. And what does this do? I mean, approving this, what would this do to um existing neighborhood plans that don't allow for this? Would this then trump that? And is that considered, you know, a taking for people that potentially will have an ADU next to them that lowers their property value? Um, so a couple components there. Um, if you have a more specific neighborhood plan that restricts ADUs, this will not trump that. Okay. generally agree with where the planning commission ended up. Um, so I'm going to be interested where my colleagues are on that. And you're saying that if we want to add the the dimensional standards, we have to put that in our motion because I thought your draft was the planning commission draft. Nope. I um the only reason I did that was because I wanted to be mindful that we kept the same ordinance, the same draft all the way through. So you saw the beginning. So it's not currently in the ordinance. So I'm going to bring up a couple questions for you and then some proposals. Um, one of the biggest things, uh, my colleague just touched on it was I hear from people about CCNRs and they want to make sure and that this does not quote Trump their CCNR. So, for example, I have in my ward some CCRs say you cannot have an ADU. Okay. And apparently the state did not mean to trump CCNRs. So, if you specifically outlaw them in your neighborhood, they say that controls. Do you agree with that? Yes. Okay. So to ensure that one of the things you and I have talked about is how do we um get those CCRs recognized by the city and um how do we give the assurance to neighborhoods that we're supporting their CCNRs. So let's say a ADU comes in in one of these neighborhoods that says no ADUs. Um uh my suggestion would be and I would like to see this put into our recom or into our draft um that they do two things. one, they post a sign. That means it's not up to the city, but it's up to the neighborhood to police their own CCNRs. They can't police them unless they know something's happening. So, my re, and I've talked to you about this, my recommendation would be they have to post a sign. You can decide administratively what size, type, style, whatever for 10 days before they submit because I have learned that a building can be approved within one day of being submitted up to 10 days. So, 1 to 10 days. So I think the sign has to be posted before the clock starts running. The second thing on that note that I've recommended to you and the others is that when they submit an application that they submit an affidavit that they either do not have CCNRs or they acknowledge they do have CCNRs and that they comply with them. So a CCNR for example could allow ADU specifically like my um neighborhood plan does. Um but they also have to be a certain size. that size might be different than what the city is, uh, you know, puts into their ordinance. So, I'd recommend those two things. Um, I have a few more recommendations. Uh, one of those is you went over setbacks and you and I have talked about this extensively. My only slight recommendation would be to say that the setback should be the same as the primary residence. Basically, what the NRS said, it said you need to comply with the setbacks for the primary residence. I think that should be in our ordinance as well, not the swing set, the out building, the garbage container. So, I'll come back, but those are two things I'd like to see. And attached to that, because I think it does sort of piggy back on that is also um some fire safety clearances as well. Um Well exactly. Um I think that that is really important. And then I do think there was a community member and I don't remember who it was because we've heard a lot of public comment but um was uh to require a parcel survey especially like if a fence is 20 years old um things like I mean it's really fascinating even where I live um we're overlapping and you would have thought that it they had done an extensive overview of what that looked like. Um because I wanted to put a door into my fence and then I found out like that they're over on my side. Fine. It's fine. But I just can see how uh some of those lots just don't make any sense. And we've seen individuals come uh to council that have uh put up fences uh not on their properties. So, I think that that is really critical um because we we do see it all the time actually where the property lines and lots um do not say exactly what you think they are or they do not Madame Mayor just to that point um just at our last planning commission meeting there was a what is it called a major deviation someone had built an ADU is that correct it I don't believe it was an ADU it was a building a building and it was not it was more than um it was less than the setback required. So it it invaded into the space and they had to come in for a major deviation. So these things it just had to go to the planning commission because it didn't meet city standards. If they had done a survey, they could have avoided all that. But I think these are minor tweaks, but some of the little oversight that I think could help greatly because um what's the saying an alta prevention? Yeah, I don't know. They're just the same. If I could speak on the survey, um when we get a building permit in, uh these would require what we call setback letter, which has to be stamped by a licensed surveyor. Um and so they are getting a surveyor coming to their property and ensuring if the planning department says it needs to be 10 ft. Um they're making sure that that meets kind of or they're measuring that and making sure that that's correct. Is that the same as a parcel map? Cuz I think it's different. Nope. Different than a par a parcel maps when you're creating new parcels. New parcels. is for any structure or building that's built. Uh we'll have someone go out or we will have a surveyor go out there and they have to ensure that it does meet the setbacks that were done. Um sometimes we get a really old un unllicensed or unpermitted structure and that's when we catch it is when we do these these building permits and setback letters and we say this isn't right. Um instead of tearing it down, we have some flexibility in our Does it show the property lines exactly who owns what where it should be? It does. um it is our building requirement and so I've talked to them about I'm not an expert in it but it does show um you know what they have in the system as the property lines they measure it against kind of what the property line is to where the structure is and it's done by a licensed surveyor so if we're already doing that what's the problem with requiring us I think it's done by an engineer not a surveyor stepway and we I can double check on that but it's uh I believe Chris is coming up um I'll let him speak specifically on the setback letter Okay. All right. Chris, good afternoon. Chris Pingry, director of development services. Let's clear up the setback versus survey discussion. Yeah. Standard issue across the board in the building permit world is a setback letter that is performed by a licensed surveyor. licensed surveyor goes out, shoots the property line, measures what is presented on the approved plan set that was submitted and approved by the department and make sure that it meets the same field condition that's out there. So, if there's a 10-ft setback required, surveyor goes out, puts his state stamp on that document to verify that it has been done. Um, and it does meet. It's not a full survey. And the reason for that is just a full survey cost compared to a setback letter um would probably be 25% of what that survey would actually cost. So it meets the intent um and we're confident in that space that it works to meet that setback and that standard by the licensed engineer or surveyor. Okay. All right. Thank you. Makes sense. I understand. Okay. I'm going to send it over to you. Uh vice Thank you, Madam Mayor. Thank you for the presentation and again all the work that you've done. Um, lots of outreach, lots of opportunities to weigh in. Um, I appreciate what my colleagues were saying. I guess I need a little more information on the sign thing. I don't know if that's something like a yellow sign that we put when it's going to planning commission. Um, so I guess I just ask for a little bit of clarification on that if it's an administrative approval what the sign what the intention is there. I think that we need to be careful with short-term rentals. Yes, we need to talk about short-term rentals, but I would um not be in favor of having the 28day language in there when if we're going to be bringing back short-term rentals. I just think it convolutes the conversation a little bit. And since this is going to be something that's brand new for the city, I'd like us to have a little bit of flexibility in it. On top of that comment, I think there should be some wiggle room for some of the for the administrator to make some of the decisions, too. So, if somebody comes in and their lot size is 4,992 ft, you know, I want I want the to set us up for success with this. And um th those are my comments. Thank you so much, Martinez. Thanks so much, M. Thanks uh Grace for the presentation and all your work throughout the multiple years that we've been discussing this during this iteration. Um I think I want to understand a little bit more of uh some of the comments that were made uh from my colleague regarding accessory setbacks compared to um I I don't know what the other primary versus the primary accessory. Yeah, I don't know if you can describe that a little bit more and if you have any examples. So, if we're looking at lot size, does it change depending on how large or small those lot sizes are? And are we impacting the possibility of some of the smaller lot sizes which are more present, I think, in W three and some of the infill areas that we're looking at. I'm just worried about the impacts uh to them if we do end up going that route or what those changes would look like. Definitely. I think um to your point, it can have um a pretty large impact depending on the zoning district. So, if someone, you know, we went through this process thinking they could meet the those accessory structure standard or set setbacks. Um, some zoning districts that's very different, but if I could get the overhead, I'll show you an example of some zoning districts and what their setbacks are. Um, so this is large lot residential 2.5. This is one of more maybe a more rural um area, a larger lot, two and a half acre minimum. Um, so as you can see, the side setback is 15 ft for both the principal building and the accessory structure. The same side setbacks as for the rear side setback or the excuse me, the rear setback, it's 30 ft for the principal building and it's 30 or 15 for the accessory building. That's taking into account what that footnote says is if it's over typically if it's over one story, it has to meet the 30 foot setback. Um, but if it's a small accessory structure, then they can meet the 15oot setback. Do you have this example for like SF five or eight or three? Yes. Let's pull it up. Here is SF8. I was okay. So, this is um you know 6 or 7,000 foot lot. And what we see is both the primary and the accessory structure have a five foot access five foot setback side setback. Um and then the principal building has a 20 foot uh rear setback uh the accessory building would have 20 or five depending on the height of that structure. And so we we're taking into account um those impacts. So the the rear setback uh going from 20 to five would depend on how large that accessory structure is in terms of height. Correct is what you're saying. Okay. So the larger the building, the further away it has to be from that rear setback. Yes. Okay, that makes sense. That's all the questions I have for this round. Thank you, Council. Go ahead. Yes. Thank you. Thank you for all your work on this, Grace. You've been absolutely brilliant in front of every audience I've seen you present this to. Um so, thank you. Um I have just a clarifying question based on um Council Member Dor's request on the signage. If I was going to build a she-shed right now or, you know, um, a shed or an out building in my yard that didn't have a resident, would I have to put up a sign to tell my neighbors that I was getting a permit to do something in my backyard? Nope. And I did um, Council Member Derer and I did talk about this. One of staff's concerns with this is we have very specific requirements. If you do a minor conditional use permit or conditional use permit, there's specific standards of what size the sign is. It has to be weatherproof. There's specific requirements for that. What size the text is. Um the it has to be yellow and and then the time it has to be put out, where it has to be put. Um not to say that this would have to meet all of those, but I want to make sure that we're not, oh, that sign's okay for this one, this sign's okay for that one. And so if you wanted to do that, we would have to make be very careful about the language and make be very clear with what we want that to be. So it's it's not normal. It's not typical. Um, if we're not going to require them to do a conditional use permit or minor conditional use permit, we would never make them post a sign. Yeah. Yeah. I think she's asking though, you would not need to sign if you wanted to go build a she-shed or a playground or um a storage unit. But what I'm requesting is just where you're going to dwell in it, live in it, that you know, those are usually controlled by the CCNRs. And I'm completely fine with whatever size sign that you decide. I don't think it needs to be in a regulation, but I think it should be an administrative policy, but if you want to put it in the regulation, I'm totally fine with that, too. I just don't think they should have to go through a permitting process other than the building permit. More, this is my time if you wouldn't mind circling back. I think they stopped this clock, but I just wanted to explain what what I was asking. Perfect. So, my my concern is is as an accessory dwelling unit, I feel like these signs, we're inviting our neighbors into business that we're not inviting them into otherwise. Yes. And um another part of my concerns here is that I hear a lot about regulating being a good neighbor. I am all in for saying we need to make sure that there's parking available. That is good land use planning. That's good public safety planning. That's being a good neighbor in terms of like getting traffic in and out of a of a community. Um regulating being a good neighbor in other in other ways, putting up a sign, things like that. I feel like we're assuming that neighbors aren't going to treat each other well by requiring these things. And so I I don't know, the spirit of that is it's tricky for me. I don't know. Um, I also share concerns about the short-term rental policy in this. Um, property values should be looked at from a a lot of different framing, but for young families or families that are trying to bring generations onto their property to save money or potentially free up another primary home for other family members. Um, by making this short-term rental or any real regulation on this accessory dwelling, we're removing people's ability to make their property work harder for them, however they need it to work for them. And their primary homes are going to be for the most part their biggest significant investment that they have. and by not allowing them to use them as short-term rentals, I feel like we're we're taking away an opportunity in a very expensive market to maintain property. So, that's just my feedback on that. Uh, Councilman Ree, thank you, Madam Mayor. Uh first of all I wanted to ask um Miss Magdan um we had two public commenters Greg Evangelados and Miss Sylvier who I can see are behind you. Um they had asked really about two questions. One was the size of the primary residence versus the secondary and and maybe the primary was the smaller of the two. So, I'm trying to understand that and it also it kind of piggybacked on another concern about minor deviations which uh Vice Mayor Taylor also mentioned. Does the administrator have any discretion in this area either to say, "Hey, this primary versus secondary is not really a thing on this specific lot because the primary resident's really tiny and maybe the ADU is going to be slightly larger." Um, and then this minor deviation thing about administrative powers. I'm trying to assure assure ourselves that we aren't foreclosing the possibility that some people's lots are just not exactly the same or maybe their setbacks or are different. So, what can you say about that? Sure. Um, it it gets difficult. Obviously, our our code is very specific standards so that when we get in a building permit, we're making sure the setbacks are exactly what they're supposed to be, the size uh requirement is met. um we're kind of going through these things and checking off the boxes. However, we understand that it's not always one-sizefits-all, especially in some of these older communities. Um there might be an a unique shaped lot or a unique circumstance. And so if it can't meet those circumstances, we have flexibility and relief um which we have a variance. We have a minor deviation which is less than a 10% deviation from standards. And then we have a major deviation which is up to a 50% deviation from standards. Um so we do have those things built in. um with the you know specific I guess example that came before you during public comment um they could switch you know the front house could become the primary house and the currently primary house could become the ADU but we still have to make sure that those meet the standards that are in code if that helps. Yeah, I think you have answered it. And ultimately, of course, what we're trying to express is our desire that the ordinance not be so overly burdensome that it forecloses someone who legitimately wants to build an accessory dwelling unit from doing so. Um, I suppose like my colleagues, Miss Taylor and Miss Anderson have mentioned, I'm uncomfortable with additional red tape or bureaucracy which would foreclose the possibility that people would make beneficial use of the property they own. in part because I think that ADUs are incredibly expensive. I I'm not sure how many will be built and I think my preference is as we launch ADUs as a new um a a use or a new identified u code requirement um that we not have more ownorous restrictions on them. So I I therefore conclude that it's not appropriate to have limitations on them being short-term rentals. I also don't think that um because I don't know that so many of them are going to be built. I think that if we get a year or two down the road and we have some um historical or empirical evidence to base it on, we will know what these are being used for and and I think we can make changes to the ordinance later as we get out the gate and we really want people to try to utilize these uh to see what they can accomplish for our community. I I think we're better off having less ownorous requirements on them at the outset. Those can be added later if we see they're being, you know, gobbled up by corporate landlords or something like that. I I don't think that's going to happen here. Um I think even our prior uh council colleague in public comment had mentioned that she thought the shebacus didn't approve of of these. Um I think Vegas very different market for uh BBOS's and vacation rentals. I just don't know that it's going to happen here. So, those are my comments in this first round. Thank you so much, Madame Mayor, for allowing me to go over. Okay. Thank you so much. Um, Grace, so I want to ask you, I guess my heartburn has always been, and I have I have said this several times, that not all neighborhoods are created equally. Um, the one that does give me a lot of concern is the Newand's area or any historical sort of significance. um and really preserving the neighborhood to what the his history um was sort of preserved for. Mhm. Um so that is really really tough um for me and you know is I mean the like carving it out or maybe in some sense um I would like to see that maybe you know the existing ADUs they're grandfathered in anyone else after that totally separate story. Um I know that's not what we're looking for here. That's what I would have really have hoped for. Um I do have a lot of concern um when we treat neighborhoods all the same because they have different density. Um, and then that would lead me to believe or ask you, um, did you look at how many how many parcels in the New Lands area would be able to build an ADU because I assume that those those homes are so much bigger on those parcels that it would be pretty hard to do, but I'm not quite sure. G tell me a little bit. Definitely. We've um analyzed the Newand's neighborhood a lot just because of some of the concerns we've heard. Um, interestingly enough, about half of Newand's is zoned multif family. Um, and but they have single family houses on them. Um, they might have duplexes, but they can do another unit today. Uh, we also see when we look at a map of the Newand's area, they're in a lot of times already exceeding their lot coverage requirements. Um, I don't want to say that they can never do an ADU, but when we look at it right now, it would be very difficult for most of those homes to build one just because they're exceeding some of those requirements that are in code today. Okay. Well, it's the one area I have a lot of heartburn. Not one area. I shouldn't say that. There are a lot of different neighborhoods in this in this city and they are not all the same and shouldn't be. Um, but I I think I'm outnumbered there greatly. But I would say for me that has always been a lot of heartburn. Um, okay. Council New Berke. Yeah. I just had a quick question. Um, I know you mentioned several times outreach that was done. Do you have any numbers about, you know, how many people responded, what kind of um, engagement we had on that? I know there was several meetings that you went to, but like how many people responded? So, um, with the initial survey we did, like I said, we got over 2,000 people responding, which is huge response rate. Uh, each