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LongBeachCC_08112020_20-0747

Speaker 0: Thank you. With that, we're going to go and move to the hearing aid. Can you please call with the U.N.. Speaker 2: Report from Development Services recommendation to receive supporting documentation into the record. Include the public hearing, declare ordinance approving a zone change. Read the first time lead over to the next regular meeting of the City Council for final reading and approve a site plan review to allow the construction of 18 for sale. Three story townhomes located at 4800 Long Beach Boulevard, District eight. Speaker 0: Thank you. I was trying to develop the service staff. Speaker 4: Thank you, Vice Mayor. Members of the city council. Mr. Koonce is here to give you a brief presentation. Good evening. Members of the Council. Agenda item number eight as well as agenda item number nine are two important projects in Council Member Austin's district. I'm particularly excited and we should all be excited about these projects because they represent what's called missing middle housing, which is housing that is accessible to working folks in our community, that is built at a higher density than a single family home, but is of an elegant size and density that blends well into our existing communities, such as the corridor of Long Beach Boulevard. In this case, this is a former redevelopment property that's been vacant since 2013. It's been discussed for development since as early as 2007. So the community has been incredibly patient in this project moving forward. It's located in the Adams neighborhood of the Greater North Long Beach area near the Union Pacific Railroad, right of way between 49th and the railroad. The two adjacent properties are also zoned K and have single family homes. The area surrounding the property is a mix of multi-family as well as single family residences. What's proposed here are 18 townhouses. There will be three bedroom, three bath units located in buildings over the 48,000 square foot site. The buildings are oriented towards Long Beach Boulevard with a generous amount of landscaping, as well as some townhomes facing the corridor. And there's a third building with two additional units behind the primary building. That project in front of council involves a number of planning actions. Zone change from K to are four an as well as a zone change on adjacent lots from K to our three T, which will provide a consistent pattern of development. It also includes a passing tentative track map. This will subdivide the parcel and allow for a subdivision airspace. These are ownership units, which is an important benefit of this project. The Planning Commission previously approved this project and the staff site plan review approval occurred back on December 11th of 2019. When the Planning Commission heard this item on June 18th, there was nothing but positive comments from the public and from the commission themselves. So with that, that concludes the staff report and I'm glad to answer any questions on this item. Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Consider us and this is your end. Would you like to speak on it? Speaker 3: Yes. Thank you very much. And I just want to say thank you to our city staff, particularly our Development Services Department, for their presentation and their diligent work on this project, as well as our economic development department, who is overseeing the sale of these properties. I also like to thank City Ventures for their work and their partnership. And while we have two separate hearings this evening, one for the 4800 block of Long Beach Boulevard and the other for the 5100 block of Long Beach Boulevard. Many of my comments will pertain to both proposed developments. These projects have been in the works for a very long time, has been mentioned. These two locations were acquired by the city's redevelopment agency and most of the previous uses were cleared more than a decade ago with the intent to build more housing along the corridor. When the state eliminated redevelopment in 2011, the city could not move forward with any name for a few years until going through a process and getting a long range property management plan approved by the state of California for former redevelopment properties. Finally, four years ago in 2016, we approved the purchase and sale agreement with City Ventures to develop housing on these two sites. Since that time, City Ventures has developed plans, made numerous time with the community and nearby neighborhood associations, and engaged in many discussions with development services and economic development teams about parking and open space requirements and how they will have the housing cancel out. They were also preparation for seaboard environmental documents before I went to the Planning Commission where it was unanimously recommended. I believe at the end of the day we will have a great project that will bring new for sale housing that is desperately needed while transforming Lombard Boulevard. The corridor in Virginia Village. These developments will build 56 new net zero energy homes. That means the development is fully electric, reduced rooftop solar panels with the and will provide energy used on site. This is the type of sustainable, responsible housing development we should be encouraging throughout our city. We also have significant need for new housing, including homeownership opportunities. These townhomes will allow family families to become first time homebuyers. The staff report mentions there is an expressed need to satisfy a local shortage for units for larger