New year, same issues — Santa Rosa dealing with rent control, homelessness

In its first meeting of 2017, the new Santa Rosa City Council today is set to grapple with two issues that bedeviled the old one in 2016 - rent control and homelessness.

All signs point to the council calling for a special election June 6 on the question of whether Santa Rosa should have rent control and protections for renters.

The council passed its rent control law in August, but it remains suspended following a successful September petition drive to block it.

Now it has a choice. It can either repeal the controversial new law, which seeks to cap many rent increases at 3 percent per year and provide various other renter protections, or let the voters decide the law's fate.

Repeal seems unlikely, given that the two new faces on the council, Chris Rogers and Jack Tibbetts, have expressed qualified support for the policy.

Mayor Chris Coursey, a strong proponent of the city's policy, predicted the council “will likely call for a June ballot measure to affirm a rent-control ordinance for our city.”

In a statement, Coursey said there would be “big-money opposition,” and said such an effort “can only be countered by a strong grass-roots campaign” in which he urged residents to participate.

Because the petition wasn't validated by elections officials until late December, the earliest date the council can call for a special election is June 6.

The city staff is recommending June 6 for two reasons.

The first is that it will bring closure to the issue as soon as possible for the city and the community. Second, the city is also considering the June 6 election for a cannabis tax, and placing both items on the ballot could save money compared to calling two separate special elections.

Putting additional issues on an exist ballot is less expensive than calling an election for a single issue, explained Santa Rosa City Clerk Daisy Gomez.

A one-issue special election would cost about $403,785, but adding a second question will cost an additional $89,730. That means a June 6 with both issues on the ballot would cost about $493,515.

The cheapest solution would be to just put them both on the Nov. 6, 2018 ballot - the next scheduled election - which would cost about $134,595 each or $271,000, Gomez said.

But waiting that long would risk losing more than a year of potential revenue from the proposed cannabis tax, Gomez said.

The city's increasingly visible homeless problem is also likely to flare up Tuesday as the city prepares to extend the homeless emergency for the sixth time, including considering changes to a program designed to allow private groups like churches to serve the homeless.

The Community Housing Assistance Program allows groups with properties zoned as “meeting facilities” to let people sleep overnight in their cars or camp on their properties under organized programs.

The city views the program as a promising way to encourage private groups to help solve the city's homelessness problem.

But the first group seeking to establish such a legal encampment, the First United Methodist Church, has run into virulent opposition from residents of the neighborhood surrounding its Stony Point Road campus.

That, as well as concerns about large number of homeless people huddling under Highway 101 overpasses in downtown, have increased pressure on the council to broaden the program.

This includes expanding the program beyond “meeting facilities” to include commercial properties.

It also could mean having the city get involved in the process of notifying neighbors about new CHAP sites, a process that some have called flawed. And the question of whether city-owned properties or buildings should be used for encampments or expanded shelters is also likely to come up again. Some residents opposed to the First United Methodists' plans have called it hypocritical for the city to ask their neighborhood to host a homeless encampment when the city has offered none of its numerous public properties for that purpose.

Examples of potential sites identified by city staff include the National Guard Armory near Santa Rosa Junior College, Veterans Memorial Building on Maple Avenue, former Fire Station 5 on Parker Hill Road, or city parks and parking lots.

Several residents of the West End, Railroad Square and St. Rose neighborhoods gathered at the Catholic Charities support center on A Street last week to air a variety of safety and sanitation issues raised by downtown area residents.

Several people expressed frustration that the city and the county seemed to be making excuses for why they couldn't use their properties to expand services. The county's resistance to using the 117-acre Chanate complex due to alleged earthquake risks or the city's hesitation to using the former fire station on Parker Hill Road due to accessibility concerns were both cited as examples of local governments failing to take more meaningful action to address the problem.

You can reach Staff Writer Kevin McCallum at 707-521-5207 or kevin.mccallum@pressdemocrat.com.