Preview: December 11, 2024 Reno City Council meeting

Up for consideration: a new ordinance to regulate use of public spaces; the potential appointment of a new City Manager; next steps for the Lear Theater & more

The theme of today’s Brief might be “whiplash.” The Reno City Council will next meet on Wednesday, December 11th, and a number of the actions they’ll be considering seem to have appeared quite suddenly with no or little warning, including the introduction of a new City ordinance enabling far more aggressive policing of public spaces, and the potential appointment to Reno City Manager of an individual who wasn’t even a candidate for the position five days ago. We’ll also be getting an update on the Lear, for which City Council may dictate some key next steps.

Your participation and engagement in one or more of these substantive issues can significantly aid the discussion and deliberations, so please consider contributing your thoughts. But let’s start with some updates from last week’s Council meeting.

---

Updates from the December 4th Reno City Council meeting

You can find the City’s official highlights from the December 4^th meeting here. The status of the Reno Police Department and discussion of a possible noise ordinance were covered in two very thorough articles by This is Reno (which you can read if you register for the site, so please do and consider purchasing a full subscription):

• “Reno police chief highlights challenges, goals” (Kelsey Penrose, 12/6/24)

• “Is Downtown Reno too noisy? Residents say yes, but business owners want noise accommodations.” (Kelsey Penrose, 12/8/24).

That latter article provides an nuanced look at one of the central discussions concerning downtown Reno right now, and reveals the complexities of formulating policies to navigate the varied interests there (and in MidTown and elsewhere, too).

The question of how to deal with excessive noise is revealed not as a polarized issue pitting residents against business operators, as some might think—far from it. Rather, cooler heads agree that tackling the issue in a responsible way will require working together to distinguish between types and sources of noise and how to measure it as well as who it impacts (and in what way) and then determine in a thoughtful (and political and technical) way how to address it. This is a conversation with a deep need for collaboration and warrants reading beyond the headlines to fully appreciate.

From the This is Reno article:

“…downtown resident Gary Cecil said the way the city is measuring does not take into account vibrations caused by the music because they are measuring it on an incompatible scale….According to Cecil, the city evaluates noise using a measurement called the A scale. He said if the city switched to measuring with the C scale they would find a very different range of measurements showing that the decibel level primarily caused by bass — often amplified at live music events — is significantly higher than what the A scale range is able to show.

Cecil told This Is Reno there are 16 major U.S. cities that use the C scale for their noise ordinances, including San Francisco, Atlanta, Minneapolis, Pittsburgh, Orlando and Roseville [and] he has encouraged Reno to switch to that scale to be in line with those cities and more accurately measure the impact of concert noise.”

As Cecil explains, those “big booming bass bumps” or “b4” noise generated by many of the events at outdoor venues like J Resort’s Glow Plaza require measurements of the C scale in order to accurately assess their impact, something that’s important to acknowledge and address, particularly with the prospect of additional outdoor live entertainment venues downtown. I’m looking forward to this continued conversation.

---

Preview: December 11, 2024 Reno City Council meeting

This week’s Council agenda, which you can access here, is a packed one, befitting their final scheduled meeting of the year. I can’t highlight and contextualize it all, so be sure to peruse for yourself. Here are a few more items that I’m not discussing at length (there are more beyond these) and most include additional materials accessible from the agenda, but I’ll just link to the Staff Reports, which provide an overview (and just a heads-up that the City website seems to be loading a bit slowly right now):

• B.11 - Approval of artist Mike Burke for the City Hall Outdoor Art Project in an amount not to exceed $90,000

  

  Rendering from Mike Burke’s proposal to the City of Reno

• B.12 - Resolution to give Notice of the Sale of Properties subject to the Lien of a Delinquent Assessment (initiation of foreclosure). Interestingly, Reno City Center is said to have “a total of 42 delinquent parcels totaling $251,390.64 for which bankruptcy proceedings are underway; therefore the City Center properties are not included on this item and will follow the bankruptcy process.”

• C.1 - Arrowleaf Zoning Map Amendment

• C.2 - Ordinance to adopt an updated Title 18 (Zoning Code Clean-Up)

• D.5 - Downtown updates for the month of October 2024

• D.7 and D.8 - Agreements and contracts related to wildlife fencing

Now on to my detailed highlights.