families, which is three bedroom townhomes will address. We witnessed this demand for such housing when 131 new homes were just built all down the street from this project at the Riverdale, and they were sold in a record time just last year. Again, I want to thank everybody who is involved in making this happen, and particularly the city ventures for spending time and engaging the community , including when we shared a virtual town hall just two weeks ago. I received positive feedback. Many residents were asking to be put on the list when they go on the market, which leads me to one question for the applicant. If this project is approved. Speaker 0: This Boston, you have one main issue. Speaker 3: This is a presentation. Okay. But I do have a question. How soon do we expect to have be able to break ground on this project when this after this vote this evening? And is somebody available to answer that question? Either way, since my time is moving, I like to move to close the public hearing. Adopt a mitigated negative negative declaration, declare the ordinance approving a zone change. Read the first time laid over the next regular meeting and approve a site plan review. Tentative track map to allow for construction of 18 three storey townhomes and 4800 block of London School of Art. Speaker 0: Thank you. Speaker 3: Gasping on that is my motion. Speaker 0: Yes. Yes. Do we have a second? You it. You second this motion. Speaker 3: USA. USA seconded the motion. Speaker 0: Do you want to speak on issue? Speaker 3: As a council member. Austin said it all very, very well. Thank you. Speaker 0: Okay, Brian, is there any other excuse me, Councilwoman Richardson would like speak also? I'm sorry. I was just giving up the second set of complaint that councilwoman up. Right. Speaker 1: And I was just queuing up 2 seconds. Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you. I think everyone, we have any public comment on this that. Speaker 4: We do have public comment online, but we have. Can you tell the applicant? Do you have anything to add? Speaker 5: Our senior vice president can hear me. Okay. Speaker 0: Yes. Speaker 5: This is temporary to tell senior vice president of development for City Ventures. I just wanted to say we are so excited to get going on these projects. We have been working on them for several years. And, you know, following the success of our Hudson project, we think these are going to be absolutely fantastic. And we have construction drawings, to answer your question, ready to go into plan Czech in September. And so we will be processing our plans through the city and hoping to get going on the projects as early as early next year. Speaker 0: Great. Thank you. Thank you very much. We have a first and second grade. Could you please cover for the vote? Speaker 2: District one. I district to. I District three. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 2: District Court. Speaker 0: I. Speaker 1: District five i. Speaker 2: District six. Speaker 0: And. Speaker 2: Seven. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 2: District eight. District nine. Speaker 5: All right. Speaker 2: Chris. Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Now we're going to move on to item of the hearing excuse me here at 9:00. Could you please cover the hearing? But I'll start with you and administer this hearing.

Ordinance

Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Use District Map of the City of Long Beach as said Map has been established and amended by amending portions of Part 22 of said Map from CCA (Community Commercial Automobile-oriented) to R-4-N (Medium-Density, Multiple Residential) and CCA (Community Commercial Automobile-Oriented) to R-3-T (Multi-family Residential, Townhouse), read and adopted as read. (District 8)

LongBeachCC

LongBeachCC_08112020_20-0751

Speaker 0: Thank you very much, Greg. Okay, with that, we're going to go and move to item 14. But before I turn this over to the two staff, I'm going to ask Councilman Richardson if he would like to open it up discussion for us. Absolutely. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I have some comments, a little bit of the introduced as they are under 5 minutes, Mr. Vice Mayor. So first, I want to acknowledge that earlier this summer we heard the voices of thousands of our residents in our streets declaring that Black Lives Matter and demanding change, changes like reprioritizing our budget to invest in our community. In June, the Long Beach City Council adopted the Framework for reconciliation. That opened up a dialog and how we can acknowledge, listen, convene and ultimately catalyze a plan to create a more equitable, resilient city. You know, thanks to our Cosigners Vice Mayor Andrews, Councilman Austin, Councilmember Pierce, I think every resident and stakeholder participated. They shared their vision for a more inclusive city. I also want to thank the community members that participated in this process and the staff that organized this, the steps of the framework, and the third party facilitators who was who assisted like Theresa Chandler, Wynn Manning, Katie Balderas, Kelly Colby and Tom Modica. Third party facilitators like Carl Kemp, Chris Wilson, Dr. Amber Johnson and Dr. Joanie Riggs. Oh, and so. So how did we get here? So we're facing a crisis on three fronts that really exacerbates disparities. So we we have a COVID 19 pandemic. We have severe hospitalizations and deaths for black residents and brown residents. And people of color are disproportionately impacted. We're facing an economic crisis that has significant job losses, and we're at war two