City Council Update 7.19.22

City Council Update 7.19.22: Audio automatically transcribed by Sonix

City Council Update 7.19.22: this wav audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.

Steve:
Welcome to a Redding City Council update for full details on each of the items covered or to watch the meeting online. Visit the city of Redding dot org or find the links in the episode show notes for any questions, suggestions or comments. Please Email [email protected].

Kim:
This is Kim Niemer, your Community Services director and I'm reporting out on our meeting from last night, Tuesday, July 19. So we started off with a presentation by the Economic Development Corporation of Shasta County President Todd Jones. So Todd, report out some really exciting news about recruits that they are soliciting to bring their businesses and grow businesses in Shasta County. The EDC has been very active in the recruitment of new flights to the airport and properties out of the Stillwater Park. And so they are continuing their good work and he highlighted that activity to kick off the meeting. Moving along, we went to the consent agenda. So the consent calendar has items that are not discussed individually. They are approved as a group. And so I'm going to highlight a few of those items because it's a it's a long list this week, specifically that two big affordable housing projects were funded. One is Lowden lane senior apartments project for almost $2 million to go towards that project. The other was the Center of Hope Phase one project, which was $2.3 million for at-risk young adults. So those will be building new affordable housing in our community. We also approved an agreement with Tesla to add some parking spaces over by the Sundial Bridge. So that will move to construction hopefully by the end of the year. We are seeing a lot of electric vehicles and the need, especially around our tourism sites, to accommodate them and have them come and stay Redding to dine and shop while they're charging up.

Kim:
Is is a good, good plan. In case you didn't know, July is parks and recreation month so we have a ton going on here Redding Recreation the pools open fantasy fountain is flowing, we've got camps going so check out Reddingrecreation.org for things you might like to do. They awarded a big project for Bechelli Lane improvements. It's going to add bike lanes and resurfacing and some roundabouts. It was almost a $10 million project and was awarded to a good local firm Tullis. And the last item on the consent calendar was adopting a new job classification called park ranger. So we, the city police department and Parks have been talking about creating this assignment. It would be a Redding police officer who has the kind of specialty assignment of being the park ranger. Four new positions were approved a little while ago. And so this is their job description, which would be specific to enforcing and patrolling our parks, trails and open spaces. So we're very excited about that and hope to have them in place in the next couple of months. We had a few public hearings. These are annual public hearings to review maintenance districts. So we have almost 50 landscape maintenance districts in the city. These are the areas generally in front of subdivisions that are common area landscaping, and we have a contract with a private landscape service to maintain those and the cost of that is managed through this landscape maintenance district.

Kim:
So every year we have a budget put together that has the maintenance costs, the utility costs and some some project management. And then that number is reviewed and adopted by the City Council and then is forwarded to the county assessor because then those rates are applied to property tax rolls by the county. And if you're in one of these districts and you're wondering how much it costs and what do they do, there's an extensive attachment on the website under that item 6.2, and you can actually look up your district, you can see what the budget is and what the boundaries are. And if you have any questions, you're always encouraged to call us at 224-6100. In addition, there was a sewer live station district and we approved a new landscape maintenance district for a new subdivision off Hope Lane. So those public hearings are pretty routine, something we do every year. Then the bulk of the meeting was a few special reports, so we heard from Planning Manager Lily Toy on short-term rental regulations. And so the City Council had requested a presentation on. This a couple of months ago. This is an item that they follow carefully, both in terms of how is it working, but also how is our enforcement so that we know that the visitors are being good neighbors and also that the homeowners are paying hotel tax, which they're required to pay and get a license to operate a short term rental.

Kim:
So a lot of good work going on there. It's it's an evolving practice as trends with vacation rentals continue to come. We did have a few neighbors that came expressing concern about vacation rentals in their neighborhood, and particularly one that had a few in their neighborhood. So the city council has asked the planning manager to come back with some additional recommendations working through the Planning Commission to maybe strengthen some of those regulations. Also, the city attorney gave a lengthy presentation on the code enforcement activities, so that division was moved to the city's attorney's office about a year and a half ago. They're responsible, really, for taking these cases to court. And so that made a lot of sense. And so he highlighted some of the cases that they have processed and they involve basically kind of neglected, abandoned properties, unlicensed marijuana groves and grows as well as other just litter and hoarding and things like that. So very interesting. That's a busy group. And as he did mention that the enforcement activity is on a complaint basis. So if you are wondering why somebody isn't addressing a concern that you have, it really is up to residents to place that that complaint, to get that action going. The city isn't out sort of randomly looking for codes to enforce. So interesting meeting. Encourage you to watch the videos if you want to learn more.

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