Month: October 2019

COBB AREA COUNCIL
PUBLIC MEETING
Thursday September 19, 2019,
6:30-8:30pm NOTE NEW START TIME
Little Red Schoolhouse/Cobb Mountain Lions Club
15780 Bottle Rock Rd., Cobb, CA 95426
Draft Meeting minutes by Cindy Leonard
• CALL TO ORDER (shut down cell phones; sign in please) 6:05
Roll Call: Cindy Leonard Secretary, Cathy McCarthy arrived late, Jessica Pyska, Eliot Hurwitz Chair, Frank Lincoln Treasurer, Jake Strickler arrived 6:40, Alternate
28 community members present
• Approval of Minutes from August, no comments Magdalena motions to approve, Michael Davies second
SHORT ANNOUNCEMENTS
-Glenneth announces the Cobb Open Studios on October 26 and 27th, 9 art studios will be open and there will be a website soon.
Sunday September 29th lobster boil at Lion’s Club.
Dave says he has a couple of people creating a website called “CobbWebb” for local events. Look for it soon.
Madeline says Tuesday night the South Lake Fire Station voted to give their two old generators to the MUSD and also to Little Red Community Center. Eliot states that there will be a GoFundMe site when we put together all the quotes for the installation of the generator at Little Red to cover installation costs.
TREASURER’S REPORT Frank reports that there is currently $9,745.00 in the Cobb Area Council checking account, taking in to consideration the outstanding bills. We are transferring all the accounting into a new Quicken program, so we will have exact amounts next month, but these are pretty close figures:
General Fund
$3,000.00 Calpine Donation
1,100.68 misc expenses
1,899.32
Cobb Safe
$1,800.00 Donations
25.64 remaining SSCRA
1,000.00 Rebuild North Bay Donation
-2,251.91 expenses 2 years
$ 573.73
Wilder Than Wild
$600.00 donation NCO
448.00 event donations
-886.64 expenses
$161.31
Cobb Resilient
$4,000.00 Rebuild North Bay donation
2,000.00 Calpine donation
$6,000.00
Blackberry Cobbler Festival
$2924.86 (estimated remaining)
T-shirt fundraiser
need to find out what we owe John Carlisi
We still have shirts to sell, so not quite break even yet
Economic Development general fund
$1,300 Calpine donation
PUBLIC and BOARD COMMENT ON NON-AGENDA ITEMS (3 mins./individual)
Mel states radios are still available for anyone who would like to purchase them. There is a prototype for the mesh network still being tested. We need 3 locations to get started. Ultimately we would like to have 10 locations. It is about $140 each. CAVERN.mobi is where you could go to find a wordpress site with information. It is like rooftop wifi network. The goal is to have a dense mesh, no longer than 200 yards between the nodes.
Inez said that she had elevated levels of lead in her system as a result of wildfire smoke. After several treatments, lead is now pulled out of her system. She also had water and soil tests done and it looks good.
Supervisor’s Comments: not present
Community Reports:
Cindy update on potential ideas for contributing to the Little Red Schoolhouse maintenance fund and also funding the CAC General Fund. She suggests that the Cobb Area Council pays $30 per month to the Lions Club for the use of Little Red and that this comes out of the CAC general fund. Because there is currently no fundraiser or income source for the CAC general fund, she is proposing that for each event that the CAC does, we put $100 into the general fund for “Administration”. For example, when we have Cobb Safe or the Blackberry Cobbler Festival, one of the expenses would be $100 into the general fund. That way we don’t have to figure out a new fundraiser to fund the general fund.
Other expenses that come out of our general fund are: $54/year post office box rental, website fees, tax preparation, checking expenses, etc. If we add $30/month contribution to Little Red, our annual general expenses would be around $600.
Cindy asked for community members to think about this and then we can put it on the October agenda to discuss and vote on these ideas.
Cindy reports that she and Magdalena have been working on planning the Cobb Resilient event that will be held on October 19th at Cobb Elementary School. There are lots of speakers and there will also be the catered lunch where the Firewise groups can meet and plan. Look for banners and posters around town promoting this event.
Many community members commented that PGE has been cutting trees and not removing the brush, creating a very dangerous fire hazard. Anyone who has this on their property should write to the supervisors and to PGE.
Economic Development Committee updates:
Konocti Challenge on October 5th cheer station was an idea, but this year they are not coming to this end of the county.
Jessica states that the issue of area plans came up at the supervisor’s meeting. She stated that updating the Cobb Area Plan was one of the priorities when the CAC was formed. We understand that the resources at the county are stretched so we want to help facilitate the process. The CAC and MATH have the updating of the area plans as part of the bylaws.
Rob was concerned that the Area Plans still have not been updated, so he instructed Community Development to start working on the area plans. The supervisors will put it on the agenda.
Jake and Jessica had a meeting in the spring with Lars Ewing with public works regarding building a park in Cobb. Lars recommended that we wait for our park visioning for the November meeting. We need to talk about what the community wants for a community park. Mariette took part in the August visioning (about other Lake County parks) and she hopes the people who helped with that one can help with ours here on Cobb. The visioning process here will be up to Rob Brown and Lars
August 24 Blackberry COBBler Festival Report
Jessica says we were very happy that over 1,000 people showed up and we sold out of everything. We made about $3,000 and have begun planning for next year.
Cobb Mt. Economic Development Planning Grant
We have just been notified that we are receiving the Fire Recovery grant of $200,000 to create a strategic plan for the Cobb business development.
Goals of this grant:
-implement a strategy
-build a bridge
-navigate our challenges
-concrete results to regenerate the Cobb community, stronger than ever
Four components to the grant: community assessment, development analysis by the CDS, Small business revolving loan fund, and to establish a Cobb Area Merchants Association.
A final report will be put together as a supplement to the Lake County Economic Development plan.
We will measure and evaluate success. We will get a baseline assessment and then a post-project measurement.
Timeline:
Part 1 Sept 19-Feb 20 Meetings with community, survey, maps
Part 2 March 20-Sept 20
Part 3 Jan 20-March 21
Part 4 Oct 20-March 21
Part 5 Nov ’20 – March ’21 Draft and print Cobb Mountain Economic Development Strategy document
Reports on this project will be given at each CAC meeting. The funds will be at Community First Credit Union, separate from the CAC funds that are at Bank of the West.
We were one of five awards that were given in a tri- state area.
Robert Stark reported that several employees of the Cobb Area Water Company went to the town of Paradise to help them repair water systems for two weeks, just like other water companies had come to Cobb to repair our water system after the Valley Fire. In Paradise they previously had over 10,000 homes and now they have about 1,500 homes.
Motion to adjourn Rich, seconded Robert at 8:05p.m.