---

The search for a new Reno City Manager is…over?

Item D. 4 - Presentation, discussion, and potential appointment of Jackie Bryant as City Manager and potential approval of the City Manager Employment Agreement

As I reported last week, City Council received an update on December 4 from Bob Murray & Associates, the recruiting firm they hired to conduct the national search for a new Reno City Manager. I expressed concern that the report did not actually provide an indication of what that update would be, which made what actually happened even more of a shock (at least to this viewer).

Turns out, multiple City Councilmembers had—completely independent of each other—told the recruiter in private conversations a few weeks ago, when he was presenting them with four finalists, that they actually would prefer to permanently hire Interim City Manager (Assistant City Manager) Jackie Bryant, who they explicitly knew was not a candidate and who had stated for the record back in June that she was not interested in the position. Here’s some media coverage of last week’s discussion:

• “Reno pauses city manager search to consider interim leader Jackie Bryant” (News4Reno, 12/5/24)

• “Council rejects recruiter’s city manager candidates despite $75,000 cost to find them, instead offers job to interim manager who did not apply and did not want it” (Kelsey Penrose, This is Reno, 12/5/24)

You can watch the whole item here. It took about 28 minutes, start to finish, and ended with a unanimous decision to pause the national search and place the potential appointment of Jackie Bryant as Reno’s next City Manager on this Wednesday’s agenda (here’s the Staff Report).

Of course, Interim City Managers get hired all the time for the permanent job, but I think it’s safe to say that that’s usually when they actually apply for it, subjecting themselves to the same process as any other candidate. Here, Bryant would be appointed to run the City without applying, without being interviewed, without laying out what she would retain or change from the former administration, and without her full credentials even being presented to the public or compared with those of anyone else. In terms of public process for a hiring at this level, this might be unprecedented.

And yet no one batted an eyelash, even as Mayor Schieve turned directly to Ms. Bryant (who had remained on the dais the entire time, even when the conversation turned to appointing her permanently) and said, “The sentiment out there is that you are absolutely tremendous….I don’t think there’s anyone better….You’re strong, you’re talented, you’re smart, you’re beautiful; what more could we want in a city manager?” That’s not “pausing” the national search; it’s grinding it into the ground.

What troubles me about this from a process perspective (my concerns are procedural not personal) is that Council had a very specific discussion about this back in June, when Mayor Schieve expressed her preference for a local candidate (in the abstract), and then-Councilmember Jenny Brekhus laid out the need for Council to clearly decide what it wanted and then stick to it, since in prior searches they had said they wanted an experienced City Manager and then hired people without that background.

Brekhus went on to point out that if they appointed an Interim City Manager from inside the organization, that could work against the message that the City wanted to “do it like big cities do it” and find an experienced big-city manager, by presenting a subcontext that “we want to hometown this.” In response, the recruiter said this:

“In the broader context, I think it’s really important that we get the message out to the candidate pool that this is an open recruitment and you folks clearly want to get the best candidate possible. And somehow, sometimes that message can get blurred if the word on the street becomes ‘Oh, they want somebody local’ or the word on the street is ‘Well, they’ve appointed an ACM as the Acting or Interim and they’ve got the inside track.’ So my job as a recruiter is to do the best I can to let them know that ‘hey, we’re not cheap. They wouldn’t have hired us if they didn’t want to do a recruitment and really see what’s the best thing out there.’

But there’s things Council can do to help with that, and that’s just be careful about the things that you say during the recruitment process. I’ll give you an example—I’ve had mayors comment on what a great job an Assistant City Manager was doing in the interim role, and how fantastic they were. It seems pretty innocuous, right? But it was a public statement, and so all the candidates were saying, ‘We don’t even have a shot.’ Right? So I would say, refrain from making those kinds of comments and let’s refrain from suggesting that ‘we’re going inside’ or ‘we’re going local’ or anything like that, right? Because those are the things that can affect the candidate pool.”

In the very next meeting, Ms. Bryant was presented as the sole option to serve as Interim City Manager (Mayor Schieve said she had left that decision up to departing CM Doug Thornley), and was praised effusively by multiple Councilmembers, who supposedly felt that such praise would not violate the recruiter’s advice, since Bryant was definitely “not interested in the long-term appointment”—a fact that from what I can tell was revealed (at least to the public) for the first time by Councilmember Reese.