neighborhood advisory board had a little bit different participation. I know council members, council member Ders had about four upwards of 40 people there. Um, and so it it depends. Council member Martinez's was also um, well attended. And so I don't have the breakdown of exactly how many people, but I did provide you guys each person who provided public comment along that process. Okay. So, I had a couple other things. I did want to um mention that I do think that um an ADU is is different than um building just a different type of structure. Um when we're talking about somebody living there and a car and those type of things, um I think it's it's not like an apples to apples comparison with like a shed. So, I do see the value in in notifying um surrounding residents. I also have a question about um would there be any kind of appeal process? If somebody finds out there's um potentially an ADU going next to them and they have some reason they object, is there an appeal process for them? So, our building permits uh can be appealed. Um the question I think we need to ask ourselves is why would we like them to be appealed? Um if they're meeting code, what are they appealing? Just the fact that they don't like the ADU, they don't want it next door to them. Um, it's not a disc building permits aren't discretionary. Like I said, it's very black and white. If they meet these standards, they get their permit. Um, and so if we want them to be appealed, we just need to they can be appealed. Um, but we just need to ask ourselves kind of why we Okay, so let's say I'm just hypothetical. Somebody checks a box that says no CCNRs and all of that, but a neighbor says, "Actually, we do have CCNRs on this." Um, and uh, I disagree with the lot line that you have put on your application. Um, how would that neighbor that has those kind of concerns know that a permit's been issued if we don't have any kind of signage out? Definitely a couple things I'd like to hit on and I can definitely defer to our legal team if I mischaracterize this, but um, we have private restrictions and we have public restrictions. We only enforce public restrictions. And actually, one of our public commenters sent us a link that laid it out really, really nicely. Um, local jurisdictions don't restrict private restrictions. We I looked and looked and looked for an example of someone who did enforce and did um restrict private or yeah, did enforce private restrictions and they're just not out there. So, that's a private restriction. Um, it would become a civil matter at that point. And I don't know if the city attorney wants to chime in. Okay. But the other portion I mentioned was a dispute on where the property line is. How would somebody be able to um kind of pursue that type of complaint if they don't even know a permit's been issued? Uh if they wanted to dispute, so like today, if a fence gets built and they're saying that's on my property, uh we think that this is the property line. Um oftent times that becomes a civil matter. Okay. All right. Um I did have a couple other things. I don't know. Okay. We'll do a quick um second third round and then we're going to move on. Um anyone else over? Yeah, I have no followup. Okay, go ahead. Council, wait, wait, hold on. I'm sorry. Um Councilman Reese, do you have anything? No, Madame Mayor, I think I've said what I had to say. Thank you so much. All right. Um go ahead, Council. Thank you. Um so the other thing I wanted to ask Grace is um you know I've been a big proponent of these ADUs for very long time and what I'm trying to do here is just deal with a nuance that's been brought up to me so many times that I I feel it was my duty to bring it up in front of of the group here. Um, and that is you've pointed out that's not the city's role to enforce restrictions and my colleague here just brought up how does the neighborhood enforce their own restrictions if they don't even know that something's coming forward. So, I put forth just for my colleagues, I put forth this sign proposal because so many of my constituents asked for something like that that it would put it in their hands. They wouldn't have to engage the city. They would take care of it themselves. even including the survey issue. What I wanted to ask you was I was um a concern myself where there was a restriction of 28 days put forth by you and the planning commission that you couldn't rent for less than 28 days. And my biggest concern was that we already have people out there renting for less than 28 days in an ADU. and we support small business and I didn't want to just by our ordinance adoption here wipe out these small businesses that are relying on this income or have been doing it. I think we heard testimony persons been doing it for 20 or 14 years. Um did was it really our intent to just stop them in their tracks and I didn't think that was right. So, um, I really didn't know where the rest of the council was on this, but in case they wanted to leave it in, I at least wanted to recommend grandfathering in. People had already been doing this for a while for a period of time. Um, the other concern I have is that, and you could help me by going over the history, but I think what you said, and I'll characterize it. I think you said for about let's say 80 100 years, we allowed ADUs till about 2000 is what I remember. 2005 something in there. Then there was a moratorum uh on ADUs, you couldn't build them. Then there was a actual was there an action that prohibited them. And so what I want to make sure is that if you built a ADU before they were prohibited that you can still do your business and use your ADU, but on the other hand, if you built one in in the last 25 years since about 2000, I want to make sure that those come in and get legal. you know that they follow our our building requirements, our our electrical, plumbing requirements, um whatever other requirements you have. And so what's the process for that? Can you just address that whole thing? Yes. I'll start with the history um because I know we had brought this up and uh it looks like in September of 2000, we adopted a new zoning code which allowed for ADUs um in certain zoning districts with restrictions. And then in April of 2020 or 2005, excuse me, um there was a moratorum placed on the construction of ADUs and it was to kind of study the impacts or the appropriateness of ADUs. In 2007, uh council adopted an ordinance which prohibited ADUs in the city of Reno. Since then, uh the master plan encouraged ADUs. There was a lot of public outreach to people who wanted to see them. Um we also had Greenfield neighborhood plan area um which wanted you know the residents came together and they said no we would like to see ADUs in this area and so we've had um a lot of PUDS come in or neighborhoods that said we would like to see ADUs and that's allowed us to to look at what it might look like. So today's world we have the last action was 2007 to prohibit them. There was an ordinance brought forward in 2018 that died but it didn't get passed. Correct. So they've been prohibited since 2005. That's my understanding. Yes. So, all the ones before 2005, what I'm just saying is those legally exist. And then the ones since 2005, people have built them. They got guest quarters. Yes. Then when it was permitted, they came in and brought in a a kitchen uh stove or oven, right? Yep. And so I can speak to that. Uh we already have an a non-conforming section in our zoning code. There's oftent times when you establish a business, the zoning change and all all of a sudden that business is non-conforming. Um, and so we have a section that grandfathers anything that's been legally established. So if you can prove you got a building permit for an ADU in 2000, um, we can honor that and say you can continue to operate how you were licensed or uh, permitted. Um, if you illegally did it, we also have a process what we call retroactive building permit. Uh, in that process, we often get maybe a code enforcement complaint or someone didn't know they were supposed to get a building permit. They'll come in and we try to work with them with the best of our abilities. We want to make sure it's safe, it's habitable, and that was built to code. Um, but sometimes you see what you saw at planning commission, maybe it wasn't built to those setbacks. Um, or maybe, you know, something wasn't done. So, we have to address that after the fact, which is an idea. So, in today's world, do we have a process or do we need to make sure that if if you aren't conforming that you can come in and become legal or do we need to address it? That's my question. I don't think I we have a process already. I it seems to work really well. Um, we we work with these people. So once we make these legal, yes, our expectation is that the ones that were built during an illegal time, it's up to them to come in and get them legal. Correct. Or they go to sell their house and they never got a permit. And it always happens differently of why they come to us. But we do have a process. Thank you. And I would recommend and I I assume you're already doing this, but maybe a mailing of a notice of if within 500 ft of um if you know someone puts in to build one. Is that already? We do not send mail notices out to building permits. I can definitely defer to Chris again. I think we get upwards of 10,000 building permits a year. Um, so no, but I mean for just for ads for an ad. And that's where that equity piece comes in of we're noticing people for an ADU, but if they wanted to put in a duplex or multifamily, we're not noticing them for those things um unless it triggers a conditional use permit. And that's why stack didn't recommend that process. Okay. I just that that one worries me because the sign is always so problematic, right? Like the way the I mean half the time the sign blows off and there's like you know and I don't want I don't want neighbors to come back. You didn't tell me and you know I mean I do think that that notice is is really is really important. Um I just don't love that sign idea. It's just just to confirm this ordinance would not require a sign. So that's been talked about of something that we might want to see. The one in front of you would not require a sign, but it should require some sort of noticing for the and the only projects that require noticing currently are any discretionary review. So, minor conditional use permits, conditional use permits. Um, those would be the things that we would see that would require noticing today in our code, but we could put it in. Yes. Okay. All right. Go ahead. Uh, Council Neighbor, um, you mentioned in the presentation that the front doors would have to be separate. They can't look like a duplex. Who would enforce something like that? Are we going to have code enforcement go out and verify that these these pieces are being um upheld? No, we look at this during building permit. So, when they come in um and it's the same standards we have today for guest quarters. If someone wants to put in an attached guest quarters, uh we look at the building permit and we make sure it meets all those architectural requirements. One of those being that the front doors cannot be visible from the same street. Okay. Uh and that's because of that duplex appearing. Okay. And then the 28day rental piece, how would we enforce that? Would we have somebody that checks the short-term rental websites and looks to see what's available? And how would we know when one of these became available if we said, you know, going forward we're not going to allow them? How would we know and how would we track that? This one would most likely be similar to how um today in our zoning code, guest quarters are prohibited from being rented out. Um but we deal with those on a complaint base. So if somebody complained they had a party next to them or they know their neighbors renting it out as an Airbnb, that's how that would um be enforced. And I would just like to say the reason we added that in was because it was the number two concern we saw from the community. And so that was kind of, you know, our way of mitigating that. Okay. All right. Um, I did have one more thing. Um, oh, you you touched on it, the the process for coming into conformance. Um, yeah, I think that's it for right now for me. Thank you very much for your time. Um, and also I would just say cities across this country have these ordinances. Obviously, you've looked at many of them. Yes. I assume it's very much in line with what other cities are seeing and sort of um I don't see every day in the headlines that I mean once in a while whenever it's really crazy. Um but you know unfortunately my office is where I hear all bad all day long. My email is all negative negative bad bad. Yes. very rarely and I can't even remember one actually other than maybe one party house a long long long time ago. It didn't even come to me. It was in the is in the news. But just interesting to see that for the most part people are pretty respectful and pretty good about it. You do always, it doesn't matter what it is, whether it's dirt bikes that are out of control, Brandy, we know um because there's a lot of that lately that's out of control there. you will always have unfortunately a bad actor, but for the most part people are really good and uh respectful. I want to continue to think that way. So, um okay, I'm going to ask I'm going to ask someone to give me a motion. Sure. Um Councilwoman Der, I'm going to do that and then if we can't get there then, um I'll send it over to you. Okay. Sound good? Okay. Go ahead. Yeah. Um I've I've listened to everyone and took some notes. So, I'd like to make a motion. It does require changes. Um, Grace, and when I met with you, do you want to address this? Yes. Um, I did discuss with our city attorney's office, as long as those changes come from this motion, we don't have to renotice it. Okay. Okay. All right. Well, just listening to my colleagues, um, what I'd like to do is, um, move forward with the re uh, recommendation in our staff report with a couple changes. One of those changes would be there would be no 28-day prohibition on SDR. In other words, you could have a short-term rental on the ADU, just like you could on a primary resident or an in-house. So, it sounded like most people wanted that. Uh, the second thing most people seem to want was the planning commission suggested design standards that would be the same for whether you're attached or detached. Is that the simplest way to say that? you. Yes, you can just say planning commission's recommendation. Planning Commission recommendation. Okay. And and I'm looking for some head nods. That's what people like to see to balance that out because a lot of people did not want these 28 day rental, but I think the council does. I really do think and the mayor me recommended this that we require a mailing of a notice within 500 ft. No signed, but some kind of notice. And she's recommending a mailing. And then the second the last thing would be that the setbacks for the ADU would be the same as the primary residence since you're living in them whatever those are which it mirrors a lot of the outbuilding playground. Um so those four changes. Sure. I think Chris has something to say and the signage is not my um line in the sand. It's just Yeah, I took I just don't know how we would do the mailing that's being proposed. Ping director services. No, I took it out. I took out the sign. I'd like to just further discuss the noticing piece required for the building permit. Um, building permits obviously and entitlement cases obviously run in two completely different worlds. um building permit review is on an expedit expedited timeline that we have a 10-day promise to our applicants to have that reviewed. Two issues that I see with that noticing or signage requirement is who is enforcing that noticing is the city and we're going to put that on the applicant to pay for that noticing to require that noticing who is also going to enforce that signage that is put in someone's yard apparent. There was no signage that so even with the noticing piece and that's where we have a dedicated 10-day review period. We would have to pull that completely out of the normal building permit process. So I just wanted to throw that out. Chris, are you recommending that we don't include that mailing portion because we don't do it with other things, right? It's going to throw an additional burden on how we do our process now through the building permit process if we're requiring things. So, would you remove that council member door from your motion? I'm from what I'm hearing Chris don't go. I'm just trying to is hear everybody. Go ahead. You're saying timing is difficult because you you expedite these things. I see I see what you're saying. What do you recommend though to notice the neighbors so that they have an idea of you know and here's why and we see it all the time with commercial this isn't just ADUs but we see it matter of fact I think Brandy I just answered one of your constituents that I sent to you over um a building they're building in the middle of the night all these things um and the problem is is if you don't know that you know there needs to be some conformance some rules some you know otherwise people can just hey I'm out here like building hey you know and then then people are coming to us saying why didn't you tell me that you guys were building and I'd like to give my professional opinion on this and that's all this is give it to me because we we are not the professionals in your we have built a set of standards in this ADU ordinance that meets rules meets laws at this point of requiring additional restraints on a building permit process is convoluted that process of land rights of your personal property rights as long as you meet the ordinance in place then you are meeting that the civil matter between CCNRs and the neighborhood that is a civil matter with that lives within the CCNRs those CCNRs most of them all require you to ask for permission prior to building anything in that lot right so you also have to be you know cognizant of what your CCNRs and the rules that you have in your neighborhood are prior to building an ADU um to where I feel that the onus is on the property owner to know that their CCRs and the rules that they have to apply by but just press professional opinion. Okay. Okay. All right. Well, Chris, that's helpful discussion too. Um I just want to say that you know the the requirements for sending out notifications and putting a sign out is uh for conditional use permits and what was the other reason for that? Any discretionary review. So uh Chris had mentioned we have a discretionary review process and we have a building permit process. the discretionary reviews, our minor conditional use permits, conditional use permits. Um, this body might see zoning map amendments, those will get noticed. That's the piece that I'm concerned about right there is the zoning change. What you're doing effectively when you um put in an ADU is changing the zoning from single family potentially to not single family. So I think that's where the distinction is for me to say that we should have noticing because that is a very different thing to go from single family to multiple residential units on a parcel. So I feel like there's a definite distinction there that um we should take into account because it is effectively changing the zoning. Yeah, I think I disagree with that. I appreciate your comment, but I don't think you're changing the zoning. That is a completely different process that does require noticing. And I don't think that we're I mean, I understand where you're coming from, but I can always go talk to my neighbor, too. Walk across the street and let them know what's going on. That's that's what I would do as a good neighbor and understand what my rules and regulations are. I don't understand how um changing something from single family residential and adding an additional residence would not be considered a zone change. Okay. Thanks. If I may, I think Grace, come on. We might be one of the only, if not the only major jurisdiction in Nevada that currently does not allow for accessory dwelling units. Um, we've looked at numerous different cases of these, uh, ADUs in different jurisdictions. Um, none of them have considered them a change in zoning. Uh, that's just kind of best practices. They're accessory to the primary unit, so you have to have a primary unit in order to have that ADU. Um so best practices research none of them have considered them zone changes. If this body wanted to um require something above and beyond that's definitely within their your scope. Um it's very very abnormal though. I will say that. Yeah. So it's not a zone change. Correct. Okay. All right. We're going to move on. So go ahead. So just to recap. Yeah. Uh, I had made a motion with um to remove what's in the staff recommendation of a 28-day prohibition on STRs. Take that out. Yes. I had recommended that we adopt the design standards uh approved at planning commission. Got it. I had recommended that we set the setback same as a primary residence which they're different in very few cases but where they are different I think it's important to recognize that it's a living space and the last thing was how do we put people on notice I'd recommended uh mailing a notice uh so I'm looking for a second and then I have a question for you okay um and I mean it's because we just heard from Chris about yeah the noticing do you want to delete that that's I mean I'm fine with that. I just My question to you, Grace, is in all of this research, did you find anybody noticing uh their neighborhoods? No. The only thing I could find was people requiring a discretionary review for some of these. Okay. Um which would go down our noticing pathway, but I can't find anyone noticing building permits. A 30-day review. Some of the jurisdictions. Yes. Yes, in Nevada. Um the WO County actually recently took that out and when we reached out to both Sparks and Wo County to see what their um inflow of ADUs is, they're both averaging about one per year. So, uh county looked at that and just said we're not um you know getting the demand necessary for