Great Depression levels and significant barriers to capital and opportunity for for our businesses. And, you know, with the murder of George Floyd and the countless list of individuals who've been killed at the hands of law enforcement as well as vigilantes, we've seen civil unrest in cities all around the world, in places including Long Beach. And so this these patterns of disparity that have happened by accident, I think there was all the systems and systems are laced with values based on race and gender values of policymakers and influencers. And this moment demands that we take a critical look at the persistent health and economic disparities within our city and understand how public institutions perpetuate inequities so that we can lead meaningful systems change. The Long Beach City Council initiated this process by declaring racism a public health crisis. And this plan is an appropriate response to that crisis. So the new model for a modern and resilient city is one that prioritizes public health and it prioritizes public health and invests in inclusive economy and embraces racial equity as a superior growth model for our city. This comprehensive strategy will make sure Long Beach is stronger as we recover from the COVID 19 pandemic and place a racial equity lens on our government systems and ensure we focus on intentionally updating our policies, closing gaps, restoring public trust in our our local government , including our local police department. And to be clear, this is not the end of the process, but rather the beginning of a transformation. In addition to that, we have you know, we're at a place where we have to really look at this as a pivot, a pivoting point, sort of inflection point for our city, a moment where we can truly focus on a new model of a more resilient city that really embraces racial equity as a superior growth model. And this comprehensive strategy here will make Long Beach stronger and stronger as we recover. So as I close, I want to mention that I'm going I'm planning to come back and I'm hopeful. I'm hoping that through this, we can adequately, adequately address structural inequities that are black and brown residents experience. And that Long Beach can meet this moment by embracing racial equity as a core philosophy. I have some amendments I'll add after the staff report to ensure greater inclusion of our Latino and AAPI communities and some elements that that are not included here. And I just want to close with the words of John Lewis in his final essay that was published. That was publicized. It was published in The New York Times. And this this quote says, When you see something is not right, you must say something. You must do something. Democracy is not a state. It is an act. And each generation must do its part to help build what we call the what we call the beloved community, a nation, the world society with peace within itself. And with that, I want to acknowledge this is a very significant moment, and I want to hand it over at this point to city staff to present the Racial Equity and Reconciliation Initiative. Yeah. Speaker 6: Mr. Vice Mayor, are you ready for the staff report? Speaker 0: I am. Okay. Speaker 6: So, Mayor and City Council, we're here in front of you tonight to present to you the Racial Equity and Reconciliation Initiative initial report. This is going to be a fairly lengthy presentation to really go through what the team has been working on incredibly intensely for the last two months. Today is a really big day for us. We feel this is the biggest step forward in racial equity work in generations, and we're very proud to present what we heard. The process that we went through and then the recommendations that we have to bring forward tonight. It's important to note that this is an important step, but there's going to be many steps beyond this. Each of these items that you'll see is going to go through additional review and and implementation and plans and you'll be seeing this as we go forward, provided the Council gives us direction to move forward tonight. And so we'll have a two part presentation given by Teresa Chandler, our deputy city manager who's been leading this work, and Kelly Collopy, our director of Health and Human Services, Teresa. Speaker 1: Thank you, Tom. Good evening, honorable vice mayor and council members. This report was a collaborative effort in partnership with the city manager's office, the health department, many other departments who make up the citywide equity team and community partners and stakeholders. Before jumping into the report, I'd like to take a moment to reflect on how we got here into a moment, into a movement beyond anything many of us have ever experienced. In just 8 minutes and 46 seconds. George Floyd, a 46 year old black father, brother and grandfather, was killed at the hands of Minneapolis police officers. His death added to the collective pain our country feels over the tragic death of Breonna Taylor. Ammad Aubry and too many others who have lost their lives due to police violence against black people. Across the nation, including here in Long Beach, people took to the streets, to the streets to condemn racial injustice. Now more than ever, it is vital for our city to take this unprecedented moment to acknowledge and understand the persistent and exploitive effects that still exist within the government, economic and social systems designed to exclude black people and people of color within our history. Though progress has certainly been made. We can now take bold action to ensure racial equity is woven into the city fabric going forward. Racism is more than