Bryant’s disinterest in the permanent position was a critical piece of information, since ostensibly an Interim CM could be praised without limit (which is what happened then and all summer and fall) as long as they weren’t an actual candidate. And yet Councilmember Reese acted strangely offended when Councilmember Ebert asked him the pivotal (and innocuous) question of precisely how he knew Ms. Bryant wasn’t interested (to which he replied that he had asked her). Ms. Bryant herself ended up making the unequivocal statement, “I have indicated and I will state for the record that I am not interested in a long-term position.” That was June.

She hadn’t changed her mind by August 14, 2024, the last time the public had an update on the search, when Council approved the final recruitment brochure and job description, and she had until November 3rd (the recruiter’s stated application deadline) to officially throw her hat into the ring, which she did not. (I also feel compelled to point out, looking back at this history, that Sabra Newby was paid an annual salary of $230,000 when she resigned in 2020, and Doug Thornley’s departing salary was listed as $357,988, which Council decided to start paying Bryant in June).

So here we are. As Wednesday’s Staff Report says, “Staff is seeking an appointment of Jackie Bryant as the next City Manager for the City of Reno and potential approval of the City Manager Employment Agreement effective December 11, 2024” at a base salary of $368,728.46. We’re of course up against a deadline now, since state law requires the position of City Manager to be filled within six months of its vacancy, in this case by January 7, 2025—one day after the next scheduled City Council meeting. So I guess the upshot is that despite what you may have assumed five days ago, we are likely not getting a new City Manager from outside the organization or the city and residents will likely never know who actually applied for the job or have an opportunity to compare, discuss, or weigh in.

---

Next Steps for the Lear Theater

Item D. 6 - Presentation of Lear Theater/First Church of Christ, Scientist Historic Structure Report and discussion and possible direction for next steps for the Lear Theater/First Church of Christ, Scientist located at 501 Riverside Drive.

The historic First Church of Christ, Scientist building (Lear Theater) got a flurry of media coverage last week, as news spread that the ARPA funds previously designated for its security, fencing, and landscaping had to be reallocated due to lack of any bids to perform the work. You can read some of that coverage here:

• “Reno reallocates funds after failed bid for Lear Theater renovation” (News4Reno, 12/6/24)

• “Lear Theater undergoes historic structures report; no access recommended” (2 News Nevada, 12/3/24)

This week, City Council will be presented the contents of the Historic Structure Report and asked to consider the recommendations of the Historical Resources Commission, outlined in the Staff Report here and by me here. They include prioritizing stabilization of the building and beginning a community engagement process to assess the need and/or desire for the two primary options presented in the report: a theater with permanent amphitheater seating or a flat-floor cultural center.

The HRC’s recommendations did not include issuing a Request for Proposals to solicit outside ideas or partners for the property at this time, and yet there it is in the Staff Report and in various media reports in which Assistant City Manager Ashley Turney “expressed hope for finding a partner to help preserve it.”

This RFP idea keeps cropping back up unexpectedly, whether generated by City staff or someone on City Council, and I find it incredibly premature. We are fully engaged in a public process here, in possession of a detailed report that has yet to be read or discussed by the broader community. The advantage and obligation of public ownership is to finally put residents at the center of discussions of what this building will become. It’s not harmless to issue an RFP to just “see what happens”—it diminishes the public process that is finally underway. Once there’s a consensus and a plan, issuing an RFP to implement it (or, if the two presented options are deemed unworkable, to generate other ideas) could be a fruitful avenue. But let’s not jump the gun here. Get the building secured and let’s let the public process run its course.

I’d also like to suggest that perhaps the City of Reno could start looking into designating a certain amount of room tax to provide an ongoing revenue stream for its public historic preservation efforts, as it does for public art. Worth discussing?