these. So, they did require it, but they took it out. They took it out. Okay. So, I would delete this mailing a notice. Okay. I mean, I'll second. Okay. So I have a motion. I have a second discussion. Go ahead. Yeah, there was a lot there. Can we kind of Yeah. So we're you've removed the part about noticing and you've removed the part about um that's all I did. Short-term rental. Yeah. So right now our staff and the planning commission recommended that we not allow ADUs to be rented out for less than 28 days. Correct. And you you in your motion took that restriction out. Correct. I was taking it out. Yep. Because I'm reading the council and I think that that's what they support and Okay. Would would there be any kind of future um short-term rental? Yeah. So, let me just mention that. So, we we are planning to bring back STRs. And the one cautionary note here for everyone is we could end up with a a um STR ordinance that doesn't allow ADUs to be rented out or it could uh set other requirements on them at another date. And so people could have the impression we're taking something away. So it's just something to be aware of since we haven't adopted. And I know Mayor, you were very worried about that. That's why you wanted us to bring them together. Do you have I did and I was I'm a little disappointed that didn't happen. Um, but you know that's water under the bridge. We've been doing this a long time. And the hard part is doesn't matter what we do. Even when you're doing it right, you're doing it wrong. I I it's just so hard to please everyone. And so I see both sides um to the argument. And that's where I, you know, was speaking with Tony Harsh and I really commend her um her ability and understanding of, you know, the balance and how hard it is. And I don't love this outcome, but we have to, I think, move forward for clarity and so that it becomes something where um we are moving into the future, you know, um cuz a lot of times um we kind of can stay pretty antiquated. Well, and I'll say why I would support the removing the 28 day. It's two reasons. one, we have existing businesses, and if we're not going to deal with it case by case, then I I don't want to crimp existing businesses. Number two is that um we allow homes to be rented out as STRs. We allow rooms in homes to be rented out as STRs. We would be only saying only this one kind of building structure can you not have a STR in. And I'm I'm nervous about that. It doesn't seem very fair. So, okay. Okay. So, I have a motion and a second. All those in favor say I. I. All those opposed. Motion carries unanimously. Okay. U Madame Clerk, I'm going to send it back to you and we are going to head into item D2. Okay. Okay. Give me one minute. Madame clerk, do you have any public comment for um item D2? Oh, we need to open the public hearing. Oh, sorry. Sorry. No problem. Um hold on one second. Cuz I will have to read a disclosure, too. Okay, madame clerk, uh, let the record reflect that the council is opening the public hearing. Uh, has proper notice been given. Any correspondence received? Uh, this item was properly noticed. And I did want to note that we received correspondence which has been distributed as three letters in support of the regional planning commission's determination of non-conformance with the adopted 2019 Truckucky Meadows Regional Plan. And we do have public commenters, but I don't know if you want to take that before. Yes, I do. But before we do that, I think actually I'm going to read a disclosure. Anyone else have a disclosure? No. Okay, then I'm going to put mine on the record before we take public comment. Sound good, Carl? Okay. Carl's giving me the nod, saying it's okay. All right. Um, fellow city council members and madame clerk, item D2 involves Stonegate. Josh Hicks, an attorney from McDonald Corano, represents Stonegate. In my private life, I have retained Adam Hosmer Henner, a partner at McDonald Corano on a civil matter unrelated to Stonegate and Mr. Hicks. I have sought guidance from the city attorney's office and have advised that I may have a commitment in a private capacity to the interest of McDonald Corono pursuant to NRS2818.065. That said, this item has nothing to do with my civil case whatsoever. Uh to the best of my knowledge, any action I may take today on this item will not have any impact on me or McDonald Corano. I will be participating in this item. Madame Clerk, please accept this disclosure for the record. Sound good? Okay. Um, then I'm going to send it back to you. Public comment. Colin McGinness, followed by Sandy Roth, followed by Wendy Baroli. Hello. Good afternoon, Madame Mayor and members of the Reno City Council. My name is Colin McInness and I am a lifelong Reno resident and an organizer with the Sierra Club Toyota chapter. I'm here today to ask you to vote no on appealing the regional planning commission's decision to reject the Stonegate resoning proposal. The regional planning commission heard hours of unanimous testimony from residents who do not want this to go through. People from the north valleys have made it clear that what they need is housing and public services, not more warehouses and data centers. The members who voted against the resoning request demonstrated that they are willing to listen to community members and to take their valid concerns seriously. I hope the city council will also listen to their citizens and will not vote against the wishes and interests of the community for the sake of developers. We all know that we have limited water resources in our region and are also the fastest heating city in the nation. The Cold Springs area specifically has experienced drought conditions for most of the last 25 years. So water is an absolutely critical resource to consider here along with how its use and importation would affect residents, services, and natural resources. The Western Regional Water Commission and Tamwa are currently working with experts to study the impact of development on the Cold Springs Water Basin. Issues identified by TAMA that need to be evaluated include how much processed waste water can be introduced into the aquifer without creating undesirable shallow groundwater, especially if water is imported into the basin. The likelihood of increased groundwater pumping and/or water importation resulting from the proposed reszoning raises serious concerns about the impacts of local wells, aquafer sustainability, and potential contamination of water resources that this community relies on. It would be irresponsible planning to appeal the regional planning commission's decision until that water study is complete. We have a comprehensive understanding of the effects this could have on the Cold Springs Basin. This is especially true because data centers, an anticipated use of the Stonegate project, can use as much water as 10 to 50,000 households per year, depending on cooling systems and scale. We understand that this agenda item is not about approving any such data center yet. However, voting to appeal would be a step in that direction. I'm asking you to vote against appealing the regional planning commission's decision to reject the Stonegate resoning request. Our city is rapidly growing and development is a part of that. However, we expect that our leaders will make these decisions considering long-term impacts to our natural resources and the people who depend on them and to put communities above corporate interests. Thank you. Um, are we a student? No. No. I did graduate from the University of Nevada Reno. You just what? I did graduate from the University of Nevada Reno. Oh. So, well, good. Okay. Did you reach out to my office? Feel like you might have. Not me, but No, we have as an organization. Well, I know you have, but I was just wondering because I haven't seen you here before. No, not yet. Good job. Oh, thank you. Thanks so much. Okay. Organizer. Oh, there you go. Okay. All right. Sandy Roth, followed by Wendy Baroli, followed by Anton Casano Labard. Okay. Sandy, come on up. Good afternoon. My name is Sandy Roth and I am urging the city council not to seek an appeal of the regional planning commission's determination of non-conform non-conformance for the Stonegate proposal. At the regional meeting, there was standing room only and every single public comment opposed the proposal. And that's for good reason. Water is an absolutely critical resource to consider here, including how its use would affect residences, other businesses, and our services and natural resources. The issues go beyond whether a company has bought a bunch of water rights. The Western Regional Water Commissioner Water Commission and Toma are currently working with experts to study the impact of development on the Cold Springs Water Basement. Issues include how much waste water can be processed. We have seen other cities suffer from a lack of planning when it comes to wastewater. In Arizona, a city is now building, didn't plan for it, a $90 million wastewater plant because of all the waste water from a data center park that has been developing using using evaporative cooling. Other issues identified by Tama that need to be in evaluated include how much processed waste water can be introduced into the aquifer without creating undesirable shallow groundwater, especially if water is imported into the basin. In addition, there needs to be an evaluation of the impact of increased impervious coverage as well as the impact of increased groundwater pumping and the consequent consequent effects on resident residential wells. And there needs to be an evaluation of the likely effect of development on White Lake. Although the water study has begun, it has not been completed. As a result, it seems both reckless and irresponsible to approve this project. This is especially true because data centers which are an anticipated use of the stonegate project can use millions of gallons of water per day. It's not logical to point to small data centers like Apodon or one large one as indicative of how much water will be used. There are data centers being planned today that consume very large amounts of water. For example, Amazon is about to build yet another one. Stonegate is asking for a huge increase in industrial zoning. Even if only 15% of the site is dedicated to data centers, that still amounts to over 250 acres, which is a heck of a lot of data center. As a result, it is not rational to assume that the new sto proposal will will decrease the amount of water consumption and wastewater. A huge increase is a very big possibility. The likelihood of increased groundwater pumping and/or water amputation raises serious concerns about impacts to local wells, aquafer sustainability, and potential contamination. I'm also concerned about fire related issues. Putting aside the doing away with firefighting resources, we need water to to put out the fires that are uniquely caused by data centers and we need to be aware of what will happen to the toxic water runoff. So, we need responsible and fact-based planning with this and decision-m. Thank you. All right. Thank you so much. Wendy Baroli followed by Anton Casano Labard. Okay. On the Zoom earlier. I did. I was um My name is Wendy Baroli. I'm a fourth generation Neadan and um I am here because I thought it was important to show up in public. I apologize for the casual attire. I like it. It's perfect. It's Nevada. It is. So, um I already spoke about my concerns about what occurred with this process and I am here specifically to talk about the fact that your um Reno planning rejected this and then regional planning rejected it and how many residents showed up. It wasn't just a hundred. That was just the last planning meeting. But through the process of going with Stonegate, we in good faith negotiated with them and no one wanted any housing in the North Valleys. The North Valleys is a big no. They always they say no to everything. But we got to a place where we said, you know what, 5,000 houses over the course of time is going to benefit us long term. We're going to have grocery stores. We're going to have some high schools. We're going to have some improvements. We're going to have some infrastructure we can grow into. What they're asking for now is more than you guys maybe don't recognize because you sit behind there and you don't drive out in the north valleys. But every single time that a warehouse is approved, it's not a year down the road or two down two years down the road that that happens. It's in 12 to 16 weeks that those warehouses are going up. And those on wraps and off wraps that are supposed to be improved in the in in in the future aren't scheduled until 2030. So you're talking about increasing a huge huge industrial center in a place that frankly is the last open space that had a plan that would work for the residents and would work for the region and our closed basin. Taking into consideration Stonegate did a great job. I mean they presented us with trails and trees and workforce housing and luxury housing and a long-term plan. And now they're back asking for something that's easy to do because right now housing and building is expensive. But let me tell you what builders and developers do when housing is expensive. They either sell the property or they wait and hold on to it just like the listeners did. They have a beautiful project sitting out there called the the Agrahood, but they're going to wait until the market changes. And I don't think that this council should go against the citizens desire to have something better in that region simply because this particular applicant is very well healed and very well spoken. All right. Thank you. Okay, Madame Clerk. Anton Casano Labard. All right, Anton, come on up. Yeah. Um, I don't know if I need to state my name. You guys already said it. No, you're good. Go ahead. Okay. All right. Um, obviously I'm against this thing. I've been to almost every single thing that they've done with this thing. Um, the amendment, um, to me it changes a lot. So, I'm against the appeal. Obviously, it takes the development from 5,000 homes to 1,300. Most of those will probably be rentals. Um, 15% of the land would be dedicated towards data centers. You know, I don't think anybody out there wants that. um that area. There's plenty of places for data centers. It has consistently and unanimous unanous unanimously had public oppos opposition to this amendment. Nobody in Cold Springs has wanted this. There have been hundreds of people that have showed up to this and said that there's thousands of people that those hundred represent. Um reasons have included housing needs, desire for commercial spaces like stores, environmental concerns, influx of freight, fire risk including removal of a agreement that was provided by the fire protection, availability of water and electricity, so resources, lack of infrastructure, currently traffic concerns, little to no local community outreach, and they've received almost no support from the local community in Cold Springs. This amendment in another case in point and stonegate is being reviewed under the 29 or 2019 regional plan, not the 2024 plan when this amendment was submitted. And if that's wrong, you guys can correct me. Stonegate has done nothing to address or change the public's opinion or or Cold Springs concerns or questions with biased views. They've provided pretty much little to no evidence to their data. They've provided little to no contrast between what they said they'd build and what their amendment is offering. I want to talk about Stonegate's lack of public engagement. They did not hold public workshops. They did not invite the public or the community to review or consider this amendment outside of meetings. They did not talk about what they were going to do like um contribute to fire safety. They did not disclose what or how or why they couldn't build housing any longer. The people spoke at the last event and the people clearly preferred what was agreed upon in 2018, which is more housing, less industry, more community support, and additional resources to the area. Examples: sewage, water, traffic, fire protection, and public safety, protective services in the area. The people want this because the people want to have a place to live in our city. They want a community that can grow with improved residents, overall well-being through increased access to basic necessities, social connections, engagements with amenities like parks, sidewalks, green spaces, and local shops and stores. That's all I got. Okay. Not a big public speaker. Thank you guys. You did great. Honestly, I know it's not easy to get up there and you did you did a good job. Okay. There's no one else signed in. Okay. Thanks so much. Um, okay. I think it's going to be all you. The floor is yours, Jeff. All right. Good afternoon, Madame Mayor, members of the council. Jeff Foster, associate planner for the record. Today, we are considering the RPC conformance review uh process for objecting. So, a little bit of background. Uh this body heard uh the Stonegate master plan uh amendment request on May 21st uh as well as a project of regional signi significance. The council voted four to three in favor of approving that amendment um on August and that amendment is of course subject to conformance review by the regional planning commission. On August 4th, uh the regional planning commission made a determination of nonconformance with the adopted 2019 Truckucky Meadows Regional Plan. Even though Truckucky Meadows Regional Planning Agency staff had recommended approval, the RPC voted 5 to four in favor of a finding of conformance, not non-conformance, but the motion failed because a super majority was required. So, where are we at in terms of the next steps? Per the Nevada Revised Statutes, NRS requires that the city council provide direction to staff on whether or not to file an objection. Specifically, NRS 278.0282 0282 subsection 5 says a local governing body which has submitted a proposed plan and which disagrees with reasons given by the regional planning commission for making a determination of non-conformance may file an objection with the regional planning commission. So just a little bit of color commentary on this staff is not specifically recommending one direction or the other. We're simply bringing this to you as the process that NRS requires. Um, however, staff's analysis has not changed. Our initial recommendation in the staff report has not changed. So, be that be take with that uh what you will. As far as what are the options for the next steps, option number one is if the council directs staff to file an objection, the regional planning commission will consider objection consider the objection and issue its final determination of conformance or non-conformance. That decision can then be appealed to the regional planning governing board as necessary. Option number two is if council directs staff to not file an objection, the developer can appeal the case and then it would then go directly to the regional planning governing board on appeal. So, um just a little bit of background before you choose which option you would like. Um there were four regional planning commissioners that voted against the determination of conformance and their reasons distilled down into three general areas. First, a lack of of information about the pending Western Regional Water Commission water balance study for Cold Springs, and you've heard some commentary on that uh during public comment. Number two, the regional transportation infrastructure is not in place. There may be uncertainty regarding timing or funding for construction of improvements as well as the use of side roads. And number three, meeting the compatibility finding should require taking into consideration the county's envision wo 2040 master plan. Um in the staff report there is analysis in response to these three issues. Um and I can get into that further uh during questioning if you would like. So, where are we at? Pursuant to NRS 278.0282 subsection 5, staff is recommending that council provide direction on whether or not to file an objection with the regional planning commission. If directed to file an objection, this could include any subsequent appeals as necessary of the regional planning commission's determination of non-conformance. So the motion is I move to provide staff direction on filing an objection. And it's again it's either option one or option two. Option number one again is if you direct staff to file an objection, we will file that. Um and we would also request that you provide authorization to subsequently appeal a determination of nonconformance directly to the regional planning governing board. Option number two is again you uh tell us not to file an objection in which case the developers appeal would move forward directly to the regional planning governing board. That's all I have for you. Okay. Thank you so much Jeff. I am going to send it uh to the council member uh to council member Eert. Uh it is your word. I think we're all familiar with this project and where we've been and how we got here. So, I'm just going to send it right to you and Okay. You're more than welcome to give a motion, whatever you want to do. So, Okay. Um, I'd like to talk about it a little bit. I am I do want to make a motion, but I have a question on the appeal process. If council does not um file an appeal on this, has the um Stonegate Group already filed an appeal? Do they require us to file an appeal or is that something they can do on their own? Have they filed an appeal? So, um the process is if we recall that the when we go to the regional planning commission or to TMRPA for a conformance review, the city is the applicant to that body. I understand. So, so um the uh process is we would object if authorized staff would object to the determination of non-conformance um with ideally an authorization to subsequently appeal that final decision. Um so that is the process the applicant it is my understanding that they have filed an appeal already. Um and that was the piece I was looking for if they have already filed an appeal. these slides are very clear on you know what the process would be. I just wasn't sure if they had already filed an