Santa Rosa’s new City Council prioritizes goals

Affordable housing, homelessness and open government are some of the key issues the Santa Rosa City Council wants city staff to focus on over the next 18 months.

Those subjects emerged as three of the council’s top - but by no means only - goals following a two-day goal-setting session that began with input from the public and ended with a roadmap of sorts for new City Manager Sean McGlynn.

“I feel like, in a lot of ways, this is actually the first day of my tenure,” said McGlynn, who arrived from El Paso, Texas, in September.

The session, held at the Church of One Tree, was the council members’ biennial effort to come together in a less formal setting, discuss how they could work together better and modify the goals outlined by the previous council.

This year’s effort differed from those of the past in that it resulted in a list of goals that were manageable and attainable, Mayor John Sawyer said.

“There is nothing here that is pie-in-the-sky,” Sawyer said. “They’re all doable. We’re not building the Golden Gate Bridge.”

But they are instructing city staff to tackle some significant, arguably intractable problems such as affordable housing and homelessness, which everyone acknowledged were related.

“If we can’t catch people before they are priced out of the market, our homeless numbers are not going to drop,” said Erin Carlstrom, the only renter on the council.

Ideas for addressing the affordable housing crisis included passing a rent control ordinance, strengthening rent protections for mobile home parks, allocating more than 20 percent of the real property transfer tax to the construction of such housing, and finding ways to encourage the construction of more housing stock generally.

But differences of opinion about how to address the problem became immediately apparent. Carlstrom advocated for both rent control and the construction of new housing. But Sawyer argued that rent control is the opposite of what the city should do if it wants to attract developers.

“They’ll just walk away. They’ll just go somewhere else,” Sawyer said.

The homelessness issue generated numerous ideas about how the city could help, but little consensus. Ideas included opening bathrooms in public parks, allowing people to sleep in their cars, handing out motel vouchers and working more closely with the county to get people into existing services.

McGlynn is under no illusions that the city will be able to completely solve such problems over the next 18 months. But he said his goal was to get clear direction from the council about where to spend limited city staff time.

The city has experience providing affordable housing, but it has far less expertise in directly providing homeless services, as some council members seemed to suggest the city should undertake. McGlynn stressed that he was already tasking existing staff to focus on some homeless issues, but going too far in that direction might pull them from housing and economic development duties.

“I’ve got a bandwidth problem,” McGlynn said. “Right now, I don’t have staff to do this.”

On the open government front, the council has yet to weigh the recommendation of a task force that suggested hiring a communication director and passing a sunshine ordinance, among other things. But one step in the direction of more open government was proposed: the scheduling of a set time for public comment early in the council meeting so the public doesn’t have to wait until the very end of the meeting, Sawyer said.

Details have yet to be worked out, such as how long it would last and who would get to speak, but Sawyer said he thinks the idea is doable.

Two other subjects that seemed to win consensus as important goals were improving the transportation network to reduce vehicle traffic and exploring child-care subsidies.

That last idea was championed by Carlstrom, who has a young son. But it struck some as outside the scope of services that the city traditionally provides. Sawyer worried that its position high on the list of goals would confuse the public.

“I can see someone walking up to me and saying, ‘You’re talking about child care when our streets are crumbling?’ ” Sawyer said.

That led him and others to stress that the new goals were above and beyond a host of existing goals the city is already pursuing, such as the annexation of Roseland, reunifying Old Courthouse Square, turning streetlights back on, improving park maintenance and finding a funding source to improve roads.

“We’re not dropping everything else to do these,” Sawyer noted.

Facilitator Jan Perkins then scratched out the word “top” from a list that had read “top priorities.”

Thanks to the improving economy, there is room to expand city services instead of slashing them as in years past, Councilman Gary Wysocky said. He called the goal-setting effort worthwhile but said the real decisions about the council’s priorities will come at budget time.

“You have to plug this into a budget reality now, and that will finally make this a realistic process,” he said.

You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 521-5207 or kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @srcitybeat.