Page 38 - Sonoma County Gazette - August 2017

A bit of a euphemism tangle for SMART commute train...
By Una Glas, Guest Columnist
Here it is the first of August and we Leos can beat our chests with futile fists unless we are truly hung up with astrological symbols. There are a lot of thank yous to be delivered and one that’s almost slipped below the public’s horizon is the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria and the City of Rohnert Park.
Meet Sebastopol Council at Farmers Market!
The Sebastopol City Council wants to meet you! The Sebastopol City Council
Now admittedly, talking about MOU’S isn’t exactly an “Oh look at this item in this issued piece of news.” But this item deals with QUIET ZONES of the SMART commute train scheduled to run regular Sonoma-Marin routes very soon. I wanted to know the name of RP’s city attorney for all I knew she was a lady attorney from Napa and the first break came when I was having lunch in Marvin’s Restaurant in Cotati with Pete Callinan, RP’s first elected mayor and first city manager. He remembers the name Betsy Strauss as the RP City Attorney who was handling the debates between the city and the proposed casino.
will be reinstating its summer information table at the Sebastopol Farmers Market beginning Sunday,
July 23rd. One member
of the Sebastopol Council
I called Carl Leivo who was city manager during these debates when they had to move them from City Hall to Spreckels Performing Arts Center’s big stage because city hall was much too small to hold the amount of people waiting to protest the Graton Casino. RP City Hall seemed to be riding along uneasily with this surprising Federal Commerce Dept’s friendly attitude towards quiet zones, which the Dept. of Transportation of the Commerce Dept. bureaucracy decreed commute train bells and whistles are only controlled by the SMART commute train engineer.
will be sta ng the table
at the Farmers Market in
the Sebastopol Downtown Plaza every Sunday through September, generally from 10 am to noon. This is
your opportunity to meet members of the Council, ask questions about our City government and share your ideas.
I had great conversations with constituents and west county residents at our Farmers Market table in years past and am looking forward to meeting old and new friends!
Now they’re saying cities can create QUIET ZONES and I’m saying what’s going on? We haven’t heard yet. It appears the Commerce Dept. gurus are floating the idea for city-created quiet zones as a way to soften the blow and try to find a compromise for this fragile euphemism they’re clinging to.
The most important news to Sebastopol residents is our new online payment option for water and sewer customers. Go to ci.sebastopol.ca.us/billpay to
pay your bill online or to learn how to set up automatic payments. This new service is part of the City’s transition to more modern nancial management software. Implementing this new software and providing more online public information about our City’s nances is a major project that we started over a year ago and we expect to complete in about another year. Other online services that we expect to o er in the near future are permit applications and payments as well as business licenses. Eventually our new software will enable the City to provide much more detailed information about the City budget and nances to the public. This ts with our goal of providing increased scal transparency to the public.
Does Sonoma County Second District Supervisor David Rabbit have a have a clue as to what the Feds are up to now? The odds are against a quick and clean explanation. There’s an inflexible newspaper deadline getting in the way of collecting stories and making city hall-speak prose readable to average newspaper readers.
The Council has also been working to ensure the City’s nancial sustainability. Five years ago, the City had no nancial reserves. In other words, the City had no savings account available to respond to emergencies such as
a major sewer line failure or the loss of a vehicle. Now, as of the 2017/18 scal year, the City has a reserve account equivalent to approximately 17% of the annual general fund budget for miscellaneous emergencies, as well as special designated reserve funds for equipment, vehicle and technology replacement, another fund for buildings and facilities, and a third fund to accommodate predicted pension shortfalls.
The City and Graton Casino publish a budget every five years or so as ordered by the MOU which Betsy Strauss legally analyzed and presented her conclusions to the RP City Council. A city hall memo said the Graton Casino has contributed $37.5 million to RP since the last MOU was published. Some of the details provided in Mary Grace Pawson’s, director of community services report are interesting and not exactly widespread news.
Housing
Addressing housing issues is a high priority for the City Council. The Council formed a Housing Subcommittee early this year and completed a series of community forums late last month. The information gathered from these forums will lead to a housing action plan for consideration by the City Council. The plan will address such issues as – should zoning or development standards be changed? Should the City propose a new tax to generate revenues for a ordable housing? How can we best provide “workforce” housing?
The Housing Subcommittee’s report will be released late this summer and
will come before the City Council after Labor Day. Visit the City’s website (cityofsebastopol.org) or Facebook page (facebook.com/CityofSebastopolCA/) for ongoing information about this important topic.
The MOU contributions are mostly paying for a new Department of Safety headquarters west of the 101 freeway on Labath Avenue. It will be across the creek from California Highway Patrol headquarters. Part of the MOU package will be hiring of more police officers, construction of new headquarters, more patrol cars and fire trucks.
It’s a unique step in relations between the few native tribes remaining after
a century of persecution from Mexicans, Yankees from east of the Rockies and gold-seeking intruders to present tribal status. But no one’s saying the job is over. MOU creators fervently hope their work has been imitated by other tribe- city organizers, but we have no way of finding out in this upside down world.
38 - www.sonomacountygazette.com - 8/17
Online Bill Pay and City Finances
City nances may seem boring, but they are very important to providing high quality services and sustaining our town’s quality of life. The Sebastopol City Council and the City’s nance department have been hard at work improving the City’s online services and long term nancial sustainability.