appeal and they are here in the room and I'm sure they would be happy to speak to that. Okay. So um I was there that night and I was also there for the Truckucky Meadows Regional Planning Commission meeting prior to that when this item was um pushed back. Um, I take my role as the council person very seriously and I think that we're the um the body that makes sure that we represent the community and balance that with the needs and and the desires of of different developers and builders. Um, with that in mind, I just do not see the necessary infrastructure we need to support um this type of development um with the way they've presented it currently. Um, I think there's very legitimate concerns about water resources, uh, the infrastructure to bring in Tamwa. Um, also only having one, um, access road in and out of that area, I think is, um, a public safety hazard. Um, I know that there was some discussions previously about paving North Virginia up in Cold Springs area. That hasn't happened. I don't know if it'll ever happen, but um due to these reasons and because of just kind of a consistent theme of of not having the necessary infrastructure in that ward, my ward, um I'm not going to be able to support this um request for an appeal. Um it's it's just been um infrastructure comes later is something that we hear all the time and um for the community that lives out there, it's later. So we need to make sure that we have the infrastructure to support um this type of development and not bringing in Toma and using the groundwater there I think can cause a serious um problem for the residents in that community that are currently on um groundwater wells. So um I don't know if anybody else has any comments. Those are my comments. Okay. Thank you so much. All right. Uh council door. Go ahead. Sure. Um um similar to my colleague here um my concern is we're the choice here if I understand it is either we file an objection it goes back to regional planning they re-evaluate the criteria and whether they met the criteria and then it still could be and probably well it could be appealed to the governing board. Correct. Correct. Yes. Okay. And at this point, they already have appealed it. So, if I understand it, uh option two, uh if we direct our staff to not file the objection, then the developer can appeal their case. And you said they already have there. Is that right? That that's the the understanding at this point. Okay. Well, I'm going to come down on the side of option two. And here's why. Um the when it was heard by our planning commission, it it did not pass muster. So they didn't get an approval, however you want to say that. It came to us. We had a very close vote. It was a 4-3. It wasn't a 52. It wasn't a 61. It wasn't a 70. It was a 4-3 vote. So the council was almost evenly split. Uh it went to regional planning and it did require majority and it didn't pass muster there. So it didn't get an affirmative vote there. A regional planning, right? It required a super majority. It was actually 54 in favor of determination of conformance, but it didn't reach it superiority, but it did not reach a super majority. I mean, that's fail, right? I mean, we have that requirement at other boards, too. Um, so we we also heard how much the public is concerned about this project. So, we also have heard from our manager how short staff we are. We just laid off, I believe, six people out of planning. And I guess I'm concerned about putting the extra burden on our own staff to go forward and advocate for this project when the it's the developers project. I'm they're very competent to advocate on their own. And I would rather see them put forward their arguments to regional planning governing board than have our staff take a bunch of time have to go to hearings and advocate on something. You know, if we don't need to I it's been an operative thing. We don't need to. We don't need to. So that's where I am. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Anyone else? Go ahead. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Thank you for the um presentation. I if you don't mind, I'd like to get the applicants representative or attorney up here because I want to make sure I am understanding what I'm going to be voting on. And I the way I understand it isn't necessarily the merits of the project or the findings. So, I need some clarification. So, Councilwoman Der mentioned last time that this council was was a close vote. Um, I was on the affirmative side of that. So, why would I vote differently now? What what would something have had to change? Um, and I also want to protect the city as far as legal challenges moving forward if we were to not say we want to appeal this. What would be the next steps as far as like what does that look like for the city of Reno? Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Taylor. This is Josh Hicks for the record. I'm at McDonald Corono. I'm representing Stonegate and good afternoon to all of you. So, thank you for the question. I the process. We are here today because of the we're on a process question. This is not a redo of the merits of the application. It's how do we move forward on the process. So, the process that's set forth in state statute is a little bit unusual and I think it's important that the council fully understand it because um option two up there, I don't want there to be a misunderstanding that that's the ideal or easy or usual option because it is not. So, when you look at how regional planning commission decisions are appealed, you have to start with what Mr. Foster talked about that the city is the applicant, not Stonegate. Um, if Stonegate were the applicant, we would have been the applicant, but that's not the way the statute is written. So, we don't have a we don't have a decision point to say city staff resources. We don't have those. Stonegate, you go to do the appeal. We are the applicant. You have to do it because of state. Yes, ma'am. You are the city is the applicant. And that's the way the statute's lined up. Now, what the statute says is that if an if the applicant the city disagrees with the regional planning commission decision, they have the right to file an objection. So there I should say there are two people there are two entities that can file that objection. The city as the applicant or what's called an affected entity under the statute. Now it's what's important to note is affected entity is a defined term in statute. It does not include stonegate. It's utilities. It's um wastewater pro you know it's it's solid waste providers franchise holders. It's not stonegate. So stonegate so you couldn't file the appeal if you wanted to. We could stonegate cannot appeal under the statute. Okay. So the appeal that we're talking about on option two is an appeal that is created under T uh regional planning regulations. That's the same kind of appeal that the general public would have to file an appeal. So if you go that route, it takes things out of the usual procedure and the usual course. And that creates, I think, some serious procedural confusion for the city because now you have an applicant who has not filed an objection, but you have an appeal to the council and it calls into question what is the role of the city at that point. And as far as I know, that has never been done. So, I just want to make it clear that this appeal of option two um is not the preferred course. Um, it will cause procedural confusion. Um, and it will, I think, actually burden the staff even more because it will put them in an awkward position of are they supporting the council's 43 decision on this or are they not. Okay. So, I'll probably have more questions, but I don't want to be. I hope that answered your question. It does. Thank you. Mr. Hicks, don't go away. So I I want you to clearly articulate what the practical implications of procedural confusion are. Uh thank you council because otherwise that's meaningless. So the the usual as I was mentioning the the usual procedure is that the applicant will actually file the objection and proceed through the normal course which means going back to the planning regional planning commission and at that case any party can appeal it up to the regional governing board. So that's the normal process. The procedural confusion would be if the applicant is not filing the objection, you're no longer under the statute. you're now operating kind of in a um different area kind of an unprecedented area of appeals. Okay. So, let me just see if my if my non-legal brain is following you. So, if we were to go with what you have stated is not the preferred option number two in your opinion, it's going to cause procedural confusion. If we decide not to object, project dies as a as the city is the applicant and now you become the appealer to the governing board. Correct. I I would not say the project dies. Okay. That's what I'm wondering. Why did why does it matter? The appeal proceeds up to the governing board, but the role of the city is now in question. So why does that matter? I need to know why. Because it's outside of the usual course. Usually the city in statute contemplates that the city would be the applicant and that the city would be presenting this. And I don't want there to be any confusion that this means Stonegate is not um advocating for this project. It is um Stonegate testified and provided a presentation at regional planning. It will again u and Stonegate will advocate for things that the city is not going to advocate for. The city is really just looking at defending the 43 decision that was already made and looking at whether the regional planning commission um got that right in terms of their findings. Okay, Councilman Ree, I don't know if you have any questions. I I wanted to ask our legal counsel, uh Mr. Shipman or Mr. Paul to weigh in here because obviously I was on the 43 side of the original decision which then landed in the regional planning commission. I I did uh pay attention to and watch the regional planning commission's discussion and I I'm not sure I agreed with it, but I I don't understand the procedural nature of this uh decision. Yeah, for for the record, uh, John Shipman from the city attorney's office. I generally agree with Mr. Pix's um um analysis in in terms of the affected entity piece. That was that's a little different than I understood it, but going back I I am reviewing it. So, I think what what's before the what's before the board today is that you can um go go back and ask for reconsideration in the form of this object objection based upon what staff has provided. Um or you can um appeal the decision would be the second point of that and that would go directly to the um regional governing board. Or um you could not appeal and then we're in a uh kind of a an area that Mr. Hicks, I would agree. It's kind of unprecedented in the sense of we haven't seen that happen in the in the past where where the um the the governing like a city has walked away from an appeal. Um but that's potentially some that's potentially an option too. So um does that assist you? Well, I'm not sure it's entirely answered the question. Is there Miss the vice mayor had asked um is there a legal risk to the city? Right. I it would seem to me that the uh most correct legal course of action is for the four individuals who voted for the original project to say yes, they believe their decision was correct and that the regional planning commission decision is contrary to its decision and therefore we would appeal it. Is there some legal reason why that's not the case? No. No, I generally would agree with that. I mean the safest course um you know would be to continue with the course that the council has already right which the majority has done. Now Miss Derer posited and I'll ask you this question that there was somehow like an allocation of staff resources that is required is is this a legal issue? That's not a legal issue per se. I mean there's probably some nominal staff involvement going forward. Um but well I think um my prior colleague on the body would often say what the city council has voted on it has voted on and that is the decision right and so um I think Miss Burkus's words are true in this case as well that the decision of this body was a 43 decision to support the stonegate changes and so that will be the same decision I arrive at conclude is the appropriate legal Okay. Um, Madame Mayor, one more. Oh, go ahead. Thanks so much. Appreciate it. Martinez, uh, Mr. Foster, I had a quick question for you. In your time with the city, how often have we been in this position where we have to have the decision whether or not to appeal a decision from the regional planning commission on a conformance review. Um it has only happened one time in the last several years to my knowledge. Uh so it's it's not this is a very infrequent process that we even have to go to the regional planning agency. It's even of course more infrequent that this type of scenario comes up. So yes, it's uh not not a lot of precedent. So it sounds like as you mentioned there isn't a lot of presidents and the process which is defined in state statutes allows for the opportunity for uh us to make that determination whether we want to appeal uh to the planning comm the regional planning commission or not. I despite my last vote, I am concerned about presenting the same information to the same planning commission and it resulting in similar results and ultimately there's still having to be an appeal to the regional governing board that has to take place regardless of whether or not we decide to support staff moving forward with the appeal or not. And in the way that I am reading the revised statute 278.0282 section subsection 6, it does mention that within 45 days after receipt of the appeal, the governing board shall consider that appeal and it it issue its decision which must be made by the affirmative votes of a simple majority of its total membership. If the board affirms the determination of the commission, the affected entity or local governing board shall within 60 days after the issuance of the decision proposed revisions to the plan and resubmit that plan together with those proposed revisions to the commission for review in accordance with the provisions of the section, which to me would allow for the opportunity for there to be other factors that the planning commission or the governmenting board could look at to make a different determination. I am just concerned with doing a round two with the regional planning commission and it resulting in the same thing and the appeal ultimately having to take place regardless of our decision here. Would you like any thoughts on that or Okay. All right. Um so the uh I think what just in a general sense this is the process. So um and and the process is clear in statute uh about going back to the regional planning commission. So in in the state's infinite wisdom at some point in time they figured that this was the best way to to go so to send it back to the regional planning commission. I would also point out that that there is analysis in the staff report uh before you that does respond to uh the various concerns that the four regional planning commissioners had. So, I'm not sure that it's exactly the same presentation or the same analysis that they would be considering. I I do believe that there's the potential that the additional information that would come forth at that time could uh uh be brought to bear on some of those four planning commissioners decisions. Thank you. Yeah. Um I just wanted to share that Stonegate did have some community meetings. Um, I know that it's it's hard to um let everybody know about these meetings, but they did. Um, I went to two out of three of them. There was at least 40 people that attended both of them. Um, it was also unanimous there that people were not in support of these changes. Um, and I was really disappointed, I've mentioned this before, to see that Stonegate not make any changes based off of community feedback, my feedback. um es especially with them um taking the time to have these community meetings. So, I'm just really disappointed in that. Um I also still have concerns about using the city's limited resources to file an appeal when the developer can file their appeal on their own, whether they have or haven't yet. Um we shouldn't let you know procedural guidelines dictate how we should vote on it. And I agree with Council Member Martinez that and Council Member Ree that, you know, if we're to expect the same vote here, why wouldn't we expect the same vote there? It's it's the same body hearing the same project twice. Um I sincerely doubt that the people that voted no are going to feel satisfied with the road access we have now. Um so I just want to um say that I'm I'm ready to make a motion. I don't know if anybody else has anything to say, but um oh, one more question. Is this technically an appeal or would this be a request for reconsideration by the body? So, the per uh NRS statute, it's called an objection. So, the the appeal would be the one that goes to the regional planning governing board. This would be an objection. It's it's a matter of semantics. So, this is just it would be a rejection and it would still be appealed to the regional governing board regardless, right? It sounds like there is a process for that. There is a process, but the the uh regional planning commission if staff objects, which is a simple memo. There's this is not a inordinate or inordinate amount of time spent preparing a memo. Um but if staff objects based on your direction, then it would go to the regional planning commission and they could make a determination of conformance in which case it would then of course not be appealed automatically to the regional planning governing board. Mhm. But if they make a determination of nonconformance, then what staff is requesting is that your motion today then allow us to automatically appeal it to the regional planning governing board versus having to come back to you for another authorization. And that was the precedent that was established on previous situations where we've brought to your point uh commissioner um regarding the how frequency this how frequent this comes up. It doesn't come up all that frequently, but the process has been in the past that we seek your approval to automatically appeal a finding of non-conform. Okay. Well, um I I think that this project would benefit by making some accommodations um based off of community feedback. The community has shown that they're willing to work on this. They were a huge part of the process for the PUB. Um I think it's a shame that they weren't um involved more in this change. Um, so I'm gonna go ahead and make an uh a motion. Do you mind can we do more another round of comments? Okay. Okay. I just I needed a little bit more clarifications. One second. Sorry. Yeah. I was just wait I just didn't want a hot mic moment for everybody to discuss later over cocktails. Okay. Go ahead. So I just want clarification. I'm going to go to vice mayor. Okay. Thank you. On the audience. So it's really the audience is what I'm s we get in front of whether we make one decision or the other decision. And I just want to make sure I'm understanding this correctly. If we do file object an objection then it goes up back to the regional planning commission. Right? That's the audience that the applicant or is it the city is going to go back and is our burden to to provide information that would have the planning commission make a confirming or non-confirming decision. Correct? So, it's the audience. If we chose number two to not file an objection, then the applicant becomes the developer and they go directly to the governing board and they bypass the the committee that actually voted to non-conform. Yes. My question to you is which one of those audiences do you prefer? It's not about the audience that I prefer. I mean to the point of we're going to have the same vote again. So it go a different Let me reframe. Let me rephrase that question. What gives you um and your community the best opportunity to work with the applicant, which if it wasn't the city, the actual developer to make any of these changes that you're requesting? Well, I did um speak with legal about this about, you know, could we make changes at this point in the process and we can't because it's already like gone through these things. Um, the best opportunity for my community is for them to go through the process, take feedback, make changes based off of that. Um, I think that going to the same body again is going to get the same results. If it's going to go anywhere, I think it should go to a different body. That's like the final decision on it. Um, personally, but um, you know, I'm really just want them to be good community members and take feedback and and make changes. because I think that's something that could have been done with specific requests for changes with the P uh PUB instead of just throwing it all out. Um, and I think that's where a lot of the frustration comes from from the community out there that it it goes from a very specific plan to a lot of uncertainty. But the only thing we do know is we don't have a lot of water in the basin. We don't have a lot of access points. And until that's something that's changed or maintained in the PUB that we keep that Toma infrastructure, there's just too much uncertainty for the community as it stands. Okay. Thank you for that clarification. Thank you. Again, I'm going to ask the question again, but I'm going to ask it in a different way, and whoever our legal team, your legal team can answer it. The city of Reno had a 4-3 vote. What is the risk to the city of Reno if we change that vote moving forward? What what does that look like as far as precedent? Is there a risk to the city? Does it matter? Because I didn't hear you say anything like this is a big deal. It's not a big deal if the vote changes. And then my other concern is if it does go back to regional planning commission, I think based on all of the materials that I heard that some of those reasoning from the planning commissions weren't even pertinent to the findings that they were supposed to be making. So some