just a hateful slur or act of violence from one person to another. Systemic racism is embedded as normal practice within our society and organizations, leading to disparate outcomes for people of color in every aspect of our lives, from housing to health care. The criminal justice system. Education and politics. The facts are there have been racist policies and laws that date back to the birth of our country, starting with the colonization of indigenous land and the kidnaping and enslavement of Africans. Moving forward, racist policies have been upheld through the Jim Crow era Japanese internment camps, redlining, school segregation. The war on drugs. Anti-immigrant policies and mass incarceration. And that history has gotten us to this moment. On June 9th, the City Council engaged in an earnest conversation about racism as a public health crisis and the and the need to restore public trust in city government, including law enforcement unanimously. Council called upon staff to prepare a report that would put the city in a position to enact culture and system change through the framework for reconciliation. This framework includes four key steps to address systemic racism, and I will go into more detail about each step throughout the presentation. Acknowledging the existence and longstanding impacts of systemic racism in Long Beach and the country. Listening to accounts and experiences of racial injustice. Inequity of harm or harm to community members. Convening stakeholders to analyze feedback from the listening sessions and racial disparity data to recommend initiatives that shape policy, budgetary, charter, and programmatic reform. And finally, catalyzing action that includes immediate, short term, medium term and long term recommendation for the City Council's consideration. I don't want to overlook the significance of this moment for us as a city to be able to name racism as a public health crisis. To be able to pull together a team of equity champions from across departments. To embrace this initiative and move it forward. And to fully take on this huge charge with urgency so that we can work hand in hand with the community to change the system as we know it. Yet I don't want to sugarcoat or minimize how difficult this process was. There was deep pain, rawness and vulnerability in many of these community conversations and our efforts to move urgently through this process. We made mistakes along the way. We're not always trauma informed and in turn elicited more trauma and pain for many people. I want to acknowledge and apologize for these actions. Talking about racism in this country has never been easy, and I'm grateful for each person, community member and city staff who are speaking up and leaning into this process, even when it's not comfortable and often very painful to do so. We recognize this is only a starting place, acknowledging there is so much work to be done and committing to dismantling anti-black racism and achieving racial equity equity by way of this reconciliation process. Long Beach may not be able to directly fix the systemic problems across this nation, but we can set an example for what the United States should be and we should stand for. Excuse me. And we should stand for four. Given our diversity and willingness to take a stand for what we believe in, our vision is, is to create a united Long Beach, where race and ethnicity alone do not determine our social and economic outcomes. We see the framework as a starting place that opens the opportunity for all to follow. As mentioned, we started on June 9th and literally hit the ground running, learning and shifting along the way. This process would typically take no less than six months, but we rallied as a city team and aligned this with our city budget process . Bringing it to you in two months. This slide outlines the framework process from the beginning and launches us into the next phase. We will walk through these steps in the next few slides. But first I want to share that we had to we we wanted to remain focused. And so it was essential that we had a clear vision, mission and core values to uphold the process. So I mentioned our vision a moment ago, but I want to reiterate how important it is that we get to a place where race and ethnicity alone do not determine our life outcomes, how safe we are, what kind of job we have, where we live, how well we do in school, and how successful we are overall at this time. Race and ethnicity often determines our life outcomes. All seven of the core values are listed above. But I'm just going to discuss a few with you now. We are committed to making sure that we center and uplift the history, wisdom and experiences of this community, particularly black people and people of color. We recognize the need for the city to offer great compassion, empathy and humility as part of the reconciliation process. We recognize that intersectionality exists between anti-black racism and systemic racism against Latinxs, Cambodian and other communities of color, and that solutions to systemic racism can be inclusive and supportive for all groups. We also center race in our equity efforts because all other dimensions of identity from income to gender, sexuality, education, ability, age and citizenship have an equities based on race. Knowing this allows for a more intersectional approach, while always naming the role that race plays in people's experiences and outcomes. So now I'm going to dove a bit deeper into the four areas of focus highlighted in the framework. We started with acknowledging as a public health professional. I'm certainly proud that our city