---

A possible new City ordinance prohibiting sitting, lying, sleeping, or camping in public places

Items E.1, E.2, E.3, and E.4 - Revising City Ordinances related to sitting, lying, sleeping, or camping on public places including, but not limited to, sidewalks, streets, alleys, sensitive areas, or within doorways prohibited

An explanation of these items can be found in the Staff Report for E.1 here. According to the Report, this ordinance introduction emerged from direction provided by Council during the downtown update at the November 13, 2024 Council meeting:

As the report indicates, this ordinance is being introduced as an “update” following the U.S. Supreme Court decision in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson. The Staff Report explains that in the wake of that ruling, cities across the Ninth Circuit have begun to “update” their laws, and that the City of Reno has decided to base its updated ordinance on one passed this summer by the City of Fresno, California. KQED called Fresno’s ordinance “one of California’s most aggressive,” so I think it’s worth reading about the adoption of the Fresno ordinance and its aftermath:

• “Fresno Rolls Out One of California’s Most Aggressive Camping Bans” (Vanessa Rancaño, KQED, 9/23/24)

• “‘Where the hell can we go?’ Fresno’s unhoused residents brace for arrests ahead of new laws” (Pablo Orihuela and Omar Shaikh Rashad, Fresnoland, 9/13/2024)

• “Fresno arrests 139 under new law against illegal camping” (Brianna Willis, abc30, 10/18/24)

And just published yesterday in the Fresno Bee is this article with more stats and info:

• “Anti-camping law forces Fresno’s homeless to move. With no shelter beds, where do they go?” (Tim Sheehan, The Fresno Bee, 12/8/24)

It’s interesting to note that another initiative for which Reno did not use Fresno as a model is something mentioned in many of those articles: its use of millions in federal CARES Act funds to acquire multiple motels and convert them into shelter and affordable housing through California’s Project Homekey. You can read about that in “Inside one city’s multimillion-dollar effort to convert motels into affordable housing” (Melissa Montalvo, CalMatters.org, 7/7/21).

Please be sure to scan the rest of the December 11 Council agenda for items of interest to you. If you want to comment on any of them, you can attend in person beginning at 10am or virtually by registering here. Comments can be delivered in person, by submitting an online public comment form at Reno.Gov/PublicComment; (2) emailing Publiccomment@reno.gov; (3) leaving a voicemail at 775-393-4499; or 4) participating in the meeting via Zoom.

As indicated on the agenda, comments must be received by 4pm on Tuesday to be provided to Council in advance of the 10am Wednesday meeting.

Also consult the Current and Upcoming Meetings page for additional city meetings.

---

News Digest: The latest in local urban development

The announcement of a new Master Plan for Rancho San Rafael Regional Park prompted concern from some in the community, particularly those affiliated with the Balloon Races, about how proposed changes might impact that and other events:

• “Washoe County Statement on the Rancho San Rafael Master Park Plan Update” (Candee Ramos, Washoe County, 11/27/24)

• “Rancho San Rafael plan goes back for review after Balloon Races board criticism” (Jaedyn Young, Reno Gazette-Journal, 12/3/24)

And lastly, some miscellaneous development-related news items from across the area:

• “Major U.S. 395 North Valleys project nearly halfway complete, NDOT officials say” (Ben Margiott, News4Reno, 12/3/24)

• “UNR is only site still under consideration for new Reno VA hospital, officials say” (Ben Margiott, News4Reno, 11/5/24)

• “UNR, the only bidder left, expected to be site of new VA hospital” (Siobhan McAndrew, Reno Gazette-Journal, 12/9/24)

• “Indoor running track facility opens at Reno-Sparks Convention Center” (This is Reno, 12/6/24)

• “Union Pacific to dismantle Sparks landmark, offers bricks to preserve history” (Kenneth Dunn, News4Reno, 12/6/24)

• “Input sought for Wilkinson Park playground makeover” (This is Reno, 12/8/24)

That’s all I have for this week. If you have any comments on this week’s City Council items, it would be a good idea to submit them as early as possible. Have a good one!

---

Be sure to check out my Citizen Guide for helpful resources and links for anyone hoping to become more informed and engaged in issues related to urban development (& more) in Reno.

---

You can view this and prior newsletters on my Substack site, subscribe to receive each new edition in your email inbox, and follow the Brief (and contribute to the ongoing conversation) on X, Facebook & Instagram. If you feel inspired to contribute, you may purchase a paid subscription through Substack or contribute via Venmo at @Dr-Alicia-Barber or via check to Alicia Barber at P.O. Box 11955, Reno, NV 89510.