commissioners said they don't, you know, like the land use of data centers. That was not what they were supposed to be looking at. The city of Reno will determine what the land use is going to be at that time. So that's not what we're talking about right now. We will make that decision. So what is the risk to the city if we don't approve this? Okay. So yeah, from from a starting point, what what the statute gives is the ability for the city to appeal. So I just want to start with that. So you don't have to appeal whatever happens, but you have you have the ability to determine whether to appeal or not. So I want to start with that. But if no information, no new information has presented to this body, why would we change our vote? Uh, well, I would maybe differ on I think new information has been presented to the body in the form of the staff report that's in front of you that addresses the critiques, the RPC. So essentially what you're doing today is you're augmenting the record that the regional planning commission. So how important is that record, Jonathan? That's what I'm trying to get at you saying that we're going to mess up the president. We're going to mess up what does that mean? Yeah. So, and from a land use standpoint, as we know, I mean, we make determinations or the council makes a determination on a on a land use item. Um, the record is critical to everything. The record is what will go to a court potentially if it gets appealed for a judicial review. Um, that a court will decide whether or not the city did the reasonable thing, did the thing that was, you know, there was substantial evidence in the record. Um so what what again what the importance of that is is this is the same process but kind of going up through a regional body as well. So what you have in front of you today is kind of the feedback that staff has relative to the comments that the RPC made that you're taking issue with and that'll supplement the record and then but you as a body have the ability a number one to send it back and object or reconsider however you want to and and force the RPC to deal with those talking points um and make their record. um or you have the ability to appeal directly to the re to the to the governing board. Um I think at the end of the day um you know I as an attorney we like to see a full record that has everything in it. And so you know we'd like I mean that would be to lower the risk of a court deciding that what the city did was arbitrary and capriccious. um you know having your reasons in there like the staff report and things that you say today um is important to lower the city's risk if that's helpful. It is. Thank you. Y okay. Uh go right ahead and um just to be clear. So it's it's not I want to characterize this. It's it's not um we always do it this way. First of all, Jeeoff, you said it's happened one time in your tenure, right? Before. Maybe it's happened one time in someone else's tenure before you, but it's not a regular occurrence and there is no regular answer. I mean, we have to give our answer based on the facts in front of us each time. Otherwise, we wouldn't even be asked this question. I mean, it would just be automatic. We would just automatically the process would be different. Um, so we're being asked a real question. Do we want to um file an objection and go back in front of the planning commission and rehear it? And now that we heard what the objections are, we get to uh add all this other information in. I mean, it is that it's like a second shot at the apple, I guess. I mean, the application is what the application is. And whether the developer appeals or the public appeals because so many people have objected probably will be an appeal there, too. Um it's just whether we're going to be involved and and our staff are going to argue the objection and argue these findings of facts and so on or whether we're leaving it to the developers. So we're a we're being asked a question yes no. It's not like a fake question like we automatically do something. We're asking a real question. There is no really regular answer. It happens so infrequently. And in this case I'd rather that developer carry their case. They feel passionate about their project. Let them let them go do their thing. So, I thought we would have staff involved either way. Did I miss that? Would staff be involved in the process either way? Because I want to make sure I understand. On one hand, they're arguing the case at the regional planning commission, right? Well, Jeff said that it wasn't intense. I'm just making sure I hear. So, it's a good question. So, to to to clarify, um, if if it if it goes through the normal process, the normal which is option number one. Okay. the the normal process as outlined by statute which says go back to the regional planning commission. Well, it doesn't really say that gives us a choice, doesn't it? It it's a choice to make that, but the process that's the if you make that choice, that's what happens. There you go. If it goes to regional planning commission, if you make that choice, so uh staff would then of course continue to be part of the process. Okay. And it's a minor amount to submit the memo and then it's a going to the hearing right? Okay. But you're the arguing at the hearing. Yes. So what what is unknown as uh Mr. Hicks pointed out uh earlier in response to your questions, Council Member Taylor, is what does that process look like if you pursue option number two? And the answer is we don't know. So it's not like we're saying option one, staff, you have to work on this. Option two, no staff work on that. We just don't know. I want to be clear when I'm assigning resources. It is unknown what staff's involvement would be if if if the applicant or sorry the developer uh because again the applicant is currently the city if the developer appeals directly to the regional planning governing board because that's a process that hasn't there's no really precedent according I just want to make sure involment all right um counciloman I'm going to send it back to you counciloman I yeah um I would like to um take option two and make a motion to not file an objection um considering the developer can and likely will if they haven't already file an appeal to the Truckucky Meadows Regional Governing Board. Okay, I'll second. So, I have a motion. I have a second. All those in favor say I. No, go ahead. Sorry. Discussion. Go right ahead. Okay. Um, Councilwoman Eert, I am prepared to support your motion. I just want to get on the record that nothing has changed from my original affirmative vote. The information that came forward doesn't material materially change my my vote affirmation for the project originally. I am supporting you and your community in the way that you would like us to move forward this way. I just want to make sure that the record reflects that I did not find anything in this additional staff report that would have changed my original vote. I just want to make sure that you know that that's clear. Thank you. Okay. All right. Thank you. Okay. So, I have a motion. I have a second. All those in favor say I. I. All those opposed. Motion. Uh motion carries. I'm going to send it back to you, Madam Clerk, for roll call. Vice Mayor Taylor. No. Council member Derer. I. Council member Martinez. I. Council member Eert. I. Council member Reese. I. Council member Anderson. I. Carries unanimously. 61 or sorry 61. And And um and I'm a yes. Yes. Oh, sorry. I did skip you, Mayor. She Sorry. I'm an I. I did skip you. Uhhuh. Okay. Uh then um motion passes. Okay. Thank you. All right. I'm going to ask everyone to get up for uh we're going to take actually a 10-minute break. Um I need everyone to get something to eat and then we're going to wrap up the rest of this council meeting. But it I think we all feel better when we get up and move our legs. We're only halfway done. Well, no. No. No. We're going to be I never see it. I never Absolutely. They come from the helicopter. I'm going to call this meeting back to order. Madame clerk, thank you so much. Okay, we are now heading into item C3 and um I am really excited for this presentation. Do we have any public comment for item um C3? Uh no. This item is for discussion only. Okay, great. So, we have Chief Nance here with um the most incredible with I think one of the most incredible um initiatives that we do at the city and we have the most team. Um, I'm I'm really excited for this presentation because I don't think we have ever had a most presentation and it's so important now more than ever, but um I'm going to let you girls have the floor. Take it away. Really quick, I just need to note for the record that we're reconvening at 4:20. Um, and council member Reese is not present. Okay, sounds good. Okay. So, about what we do with our most team to Christy Butler to really talk about uh what we do and and the nitty-gritty of it, then we can answer all the questions you have, too. Uh, as you said, we have a phenomenal program. We really do have something that's very unique that works really well within our city. And one of the the things to keep in mind with this is unlike some other programs uh our program is funded by our city. It's something that that uh the council uh puts forward in our budget. It's something that we feel is necessary to have and that gives us a lot of lat uh latitude and freedom on how we deploy and how we use those resources. Some other places have other constraints that we don't have as big. So, we're really excited about what we have because we can always uh switch and change and and use people as we need them and then really adapt our program to what's happening currently and in the moment and that I think is the most important part of it. Um we have a mission statement with our mobile outreach safety team is what MO stands for and uh it's really committed to partnering with our department, city, regional partners and private entities to create a safe city by providing the highest level of police police and mental health services and it's really a collaborative effort and I think that's really important. You're going to hear a lot more about that. Uh the most teams assigned uh to our support services they work under um they work with CAO very closely the community action and outreach. Those are a lot of our uh our our MET teams, so our mobile engagement teams, the people that you see walking around, people that help with clean and safe and cleanups, just a lot of different things that kind of fall into that bucket, but it's assigned to a C lieutenant, which is currently Lieutenant Johnson, and Captain Howard is the captain that oversees it. So, we have a really good team here that rounds out everything that we do. Um, and so for us, it's really about how we deploy. is a unique deployment model to make sure that we capture everything we need. So during the dayshift times you'll see a most clinician with with a officer. So a most clinician will be with a police officer and they're doing follow-ups. They can provide support to police personnel as it comes in. And then on the swing shift hours they self-deploy which means that they can look at where are the needs that are happening listening to the radio where does where do officers need the most and then also do that followup that might have come in and then overnight or the night before when they can reach out to people that need help. So we have two different approaches that work really well for us and we also like I said we can adapt and change. So it's efficiency, flexibility and making sure that we're making sure that we get the community the timely mental health support that we need. And at that point, I'm gonna turn it over to Christy Butler to talk about some of the responsibilities. All right. All right. Which one here? Oh, sweet. So, we have uh three clinicians and myself. I'm also a clinician and these are our hours of when we are in operation. So, we currently are have three shifts covered during the week. Um they we are going to switch our shifts. We have um Wednesday to Saturday swing shift covered right now and we are going to currently change that from Sunday to Wednesday swing shift and so Wednesday to Saturday in the evenings will not be covered. So this is kind of what our responsibilities are. So we respond with officers to calls. We um like chief was saying, our dayshift clinicians ride with an officer, but then our swing shift and dayshift when we do do not have an officer. They are able to go to the calls themselves in city- owned vehicles and respond when officers request them through dispatch. So, they are never on scene without law enforcement there, and that's for their safety. Um so, we conduct welfare checks. We try and do crisis deescalation and risk assessments. And the main goal is to connect our individuals with the resources that they need. Um, okay. So, more responsibilities are supporting our officers on scene. So, we want to be that resource for law enforcement. So, one of the things that is amazing having a clinician on scene is that they learn from us. They learn our verbiage and they learn about resources in the community, which is awesome. Um we also participate in collaborative diversion efforts within the community. We are part of uh competency court, mental health court. We try and give our the information from um our experiences with the individuals in the community to those court systems so that they can better serve them as well. Um we also are part of the crisis intervention training. So all of the new officers that that are in the academy, we have a big role in trying to educate them about resources in our community as well as crisis deescalation. So for last year, uh the most team had almost 3,000 contacts. Out of 3,000 contacts, we only did 198 mental health crisis holds. That's all. So when mo the most team does a crisis hold on these individuals it's serious. It means we are very concerned about their well-being. We had 119 of those were suicidal, 73 were for self-care and six were for homicidal. Uh the majority now of our contacts are almost by phone. And that is and the chief will be able to explain this a little better. the difference in our response to suicidal calls. So, our team does a lot of that by phone now. Is that normal? Is that like are you supposed to do it that way? Yeah, I can touch on this a little bit. So, I mean, that just seems weird. So, well, we did we did a lot of work around how um law and so like we said, this is a partnership between law enforcement and our clinicians. And one of the things that we really worked hard on is um ensuring that when we respond to a call of a suicidal subject, especially a subject that is maybe alone, so they're not threatening harm to other people, there's nobody else in the house. It's them by themselves. Uh, a lot of research and studies have found that if you have a violent confrontation with that person, with law enforcement, we can force a a violent interaction by by being the ones that are confronting that person in their time of crisis in need, especially if they're in a place where they're alone and armed. Um, and that's not something that we want to do. And that's called, you know, we told you that we hear the term suicide by cop. And so it's an opportunity sometimes for suicidal people to create that interaction that they know will end in the officers shooting them. And our goal is not to uh push somebody into a suicide or create a violent interaction. We want to save our officers to not have to be into that situation. One, and two, we want to provide that help if needed. But a lot of times those calls are done by people that are in crisis in the moment, but they also maybe have drugs on board or alcohol on board. And so reasoning with them in that time, we do try and we will we'll work through it. But if we can't get to them in that moment, we then follow up the next day. So maybe it's a call where a person's alone in their house, they're saying they're suicidal. We feel that if we go there that nobody else is in danger, we're going to we're going to push that violent interaction to a point that isn't going to be safe for the officers or that person. That's where the most clinicians are able to follow up the follow up the following day with that person by phone and say, "Hey, what's going on? What help do you need? where are you at now? And then provide those extra resources. So, it's a change in how we've done our um our respond to suic our response to suicidal subjects. But by having the most clinicians aware of everything that we're doing, we don't let any of those calls slip through the cracks. We can then follow up with them when they're in a place where they're more apt or able to receive that treatment and that care, but they're not um maybe in that in that crisis mode right then. And so that's why we see with the total contacts by the phone ones that are done, we've not forced a violent interaction, we're able to follow up with them the next day and then say, "Hey, what kind of resources do you have?" So it's that secondary care space. I just I mean I'm I it it sounds a little weird, but it sounds weird, but then it makes sense because I think people in time of crisis can feel very threatened and then that can make it worse. So and we don't know what the exact intentions are and we don't want to force that violent interaction. So that's the real goal there is to make sure that we're still reaching people. We're still providing all of the care that's needed, but we're doing it in a time and a space that makes the most sense for their care. And again, we can always adapt and we still do respond to those calls if needed. Okay. Um I'm sorry, Christie, go ahead. I bet you we're not finished. Are you go ahead if you're up next? So sorry. The future goals of most So I'm not next we'll follow questions. So the future goals, what are we looking at? Uh what's our goal of of expanding this into the pro the program? So obviously our our goals are always to continue to expand the program to provide more coverage and care as we can. Um so we do have long-term plans and build out that when financially we're able to we will we can add into the the additional case workers. We can add into additional clinicians and do more in-depth case management. Uh but one of the things I'm really excited about and you're going to hear more about this come October. We've been working really hard on a voluntary mental health registry. Um, and that's an opportunity for people in our community to say, um, I have a, and a good example of this would be, um, I have a a parent that has dementia, or they might wander away from their home, or they might not know who they are. Maybe they call the police frequently. The loved one for this person can put their name and information into a mental health registry for us. It's completely voluntary. It's not the police putting the information in. it's either the person themselves or a loved one of the person or a caretaker to say this is what was needed when you respond to that call for service. So, we're really excited to do that. It's really uh been shown in other communities for maybe non-verbal autistic uh a person that's non-verbal artistic autistic for them to put that in the system so when the officers go, they know what they're dealing with when they get there. If it's a person that threatened suicide in the past, we know what we're responding to and gives us some additional information. So that roll out's going to happen in October. It's really new to our community. It's new for the uh organization. I'm very excited for that. Uh we've uh Christy and the team have done a lot of work on how to make that successful. And then always adding and expanding hours and support for the needs of the community and then adding in additional case worker assigns to programs to make sure that we're doing that. And we didn't touch on it and I think you can talking about um our work with the other uh teams that provide mental health uh work in the county. I think you can touch on that a little bit more uh also on what we're doing and making sure that we're uh touching all of that and making sure we're working very well together. I'm really disappointed. I don't think the council knows the background the story here. And what I mean um by this is um Christie, it looked very different. Uh the newer members probably don't realize that at one time everyone was sort of rowing in the same direction. Yes. Can you talk a little bit what it looked like then, what it looks like now? And the reason why it's super important. This is your space. You know it really, really well. She is an expert. Um, everyone sings your praises like nobody's business. And because my goal is to make it better. Um, I think we are actually maybe making things a little more difficult. And then at the end, I'll I'll tell everyone why to circle back. um that I would like their support on this mental health initiative. But go ahead Christie and give them a little bit of background please. So when I first started it was back in 2011 2012 we were under a state grant. So there were three of us for the entire county. Then we transitioned with the help of Sheila Leslie from the state to Wo County Human Services. Yeah. We worked hard. Yes. And so it was also under a grant. So at that time I had four clinicians, a case manager and myself. We still supported all three law enforcement agencies. So I would have one clinician on at a time sharing between each law enforcement agency. Sparks PD said, "I'm not sharing anymore." So they got funding to get their own MOS team. RPD said, "No, we're not sharing anymore. We want to have a clinician full-time." So, they got their funding. And then the county grant is now with Wo County Sheriff's Office. So, each department has their own MOST team and each department is run a little differently. It's very fragmented. And this honestly, this is a mental health initiative. It should be entirely under the county under your super supervision. explain to me the structure now that you have at Reno Police. I I think that has changed. Um there were we've had a couple of incidences and I Chief Nance, I can't remember if you were there, but JW was, but we've um where we have had an um certain individuals really challenging and it's changed um to what it was, which does concern me um because I think you're a little bit limited um based on the structure. So talk a little bit about about that. Well, I think so for us, we we our jurisdiction is the city of Reno and with each each most team, we are limited by our jurisdiction, but the city of Reno has the most calls for service. Our lovely downtown has a lot of calls that the most responds to. Um, our model is a little different from my experience riding with law enforcement. I would be with patrol and we're driving down the road, maybe going to a call and then there's a traffic accident and that officer has to deal with a traffic accident and I would sit in the car or I would help needed. Yeah. Um, we all wore uniforms. I would wear a vest. I'd have a uniform on and I would take 5 to 10 minutes explaining to the person in crisis, I swear I'm not law enforcement. Look, I'm really I'm not law enforcement. Yeah. You know, I'm a therapist. Right. So, um I was lucky enough to be able to when I started with RPD let them or have them allow us to not wear uniforms. So, we are the only team that does not wear uniforms. So, when we go on calls, that's why the officers are with us. and if it's a critical incident, they have a vest with them if they need it. Um, and they're able to deploy themselves. So, that limits them being stuck with patrol on calls that they shouldn't be on and they're able to handle any call. And then as soon as we're done with that call, they're able to go to another call and manage that call. Um, and the reason I ask and I I want that I would like for let me ask one question. This is going to be really important. How much of or how much of this is related also do you see to um opioid use drug use? Can you give me It's a It's significant. It's significant. Very. Yes. Yeah. Yes. So, drug use is a huge problem that we encounter. Um, and the problem is that lots of times that substance use mimics mental health. And so, determining the appropriate resources, it can be difficult at times. Mhm. And the reason I asked that, and I will have JW look at it, but I would like to allocate um our opioid funds to getting another clinician for you. I think there needs to be um a conversation with the county because we're continuing to be fragmented where it and I I mean, I thought it worked really well when everyone was together, cohesive, we were building mental health as a priority. Now we have fragmented it again. I mean we go up like this and we go down like this. It's constant. Um and it seems to be always on the back burner and it I mean it this should be a wakeup call to cities across America that this should be the number one priority to invest in to fund every step of the way because I'm sure most of your calls Chief Nance are um most of them mental illness and addiction a lot of them. And so I would just like to ask um the the council for support to allocate. Now listen, here's the problem. You may you might get those funds, you might not. And with that being said, that means that you might not be able to afford that person. We could afford to do it one year. And that means every year you're going to have to come back. Now, we should they should trickle in. And I think we can do a set aside. But that's what worries me the most is not having enough resources. I think there's a long-term discussion here with the county on how we deploy mental health services because we're going to continue to pay for it. But that's what those funds are directly related to. The other thing is I would say they would also stipulate on making sure um Christie that you're the you are the oversight uh because officers and clinicians are very very different and you're both working together. But I think it always has been from what I remember that you um you know I think it has to be separate but also in your purview because I think now the way it is do you have um a a police officer is Howard. Who is it? Captain Howard. Yeah. Who do you report to? I report to Lieutenant Johnson. Okay. I would like her to report directly to you. um because I think that we could do a much better job of figuring out what the biggest priorities are when it comes to using this money um getting another body for you. Um and the thing that frustrates me is mental health is not 9 to5 and we treat it like it is. It's 247. But it could really really help. And the reason I know this is we have been involved in some very complicated cases recently and I have been frustrated with the lack of resources that we have and that again broader discussion with the county. But if we have the opportunity to have these funds to go to that it would be um probably a very very wise decision. So I would like to point out if that we do work closely with the othermost teams. We talk with them. engage with them. Um, we try and meet monthly for what we call familiar voices. So, we do have our familiar voices that maybe downtown Reno, but then go to Sparks for a little bit, go to county for a little bit, especially at the jail. The clinicians up there with the MOS team are engaged um in the jail a lot more now. And so, we send them a lot of emails saying, "Hey, we have this person coming up. This is what we're thinking. This is this is their family member who's very concerned about them." And give them that information. So, we do all try and collaborate. um and do the best that we can, especially with the individuals that cross each jurisdiction. And I'm grateful that you that you guys all work together. I just, you know, Health and Human Services is under the county and they typically don't want to pay or continue to skirt um their responsibility. They should wake up and look at the national news. things are bad and we need to invest in it and um our community will continue to be at risk if we allow people um to continue to and here's why I say this. I've been in many uh police chiefs meetings and let me just tell you the problem is that we continue to let repeat offenders out onto the streets and that means that all we've done is stress and strain our police department. And you know what they do? They go like this over and over and over and over again. And so um I I just have to tell you I I just don't have any tolerance for it anymore. And uh we're I I'm I'm gonna bring an initiative to this council and we'll see where it goes, but I'm going to be pretty vocal about it because um I the way that this is fragmented, rolled out. Uh it's as if mental health, you know, doesn't exist. Um it's I don't know if it's because it's got such a stigma, but uh you can't bury your head in the sand anymore. So, I'm going to be pushing to make sure that the county does pay uh for mental health services. They get the money for that. I hope everyone understands when that money comes to the state, it gets funneled to the county. We never see it. And that's problematic. And I I'm tired of our police being stressed and strained over and over and over again because they have a job to protect our citizens. So, anyway, I'll get off my soap box. That's why I wanted the most here. so everyone could understand their role, how this works, um how under bunded underresourced uh they really are. If I could just add, I think I I think it's important. I I agree with everything you're saying as far as where where we need the support the most. Um, and we are never going to not have a need to have our most team and our clinicians with us and respond to calls because there's always going to be in the- moment crisis where we are feeling overburdened. Um, and I and I think that that Christie can attest to this is the people that we we work really hard to get them help or to get them through a place and then they're back in maybe even a worse state ever because of what we're dealing with. So, we will always need this mental health clinician collaboration that we have. And I I think that we have and you've identified a few of the things. I think you maybe downplayed it a little bit on some of the things that you guys do so well is the need for them to be present to be able to be in that moment to deal with that crisis intervention, which is what they're the absolute best at where officers need their help is them showing up looking like a clinician, being ready to provide that support, being ready to be there in the moment. where the failures come from is not from them or from the police department. It's from that repeat offender place where offender maybe isn't the right word, but that person that needs that significant mental health help from either after being involved in a criminal act or being taken into a custody and in a behavioral health center for a significant hold and then they're out before they're really truly ready to be uh functioning in our society. And that's where we we struggle the most with. That's where we see the most violent interactions with and that's where we see the most dangerous people. But we're going to always need our most clinicians to be there with us to be able to help us respond to those calls. Having them there more is the goal. Having more of them there and present and able to respond is the need. Um because one of their jobs is also to help train us to help train the law enforcement officers to be more effective in their response. And uh then that takes some time. We there's a it's a big department. It takes a lot of time for training and so we do need more people. We need more help. Um but I am very proud of the program that we have here that we've built that is different than our other local law law enforcement partners and I want to continue this while still working with them and I think we're doing a really good job of um Okay, last but not least, this is a band-aid 100%. This is a band-aid. Yep. Right. Because really, what's the long-term solution? The long-term solution is investing in long-term care. There are people that are living on our streets that should never might never ever be able to live in society and are going untreated and then it puts the rest of the community at risk and then it's this cycle and it's no wonder police are burnt out, right? It's just it's this constant cycle. So, it's incredibly frustrating and I and I'm sad to say we need a long-term plan with counties and federal governments to build those facilities to make sure um that you know because otherwise it's just like this but also accountability too with our judicial system, right? So, we've talked about this and um we're very frustrated. We're we're working on it, but I just I just think if there's one place that we can spend some of this opioid money, it should be in um helping Christiey's department. Absolutely. The crisis intervention side of this is what's most important. And I think that that's where they're they're really strong places and their good work shines through, but crisis intervention can't be day-to-day and prevention also. We need that. We need something that fixes it, not the band-aid piece. But we will do the crisis intervention. We'll always do that. That's our job. Um, and that's what we as first responders want to take on and want to handle, but we really do need that help in that long-term care because it's frustrating for all of us. Okay, this was only for um discuss uh discussion discuss. Yeah, discussion only. Um, I would just like to ask to bring it back for some allocation of funding. So, we'll we could do that at another meeting. But does you do you have some questions? Go ahead. Yeah. Um, I'm going to just basically piggyback on kind of what you were saying, Mayor. the work you do, first of all, is is amazing and it's very important and we have to continue doing it. I'm trying to thread the needle here between a presentation that we had earlier today with property tax and services and this isn't so much a question, but I imagine you're paid out of the general fund and like mayor said, we do not receive the city does not receive any money for these services. So, I guess I'm going to ask city manager at some point to look at what it takes to run these services. And as mayor said, we can't stop doing this. This is something that we have to do, but we have to have some sort of equity in the fiscal place too to make sure that we can still be providing them. So, this, you know, it says critical county government services from property tax, homeless services, senior services, adult and child services, public health services. the county gets money for these services. Do you know who doesn't get money? The city of Reno. So, um I think as we're looking towards our budget and um ways that we can try and be responsible and equitable, it would be interesting to see what we are spending on this and ask our partners at the county, hey, help us out. This is something we got to do where their citizens, too. Yeah, absolutely. And then my I I do have a question. So, how do we call you? We don't get to call and get a a MOS team, right? We have to call the um non-emergency number or something and hope that we you you're assigned, right? There's not enough of you, right? So, 911 or non-emergency. We also have an a referral for emails that comes in from different agencies, parents, officers on Graveyard because they're not available on Graveyard. Um, and so which is problematic too because I I live downtown and I'm walking down the streets and I see somebody that needs help immediately. You call the non-emergency number. They're out doing other things based on the priority. So you guys are just like you said, you might have to be at a car wreck or or a traffic accident. And we only have one clinician on at a time. Wednesdays we kind of overlap, but that's when we meet and but otherwise it one clinician. the crisis center where that closed I I'm very appreciative of the work that you do and I'm not trying to lessen. I'm just saying let's get let's get some more financial resources to make sure that you guys have what you need to be helping people. Thank you, Madame Mayor. Thank you so much. Super worked up on this one. Um, but I also think we have had I have sat here. How How long have we sat here, Naomi? We have sat here a long time. You personally and we have asked for cooperation and um with our partners, it's better, but it's still falling on deaf ears. And um like I said, I I think everyone better wake up if they're watching what's happening nationally with mental illness and and um mass shootings. and and you don't think that this should be the the top priority in your city. It's unbelievable. Anyway, Christie, thank you so much. We'll bring this back to another meeting. I want to make sure you have funds allocated and I'm excited for you to work directly with Chief Nance. Again, it is the number one priority in in um at least until I'm here for another year and then someone else can have a different priority. But until I'm here, I want to make sure we do everything we possibly can to stop from, you know, repeat offenders um you know, putting the rest of the community at risk. It's really and themselves quite frankly, but thank you for all you do. Okay, Madame Clerk, we're moving on. Uh did Council Member Eert, did you have comment? Yeah, I was just going to add on, but I don't know if we Oh, go ahead. I'm sorry. Sorry. It's okay. I worked I spent seven years on that crisis center and look what happened. It was open for what? 3 weeks. I mean, we didn't even give it a shot. Yeah. So, anyway, sorry. Yeah. No, no, no. I was just going to say, um, you know, we've been trying to figure out how to solve these problems for a long time, and I haven't been on counsel that long yet, but um, it's been frustrating for me, too. And I know that, um, Chief Nance has been trying to find ways to help with this, and I appreciate your work on it. Um, and I know I've expressed a lot of frustration with the county not filling more of this gap where they should, that RPD ends up being the catchall, and these are services that should be provided by the county. They receive a large portion of our um, property tax revenue to do this. And I just want to say thank you for You just saw that. Yeah, we just saw it. Yeah. I want to thank you for the work that you do. And I hope that we can um find a way to get additional funding either from the county or um you know at the federal level. But more than that, I think that you know it should go to the appropriate people. I don't I don't think it's appropriate that RPD should have to respond to so many of these types of calls. It should be specialized teams. It should be um social workers to help people. And I know um the um the ordinance that you know allows unhoused people to be arrested. Um I was not supportive of that because of this that it puts the financial burden back on city of Reno um for something that should be handled through a mental health situation and it does just kind of pick people up then kick them out and pick them up and kick them out because they don't have the resources they need to get out of the situation that they're in. So um just want to say thank you for your work on that. I know you've really um um run into some barriers too. So, I appreciate everything that you do. Thank you. And and everything you said is absolutely true and it falls in line with what our plan is, which is having um clinicians there to support the officers when they have to respond to calls that really necessarily aren't police related, but also to provide that service to our community for people that call 911 that have threatened suicide that we have the ability to uh get some somebody to help them in any way that we can because it does lessen our burden. and and if we had uh hundred more Christies, we'd find work for them. I promise you that. Um and I do think that we have one of the best models around and in my law enforcement experience, one of the best models that I have ever seen for uh the police collaboration with mental health response, which is unique and different, but it uh it can build. We can always grow on it, but the model is there to do it. We just need a bigger program. And then there's other places where uh that other businesses and other community places that should be helping us with mental health also. So it's not just us, but it is that collaboration that is needed for law enforcement. Is the county collaborating with you guys? Is that something discussions we need to have more of? But do you feel like you're getting support where you need there? Um you know, is there are there ways that we can advocate? You know, we're talking about doing things regionally in the day-to-day call for service realm. I think we obviously we just need we need more we need more of our clinicians being there with their officers being one-on-one where we really do need the collaboration from the county is through the jail systems when people get out of jail through the court system of ensuring that people that are not mentally well and they they need to get help to stand trial or to to to deal with criminal cases and we're talking violent criminals that sometimes are led out of jail that should not be horrific for the judicial system because we don't have the resources in this community to provide um the the ability to get people ready to stand trial. It's it's a very huge issue that we face here. It's something that was new to me when I got here. I didn't understand it, but we we need we need to fix it. They committed a crime. I don't understand. It baffles me also. And it it the the problem is is that if somebody commits a crime and and we'll talk about a violent crime, we're not talking low-level crimes. That's a whole different conversation. but let's talk about a violent crime and then they're determined not to be um sane to stand trial. They're not competent to stand trial because of their mental capacity at that time. There is not a place to rehabilitate that person to get them ready to stand trial. We're not talking about criminality that's based on insanity. That's a different legal definition. Like somebody's found guilty by the reason of insanity or not guilty for the reason of insanity. That's different. We're talking about people that commit a crime, but they're not competent either due to their mental state or drug use to stand trial. We do not have the ability here to rehabilitate them to make them stand trial for that crime. We're talking about violent crimes. And that is not something that we are going to fix. That is something our state has to fix. It's something that financially we have to put money into because what ends up happening is people that are not safe for our community to deal with are put out on the street from the jail because there's no place to rehabilitate them. Yeah. And and that's a disservice to them. It's a disservice to our community. It is shown on the national media. You see it in other places. We have to be cognizant that that is happening here. And we need to find a way to fix it. And that is not how officers respond to crimes. This is a much bigger conversation. The city manager and I have had the mayor and I have had I've had this with a lot of people in our community that until that gets fixed, we are going to continue to see those violent acts that are going to put our officers in danger and every one of us in danger because there is not a place to rehabilitate somebody so they can fall on the judicial system. Chief N it falls on our mental health uh systems. Our the lack of a mental health hospital or an overcrowding of a mental health hospital, a place that hasn't been funded by our state. It's not a priority for whatever reason. We have to get these people help. It's a disservice to that quite frankly. Okay. Well, here we go. Now, I got on a soap box. Why' you do that to me? I know. I know. I'm sorry. But it it I'm so glad you brought it up because I'm so tired of it. If I'm tired of it, your officers over here are tired of it and tired of it and tired of it. So, here's what I want to do because it is on the judicial side. And if I am correct, we for um the court uh Reno Municipal Court, we fund that. Correct. Yes. That is under our funding and our purview. And I would just say moving forward, I bet this council has the ability to not fund that if they don't want to do their jobs. And that being said, I think we should put on the agenda. I'm looking at because city manager Jackie um that they come to a council meeting and I want to talk about why they are letting people out that are violent criminals. They're putting all of us at risk. We are continuing to fund them. Maybe we shouldn't fund them anymore. Maybe that's how it should work because honestly, I think it's um gone on far too long. So, I'm going to ask the city manager, uh, Jackie Bryant. I would love for you to put that on a a council agenda. I'd like every judge that is supposed to do their job. Um, because let me tell you something. If that happens to one of your family members, you would absolutely be beside yourself and you'd want answers and you want to know why. And I'm just tired of talking and talking and talking and getting no results. So, that will be my direction to get um everyone from uh the decision makers, the judges here to talk about that. And honestly, I'm not so sure we should we should really look at their budget and how it's allocated as we move forward, which is under the county. Again, going right back to the county. Um this has got to change. And I didn't come here to pick a fight with the duties. I didn't either. I thank you. I didn't either for asking the question. Many of them are wonderful, wonderful people, but we we've got to address it. We cannot we cannot put our citizens at risk. That's what we need. And that's not put our citizens at risk anymore. These guys are all going, "Oh, God." You know, Madam Mayor, you can tell I'm not running for office. M perhaps um I mean is it possible that we could begin the conversation again with the county now and then be a actual participant in their budget process to get them to acknowledge and step up in this area. I mean they do have quite a bit more money than us. They do in all fields and um you know it just seems like they you know they need to know we're backing them picking up this charge. Yeah. Um well, yes, we were we're gonna we started to have meetings, but we're going to we're gonna actually come up with a proposal and we're going to see um you know how that goes. So, we'll we'll go from there. Um Jackie is working on it diligently and I and I just think um it's overdue. Thank you. Anyway, I am so sorry. I just seven years we put into that um to that initiative and failed in three weeks. $7 million and we we are doing our part and we we're going to continue to do our part and we're going to continue to push forward uh with the mental health space because it's important and you know all of that team is playing the best we can. So yeah, you do amazing work. I have seen you in action. Um, I just I can't thank you enough how and let you know how much I respect you. If you take her and move her somewhere else for this thing we're doing, then I'll be very mad to do that. Well, I look forward that you you get to work together directly. Okay. Thank you so much. I need a drink and I don't even drink. Well, maybe I'm going to start start again. No. Okay, here we go. Um, now we've got to go into pulled consent. Pulled consent items. Um, I thought we were going to put those at the very last. I think we are. No, cuz we still have the pros master plan. Oh my gosh. [Music] Um, I'm going to up to Jackie. She can I'm looking at her decide. It depends. Depends on when someone It's not an action item as well. What do you We could totally up to you. Yeah, we could. I don't mind either way. We'll sit here. Cuz you see, I'm in such a good mood. Jackie, you'd like me to sit here with you. It's up to the pleasure of the body. Oh, but we do need to do E1. E1. Yeah. Um, yes, that is fine. But what about the uh the pros plan? So, let's push the pros to the next meeting. I'm not getting a thumbs down. Wait a minute. I can't see. Is that Nathan over there? Nathan, if you would like to present pros right now, you you can. It's all you. If you don't want to, you don't have to. He's probably stressed all day. We probably didn't know he has a fear of public speaking the whole time. He was talking himself into it like, "You can do this, Nathan. You can do it." Right? And so then he probably didn't sleep last night with his fear of public speaking. This is you're This is a fantasy. This is not the Nathan we know. No, but I I I am going to say I don't think a lot of people think about the fear of public speaking. I just don't. But anyway, so I think that you prepare a lot and then when we don't have you up here, it's a big let down. Thank you. Thank you for uh getting this in. This is an important update and and my Nathan Oliet, parks and recreation director for the record. My part in this is very short. But I'm I'm mainly going to introduce Karina who's going to do an awesome job who has been doing mental stretching all day to be prepared for this. So we're excited about this. Um we've been wanting to come all summer. Um but it's been a really busy summer as you know. So um but we're happy to present this today. Um very important to us that we had a plan approved in November of 2023 and we don't want it to sit on the shelf and have dust. So we want to tell you a little bit about what we've been doing. There was 20 I think 30 implementation objectives. Um, so we're not going to talk about all of those today and we appreciate the long day that you all have had. So, we're going to hit some of the high points and um, there was a pretty extensive memo sent out in May on May 7th um, that has a lot of information in it about what we've been doing to to get this plan down the road as much as we can. So, um, included in those objectives, sometimes things were brought to council, to commissions, to staff, and the answer was no or wait. But we want to also highlight that that that might be the answer sometimes that it's not the time to do this yet, but keep it on the keep it on a back burner so it's ready to come back when the time is right. So with that, I want to introduce Karina who's going to go through a short probably 10-minute presentation and then we'll take your questions. Thank you. Hello. For the record, Karina Mercier, project manager and park planner. Um, I will be brief and begin immediately. So the pros plan falls under fiscal sustainability, economic development, and arts, parks, and historical resources in the strategic plan. Uh you might recall it was adopted in November of 2023. And like Nathan mentioned, we did issue a detailed memo back in May that describes the specific initiatives that we all of the initiatives that we have been working towards. So if you're looking for more detail, um please take a look at that memo. For the purposes of this uh presentation, it'll be pretty high level. Um so the master plan establishes 10 overarching goals which you can see here in their entirety. I will not read them to you. Um we'll be reviewing them one at a time in this presentation, but you can see they're very robust and very specific. Um but it is important to note that some of these goals are more expansive than others and some of them have different timelines than others. So we will have less to report. um they vary. So um the goals themselves tie into the implementation plan which as Nathan mentioned has um 249 individual objectives and action steps that outline what is needed to actually accomplish the goals that are established and it includes information like proposed timelines, anticipated costs and levels of responsibility from different departments. So the first goal is to identify and implement sustainable funding. We are very grateful to have secured a fund development manager position last August in Landon Miller. Uh Landon made tremendous progress in securing new resources for our parks and our programs and he's been working with neighbors who are raising money to make their parks better. Um, some of these grassroots projects include a potential restoration of the idol train and a new dog park play area at Northwest Park. Um, we've also been able to enter the sponsorship space in an official capacity. Landon secured nearly $100,000 in sponsorships from Waste Management, Downtown Reno Partnership, and smaller businesses to sponsor programs like the River Rangers, rolling recreation, adult athletics, and aquatics. And we've also found a lot of success in the grant space. Um Landon secured over 330 $320,000 in new grant funding. Um that includes $27,000 for the Crooked Mile Trail um to redo the asphalt and replace the bridge there and then $50,000 from the from Tamwa for the um river rangers. And finally, we're working with a lot of different community groups who want to make a difference. the appetite in the community is strong to support parks. Uh recently, Landing coordinated a park cleaning with NV Energy's employees at Miroma Park and also the Nevada Realtors Association um completely transformed the vacant lot at Northwest Park to prep the site for a dog play area. Um our focus for the next year is to continue working on fundraising for grassroots projects and to pursue more grants and more creative funding opportunities. Goal two is to repair, renovate, and upgrade existing parks and facilities. Um, we're working in two different spaces as far as this goal. The first is looking to improve our asset management. Uh, we did that by completing a new facility condition analysis report that did updated inspections for all 87 parks with updated cost estimates and a priority ranking system to improve our planning for new improvements. Um, as part of this goal, in the upcoming budget cycle, we will be introducing a proposal for a new fee for asset replacement. Um, and then as far as improvements, we worked with the Reno Youth Sports Association to gradually increase player fees to allow for increased frequency of turf mowing for the fields that are utilized for games throughout Reno. Um, we're also working to complete the projects that are already approved. um out of residential construction tax. They're underway and will come to completion in the next year. And to name a few, these are the Demani Ranch Dog Park, um improvements to the Paradise Activity Center, and the path reconstruction at Dorothy Malindon. Uh goal three is to expand recreational activities, programs, and services to the community. Um, we made updates to our fees and charges schedule to better support our operations and programs. Um, by introducing a membership program and a sliding scale program which have been very successful in increasing our revenues and services. Uh, our new department division named park planning and activation was established and this was with the goal to improve community engagement and recreation outreach at city parks. Uh, we also made some improvements to Paradise Park. Uh we incorporated shuffle board and botchi ball and we also increased programming to the community garden and then um McKinley Arts and Culture Center was reconfigured to serve as the parks and recreation administrative headquarters as well as expanded access to Plumis gym. Um, for the next year, we're continuing to expand the rolling recreation program, expanding camp offerings, and we also have an opportunity to expand outdoor fitness programming with the installation of the new national fitness campaign fitness courts at Broadhead in Demani. Um, goal four is to provide an accessible, well-distributed park system. Uh, the biggest achievement in this space was the approval of the service plan to investigate a park district. Um so this is an objective outlined in the pros master plan. Um it touches on regional collaboration and addresses our need to find sustainable funding. Um and all of that will result in a feasibility study that will allow us to potentially pursue a park district. Um so our focus for next year is to complete this plan um and continue to um collaborate with our partners WO County and city of Sparks to complete it. Uh goal five is to provide high quality amenities to meet the needs of our growing and diverse community. Our biggest accomplishment in the space is the Moana Springs Community Aquatic Center which um turns one year old this September. Um council provided direction not to move forward with the final design for Pembbrook. So we're we've been exploring alternative funding plans in a strategy to still bring about that project. Um we established new joint use agreements with Wo County School District for the continuation of the Sierra Kids program at school district sites and the shared maintenance of sports fields. Uh and our focus in the space for the next year are dog parks, pickle ball, and flexible use spaces as well as continuing to pursue flat field possibilities. Um goal six is to restore and enhance the Truckucky River corridor. We had a lot of um we had a lot in this space um in supporting public works on the Truckucky River vision plans implementation as well um including plaza improvements to both West Street Plaza and Local Motion Plaza, the installation of new furniture and shade and public restroom access. Um increased River Ranger presence thanks to the addition of four more full-time positions and seasonal part-time positions. um the new trash cans that are animal proof um as long as well as pet waist stations between Booth Street and John Champion Park. Uh solar light fixtures which were installed between Fisherman's Park to John Champion and um hardwired fixtures were installed from John Champion to Booth Street. So, lighting upgrades all along the river and then our partnership with one Turkey River on the urban tree workforce program, which is a workforce development program focusing on vegetation management. Uh, for the next year, we're focusing on wayfinding improvements along the river and signage updates to parks. Um, also the Crooked Mile Trail improvements will take place. And um something fun, we're working with the Girl Scouts at Our Lady of the Snows to install a rainbow bridge um at Chrissy Colin Park for pet memorials. It's very cute. Um okay, goal seven is to expand the existing trail system. Um on October 23rd of 2024, council adopted the Truckucky Meadows Regionals Trail Plan and that plan has since been adopted by Wo County and the city of Sparks as well. So, we'll be uh collaborating as a region on its implementation. And then um in September of last year, council voted to designate all city-owned parcels adjacent to the Truckucky River between Booth and Center Street as a city park. Um this is for consistency of maintenance and enforcement. So, in the next year, we're looking to expand that within all city limits. Um and we're also looking to make some improvements um with our trail mapping um using GIS and working with Wo County and the regional planning agency to ensure consistency in our data. Uh goal eight is to provide active stewardship of our resources. We have a partnership with B City USA at Valleywood Park um where we establish a pollinator garden which is in full bloom if you guys want to check it out. Um the junior ranger program also had a held a lot of successful events and we're looking to expand that in in this year. Um the rangers also secured a grant program from the Nevada outdoor education and re recreation grant called the aquatic ecosystem exploration initiative which um is for local students who face barriers to accessing nature. And uh we have a partnership with the biggest little trail stewardship. They help us um with a lot of vegetation management on our trails. Um pictured here, you can see uh them removing invasive species at Sierra Vista Park. Um our focus for next year, we're looking to um do a Friends of the Park program and we're also looking for a future partner at Rosewood Lakes and to expand the Junior Ranger program as I mentioned. Um goal nine is to integrate Reno's economic development strategies. Uh we have um access to plaster AI which um provides us data on park use and event attendance which is a great opportunity to engage local businesses and organizations for sponsorship opportunities. And um like I mentioned earlier, we're um working on some wayfinding upgrades including updated signage um that is more accessible. It's bilingual and it's consistent with city branding standards. Um and then finally, goal 10 is to cooperate with other regional agencies to achieve our mutual goals. We are doing this in three spaces. Asset management, like I mentioned, um we're working with Wo County on our GIS mapping um to ensure that our data is accurate, correct, and consistent throughout all our agencies. Um and since its approval in June, we've been working on the service plan um with both Wo County and the city of Sparks to develop that plan. And we also held a joint annual parks and recreation commission to discuss it back in June. Uh and we are working we're in discussions with Wo County um to propose a land swap to this body. Um the reason for that is that we're looking to achieve maintenance efficiencies. Um, for instance, when it comes to open space, the city does not have a proactive maintenance approach. Um, we're more reactionary, whereas the county has a dedicated trails coordinator position. And on the other hand, we could take over land that makes better sense for our maintenance capacity. So, our focus for next year is to continue working on these initiatives. Um, that's all I have for you. I'm happy to answer your questions. Okay, great job. Thank you. Um, just so you know, Karina was um an intern here. Yeah. And uh how long ago was that now? Nine years. Nine years ago. I cannot believe. And it's gone by by like that. Crazy. Anyway, um any questions? Oh, thank you. Um I know we're running late. Just tremendous job. really your work is amazing in the space that you guys have and all the things that you guys have done. On the goal one, I did not see where um when it comes to funding where we might be talking about the development of a parks district, would that fall in there someplace? Definitely. Um yeah, I I omitted it from this goal because we talked about it in later goals, but it ties to a number of goals in the in the implementation plan. But yes, um the service plan will is a feasibility study to see if a park district is right for us, if we could implement it in our uh region. and that would provide um a sustainable funding model for parks either through a bond or a new tax which those those things would need to be a ballot initiative but yeah I think it's just important that we are moving for that but I think um with the resources the limited resources that you have you do a tremendous job Nathan you and your team I get comments all the time about how responsive you are how great things look and I know we're always asking you to do more with less So really appreciate the efforts. Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. Okay, Councilwoman Der. No, I mean just Yeah. All right, moving on. I don't I don't think we have any action on this item. Correct. Can I say one more thing? Yes, please. And it'll be brief. Um just we said we a lot in that presentation and I just want to make sure it's clear that that doesn't limit that to our department both external um supporters through volunteer groups through groups like Rysa u and the users of our parks the biggest little B city the biggest little trails um those those folks are really helping prop us up um in spaces where we don't have the resources and then also internally a lot of we did and we did at Paradise Park has been turned around with the help seniors with the help of Isabella and and that team um the police supporting our park rangers is the only thing that makes them effective. So um public works has helped with every single project we have. So we means a lot of people. I just want to make sure that that's clear as a part of this. No, that's so nice for you to recognize that Nathan. It it means a lot, right? There is not one person that can do it all by themselves alone. does is really I know it sounds cliche but it does take a village. Okay, moving right along. E1, we are we are going Oh, perfect. We are going to item E1. And we have Boston in the house. Um and he's so cute. Look at him. He's just so mellow. He's tired. He's tired. It's a long day for him, huh? Yeah. Don't require a presentation, Madame Mayor. Does anybody else require a presentation? Is there anything you want to put on the record? Um, I didn't bring a presentation. No. Okay. I didn't bring all then. We're going to I'm going to send this over to Is this ordinance second reading of the ordinance? Yeah. Yes. And I'm going to hand it over to um the one and only Carl Hall. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Ordinance introduction bill number 7318. Ordinance to amend title 16, chapter 16.01 01 of the Reno Municipal Code entitled Fire Administration and Codes repealing the 2018 International File Code and adopting the 2024 International Fire Co and appendencies B, C, D, E, H, L, and N as amended and the 2024 International Wild Urban Interface Code and appendences A, B, C as amended and other matters properly relating there too. All right. Thank you so much. Motion to refer. I have a motion. I have a second. All those in favor say I. I. All those opposed. Motion carries. All right. Good night. Good. Good night, Boston. We need bones here. That's what we need. Dog bones. Right. G. All such animal lovers right here particularly. And we don't have dog bones. Madam clerk, get on that. I'll pay for them. Just bring dog bones. Perfect. I love that. Okay, moving right along. Where are we now? Service commission. Oh, we are um actually I think do you don't you want we should go back to the pulled items. Let's go um to the pulled items then we'll go to commissions and then we will then we're going to be done. So just for the record, I'll say that we've pulled items three, four, five, 13, 14, and 15. Okay, sounds good. Uh Councilwoman Eert, I believe you pulled three. and I'll be quick with all Okay. Thank you. Sorry. Here. Okay. So, um item B3. Um this is approval of an amended uh owner Seymar pre-construction services agreement with PCL construction, Inc. for the Truckucky Meadows Water Reclamation Facility uh dewatering project um for an additional $321,000 and some change for a total agreement amount not to exceed um 1.3 million with Reno's share being $91,000. So, I just wanted to just kind of talk about what that is real quick because that's a lot of money. So, I just like to pull high ticket items from the consent items just to kind of talk about them briefly. Certainly. Um Matt Smith, senior civil engineer with utility services department. So yes, B3 is an amendment to an existing um uh owner Semar pre-construction services agreement. Our contractor, our Seymar is PCL construction. And so what this is is we got into an agreement with them to provide uh they were to provide pre-construction services which includes cost estimates, value engineering, and design support for our engineer on the project. All in preparation for designing the dewatering facility at the at the at Twarf the reclamation facility. So Okay. Okay. So and it says that Reno share uh is just under a million dollars from the sewer fund. Can you share who who is the other financial partner? Is it Tamwa or who who's doing this other piece of funding? Certainly. Yeah. So Reno Share is 68.63% 63% of the total um amended agreement amount with uh the remainder of that being city of Sparks. City of Sparks. Okay. That's uh through our interlocal agreement uh through the joint coordinating committee. Okay. Thank you. And then um B4 is um why don't you give me a motion on page three? A motion to approve. Okay. I have a motion. Second. I have a second. All those in favor say I. I. All those opposed. Motion carries unanimously. before I pull before. I have a disclosure that I need to read. Go right ahead. Thank you, madame mayor, fellow city council members, and madam clerk. I am disclosing that Jacob's Engineering is a current client of my consulting firm, Tailor-Made Solutions. Item B4 involves approvals of consulting agreements with Jacob's Engineering. Because I have a substantial and continuing business relationship with Jacob's Engineering, I have been advised that I have a commitment in a private capacity to the interests of Jacob Jacob's Engineering and that the independence of judgment of a reasonable person in my situation would be materially affected by my current contracts with Jacob's Engineering. I will not be participating or voting on this item today. Madame Clerk, please accept this disclosure and lodge it on the record for this meeting and pertaining to other items. Thank you. Okay. Thank you so much. Okay, sending it to you, Counciloman. Thank you. Um I just uh we need to pull it for two reasons. One was this disclosure, but um I pulled it because it's rare that we are spending $4 million at one time in one place. And in light of the fact that soon we will be asked to consider an increase to our sewer customers rates um and are very fairly significant. Um, I think it's important that people know what we're spending our sewer dollars on and there are many, many smaller items on the agenda, but this was the biggest. So, could you just give us a one minute about this? Certainly. Matt Smith, senior civil engineer uh utility services department. So, this is as was mentioned in the previous uh item B3. This is for the design. So, we have our engineers, Jacob's uh consulting engineers, and they are um progressing a deatering building at the treatment plant. We have an existing deatering building, but it is unsafe, seismically at risk. There's several other problems. We we are running with zero redundancy. Um, a lot wrong with that. Through the effort of our engineer, we have determined that a new building is necessary. And so that's what this design agreement is for. Um, this is an existing agreement. We're just amending it for an additional 2 million, right? uh total and um the reason for that is because we started out 0% got to 30% and then our Seymar who uh got on board gave us a cost estimate and it was outside of our budget. So we went back to those key goals and objectives um for that project and now we're back we we went back and then now we're to 30% again and we're within our budget. So thankfully, so I think an important lesson here is that we've been seeing this for the last couple years and we're going to keep seeing it that our bids keep coming in over even our engineers estimate, right? And our engineers estimate is prepared by our staff. Usually there's a contingency there, but they're still coming in over that because usually the contingency I think is around 25% roughly. I mean typically 15 to 30% something in there. So, um, and you're saying that was the case here, too? Yeah, it's the the original design. It had a lot of bells and whistles, and I'm actually thankful that that we scaled it down that we looked back at it. Yeah, because we did find some efficiencies as well as lowering that cost. So, all right. Well, good. Well, with that, I'm ready to recommend approval of the item. Okay. Uh, Councilman Eber, did you have something to I was just turn on a Okay. Oh, thanks. Okay. So, I have a motion. I have a second. All those in favor say I. I. All those opposed. Motion carries unanimously. And I also pulled B5. Okay. Please. And the reason is is that um some may or may not know that Reno is named after General Jesse Lee Reno. And I don't know his whole backstory, but I do know that Moyelier uh had acquired a number of historic documents dating back to the 1860s um and had put those on long-term loan for the last 20 years with the um Nevada Historical Society and our clerk has been processing this and we want to do a permanent transfer. Is that right? Yes. Uh Lauren Morris, chief deputy city clerk for the record. In 2004, the city council approved the purchase of 10 documents and three portraits from the LRA estate and they're pertaining to General Jesse Lee Reno. We entered into anou with NHS, Nevada Historical Society for them to store them permanently because they have a low humidity acidfree environment. And then they also created replicas for us which are on display in city hall as well. So, they have had those for the past 20 years, and they're requesting that we transfer permanent ownership to them through this agreement. Um, and we did reach out to the Nevada State Library as well to confirm these are nonrecords because it's not city action. So, we are able to donate them as we wish. Okay. All right. Well, I just wanted to draw to everyone's attention either here in the room or on uh in TV, Zoom, YouTube, Lynn, and let them know that they can visit these documents. They can actually check them out. Uh not check them out of the building, but they can look at them in the building um if they're doing research on Reno. So, good job. Did you um by any chance talk to Alisa Barber? I I assume. Um I don't know the historic back and forth. Do you know uh like how far back? No, just she mentioned Alicia Barber. I was just wondering if she was part of this conversation, but I think our historic resources team was part of the conversation. Okay. We So the historic resources team at the city was not was not. No, this was a conversation. Uh the Nevada Historical Society reached out to us like over two years ago requesting these documents be transferred permanently. So, I've been communicating mostly with Sarah Patton, the archivist there. Uh, she was available this morning, but wasn't able to stay. Okay. So, okay. Well, I guess I'd suggest if that ever happened again, I Well, the only thing is I just want to make sure these are preserved the way that we want them, the way the city wants them. This sounds like this is for the state. So, they're being preserved the way that they should be. We purchased these with the intent that they would be stored and preserved at the Nevada Historical Society. That was the intent. Okay. Um and so they have been doing that for the past 20 years. Uh they've been maintaining preserving them in their research library and they're also available to the public upon supervision. Okay. Just making sure that everyone will have access to them in perpetuity. Yes, absolutely. And we do, like I said, we have replicas as well. Okay, cool. All right. Thanks. Go ahead. I'll make a motion for item B5. Um, I have a motion. Second. I have a second. All those in favor say I. I. All those opposed. Motion carries. Thank you. All right. Thank you so much. Okay. Moving right along. Now we are on what? B13. Yes. Uh, back to you, Councilwoman Eert. Yeah. Yeah. I would just like to know a little bit more about this. So, it's uh acceptance of a grant um to develop, manage, and implement a communitybased sled hockey program. Can you just kind of tell us a little bit more about that? Sure. Um April Wolf is uh one of her amazing programs and this grant is due to the amazing relationships and performance they've had in a in a long-standing sled hockey program that we have. So, serving our adaptive community, but really for everyone. So, um there's fully aabled folks playing as well. So this this very generous grant is going to help fund this uh team for another two years. So and it's a really interesting evolution to see where we were going to uh the local folks and asking for support at the ice arena for time and things like that and prime time and they were very supportive. But um funding like this because of a sustained and and positive program is allowing us to now pay our local folks for that time rather than um rather than asking for it. So yeah. Yeah, it's a good program and she as many of them are. So, she does amazing. So, awesome. Okay. Uh I'll make a motion to uh accept or approve. Okay, I have a motion. Second. I have a second. All those in favor say I. All those opposed. Motion carries. Okay, we are in item 14. Uh back at you. Yeah. Yeah. So this this is for rehabilitation of some um apartments. Um it's 115 units of affordable housing for seniors. Um I just had some questions about um the timeline for that and also um if there are seniors currently living there, what what is something they can expect as these rehabilitation services happen? Sure. Great questions. Ela Wisman for the record. Um, and I believe I have that, well, if he's still on the phone, the developer um can answer some questions. I do have this information. Um, so they go to the board of finance um in a couple weeks here and that will get their funding approved and I believe they're going to start the rehab within the next couple of months. Um, it will be um mainly they're not going to have to do a relocation plan through HUD um because it it's going to be mainly like daytime work. So the seniors might just have to be in a senior room and and they will provide for all of that. Not a senior room, like a day room type of thing. Yeah. Um it's like flooring, appliances. Brilliant. Yes. It's awesome. And it's a projectbased um property. So the whole thing is 30% they the seniors pay 30% of their income. And so the the new owners who are acquiring it are going to renew their contract with HUD to maintain that. So we're great. We're maintaining and keeping affordable housing as well as like deeply subsidized housing that every unit has a voucher attached to it. That's great. Well, thank you. Yeah, I just want to give you a chance to talk about that a little bit. So, thank you guys. Um, anybody else have any questions or anything? No. Okay. Uh, make a motion to approve. Second. A motion. I have a second. All those in favor say I. All those opposed. Motion carries. We're getting to the end. We're tired and now I'm getting goofy and Okay, here we go. Uh, back. Yeah, I think it was you. Yeah. Yeah, it's me. Yeah. So, this I just wanted to talk about. This was a uh discretionary fund donation I gave to um FKP, the Polynesian Cava Club of Reno. Um they're just a really great organization that I've um worked with for the last 3 years now to help with um backpack drives they do for the community. Um they do it the uh weekend before school starts and they're just really um a great group of people. um really great community and I just wanted to kind of give them a shout out for what they do and I'm just really grateful that they reached out to me. The first year I was on council to help participate in that and um just want to let people know that they exist. It's a great organization and um they'll probably have another backpack drive next year and it's it's a very um fun event. They barbecue. They have different booths there and things like that. It's just a really warm um friendly group of people. So, just want to give them a shout out. Um motion to approve. Second. All those in favor say I. I. All those opposed. Okay. We are now going to go into I believe boards and commissions. Okay. I didn't know if I had missed um anything. Okay. I'm going to make a motion. This is for civil service. I'm going to make a motion to appoint Nicole or reappoint Nicole Paul and appoint uh Mr. Brian Bus. May I get I that was my motion. May I get a second? Second. I have a second. All those in favor say I. I. All those opposed. Motion carries. Okay. Next uh item G2 and that would be Councilwoman Der. Yep. Give me your appointed name. Yeah. I'd like to appoint Cynthia Albbright and Debbie Leonard. Okay. I have a motion. Uh I'll second. All those in favor say I. I. All those opposed. Motion carries unanimously. All right. Heading down to um this is Councilman Reese's appointment item G3 to the U board 5 NAB and I believe um I will just pick randomly and see if he approves. No, I'm just kidding. Um Abby Lug. Uh so may I get a motion or can I get a second? Second. I have a motion and a second. All those in favor say I. Okay. All those opposed. Motion carries unanimously. Okay. Um, what else? What did I miss? Uh, item H, uh, council comments and announcements. Anything? And we do not have a public hearing. So, Vice Mayor, give me um a motion. Oh, yeah. I I did want to Oh, go ahead. Is this where we can ask about future agenda items? just I know we're all on the same page with this, but just want to say at the appropriate time that I would like to try and figure out how to um work on a regional plan to help with mental health services that we have a regional meeting. I know we're working on this for fire, but I think this is equally um important. So, if that's something we can work on, I really really appreciate it. We will bring something back to the council that I I'm hoping that we can all support. Thank you. All right. Thank you so much. Really appreciate you. you all of you listening today. Okay. Motion to adjurnn. Second. Thank you. I have a motion public comment. In favor say we do have public comment. Oh, you do? Go right ahead. I'm so sorry, Lauren. I just ran over you. We're just ahead of ourselves. No problem. Go ahead. Uh Dan Berles. Okay. Come on out. All right. All right. All right. Before we get started, I had a a a couple I've been here past couple days trying to take care of some things, trying to get my housing together. Anyway, however, long story short, I had a problem with your Alli Universal Security Guard following me the past couple days with situations like take your bags wherever you go, blas blas and it blew up to something that you're not want to express that. I'm way too old to be insulted. I know a little bit about life and I know signs and characteristics of discrimination, hatred, and things of that nature. And so, I wanted to express that. that I didn't appreciate the interaction between him and I or his boss at the door basically telling me that take my things when you said there was a break in the council meeting. It's poor but I I'm way too old not to express it. But however, my name is DeAndre Berles and I'm standing before you to let you know that I am currently homeless due to circumstances beyond my control. I went to the Walmart a couple years ago and uh end up being incarcerated for like a year. I solicited the housing authority and end up getting reinstated in some kind of form. So, that's where I'm at in regards to that. Um, but I slept in front of the AT&T building, 195 East First Street, which I was formerly an employee of AT&T, and I got a citation and ended up in a in a court case with municipal court. So, I'm actively going through reinstatement with um housing and with shadow subsidy and with the public housing and the choice housing voucher, all that good stuff with goes along with the housing authority. And I also been going to the county commissioners meeting and missing there as well. So I said all that to say that um I sleep in front of the first Methodist person at the Methodist church on the side and from my understanding that is housing authority that is um Department of Transportation that is municipal blas blas blas I don't know why I'm saying all this but I guess I'm saying I'm soliciting help because I am at my wits end in regards to housing clo uh shelter, food, things of that sort, things of that nature. I know everything's really in place. I know things everything has been reinstated, but I can't get a definite answer. I can't get a yes. I can't get anything. So, I guess I'm frustrated. So, I guess out of frustration, I'm coming to you guys to let you guys know that I'm not like this bum black man, you know, but I am legitimate and I'm soliciting the city council for resources or for help of some sort to get myself up and going. Well, thank you so much um for being here. Can I ask you? Yes. Would you be willing to go to um the shelter? I went to the shelter and I didn't I didn't like it. I want you to shelter because I need to shelter. I don't like to shelter because you can't stand on the bed with a guy bump under you. And that's is the problem with me. So if we if we're in a bunk together, right, and you're at the bottom bunk and I'm at the top bunk, I have to ask you, you know, at in tradition, can I use your bunk to climb up on my bunk? and he'll say, "No, I don't want you climbing on on my bunk unless it's your ass." And so that alone just just soured me. You know what I mean? And then there's a then it's always something going on. Somebody's in your bed. Somebody poured rocks in your bed. Somebody poured dirt on your bed. You have to use your p you have to use your um your EBT card. Um is that right? your food stamp card to buy a certain a lot amount of things. If not, it's, you know, it's, you know, you're Yeah. So, I don't know why I'm saying that, but that was my frustration. I know it has to be still there. You know what I mean? So, isn't it's not safe. I mean, shelter, you know, I appreciate it, but I feel more more safe kind of sleeping on the streets, but there's nothing. You guys are not doing anything. There's not even no food in the garbage can for nobody. I mean, I live a homeless world. I'm not homeless. I mean, you know, I I buy my food and stuff, but we dying out there, you know what I mean? Like for real, we kind of really dying a little bit, but we knocking each other off as well. But, um, but other than that, you know, I'm just standing before you let you know that I that I have an active court case with municipal. I have, um, I'm in good standing with the housing authority. I have a senior housing specialist. Um, Okay. Um, let me Are you able to work or are you disabled? I'm disabled. I have social security. Social Security, Medicare. How How much do you get? Way too much to be What? Way too much to be broke the way that I am. 1,000 over a,000 bucks. But I But I spend it. I I'm not on drugs, per se. I I smoke marijuana and I may drink a little beer, puff a little cigarettes, but I don't I'm not intervenous. I don't I don't smoke drugs, you know, you know, they of that sort. But I do I spend it on Motel 6, Walmart, um, Metrop PCS, um, Little Caesar, miscellaneous things, things of that sort, things of that nature. And before I know it is, it just seeps. I don't do drugs. I mean, I pump marijuana, but that's about the bulk of where it goes. But you said you worked at AT&T. Yes, I worked at AT&T some years ago. How? Some some years. It's been years prior to But you worked for them. Yeah. But I did work for them. ATG wireless services 10,000 gay road. I just used him as a springboard. Daniel Smith was my manager. I also worked for Herz once upon a time. Yeah. So, you know, I was uh college educated California State University standards files. I have a degree of old communications. Have you been in a program like a crossroads or anything like that? Uh no. Would you willing to go? Crossroads? No. Cuz I'm not a drug addict. Those are the crossroads. I've been to Lakes Crossing. I enjoy Lakes Crossing. But but far as what is it? Crossroads cross. It's it's a whole bunch from my understands who are drymouththed and looking for a meal ticket to get their stuff back up and going to the next. Okay. I I understand. Um that was my next question. If you have a case manager, and it sounds like you do. I just got confirmation you are working with a case manager, correct? Okay. Up with them um so that they also have some help on our side. Okay. Um now that you've been here because I I want to know um what's happening every day and and uh you know really understand um what services that they're providing. But I also think um crossroads if you you know what is that? What is crossroads? It's um sober living. It's sober living puff a a simple marijuana cigarette. I s the All right. Okay. So, um I I'm We've got to let my council members go. I've got to get them home. So, I'm going to let them um go and we've been over time, but I Tell me what church you're sleeping at. Uh first there. Usually that some of our churches have they've been very helpful. Okay. All right. I am going to follow up with you. I'm going to let these guys go. Um but we're going to make sure that you get resources. We're going to cuz I'm glad to hear you have a case manager. Okay. So, I want some followup to find out what's happening there. Okay. So, what do you do at this point? Yeah. Stay stay right here and we're going to we're going to follow up. All right. Okay, sir. All right, everyone. Um, anything else? No. Okay. Thanks so much. Go home. Please get some rest. Go eat dinner. Go be with a motion to adjourn. Motion to adjurnn. Oh, we I I got one from vice mayor. So, just everyone, all those in favor say I. I. All those opposed. Motion carries.