council called out racism as a public health crisis. In acknowledging this, we thought that no voice could speak with more expertize than our own city health officer, Dr. Anissa Davis. Our report our our report opens with a letter in which she states public health is defined in several ways, but at its heart is the condition by which a population can be physically, spiritually and mentally healthy and well. I challenge anyone to explain to me how black people could possibly obtain optimal public health when someone is telling them where they can and can't live, what jobs they can and can't have, and what schools they can go to in light of the multiple public health crises we are in. Now is the time for us to look at what the data is telling us, listen to what the community is asking from us, and embrace that this is different from how we have ever done business before and move forward with intention to impact change. Kelly will now share public health data and what the city has been doing over the last several years to lay the foundation for this reconciliation process. Speaker 7: In public health, we utilize data to understand the root causes of the issues we seek to address. It are used to identify differences in outcomes across the city. To understand why and to design appropriate interventions to reduce the disparities. They are also used to evaluate program impact, to monitor progress, to determine barriers to care, and to influence public policy in Long Beach, similar to other cities across the country. Data show that more often than not, black people and people of color have the poorest health and social outcomes. This is due to systemic racism. Here in Long Beach, black residents are hospitalized for asthma 9.4 times, more often than white residents. 25% of very low birth weight babies are born to black mothers, although although they only account for 13% of the population among all full time workers, white men are nearly two times as much as a Latino woman. White families are two times more likely to own their own homes compared to black families. And we know the rate for Cambodian home ownership is even lower. The data shows that in 2019, 27.4% of individuals stopped by police were black, although they make up just 12 and a half percent of our population. These factors and many other factors such as trauma, poverty and air quality affect how long we live. If you drive from one side of Long Beach to the other, there's about a 17.5 year life expectancy difference between our neighborhoods. Over the last five years, our city's Department of Health and Human Services has been sharing these data, showing health inequities that span across the zip codes. Digging into root causes and building a foundation to advance racial equity within the city structure, the department led three citywide cohorts through the Government Alliance on Race and Equity. Yearlong training housed the first Municipal Office of Equity in Southern California. Started implementing equity one on one trainings for city staff and developed the equity toolkit for city leaders and staff. Through these efforts, the city has over 40 trained equity champions across departments and created a foundation to analyze existing policies and practices. Speaker 1: As well as you guys decide to walk for another two miles. Speaker 6: Hey, Stacy. Stacy, can you me your phone, please? Speaker 0: Wow. Speaker 7: Through these efforts, the city has over as over 40 trained equity champions across departments and created a foundation to analyze existing policies and practices as well as guide the formulation of our future work. In addition, the city is focusing on diversity and recruitment and hiring to ensure our government reflects our community and is also focused on economic and digital inclusion. Though we still have a long way to go, we are confident the foundation created by the Office of Equity over the last few years will allow us to move this plan forward in a real, transparent and urgent way as the community is asking us to do. Speaker 1: We've shared. Why? Why? Racism is a public health crisis using data. But unless we name our history as the root cause, the solutions will always be focused on individual change. Yet we know that the real change needs to happen at a systemic level because of the way that history has shaped the role of race in our country and in Long Beach. A key piece of the framework is to acknowledge the existence and longstanding impacts of systemic racism in America and in Long Beach. We've done this through the development of a historical timeline of racial inequities in Long Beach, which allows us to understand the root causes of inequities, learn from our past and together build a more equitable community. The resolution declaring racism as a public health crisis. Naming things like life expectancy, infant and maternal mortality. High blood pressure, diabetes. And how all of these things are symptoms of racism that are experienced at higher rates by black people and people of color. The update to the city's historic context statement, which will incorporate topics on race and suburbanization to guide future planning and land use decisions and allow those decisions to be rooted in a deeper understanding of the city's history and evolution, including the communities of color that have helped shape it. After these steps of acknowledging systemic racism, we moved into listening. Once we received the counsel requests on the ninth to prepare the report, four days later, we scheduled our first series of listening sessions. During this process, city leadership, including Tom Modica, Linda Tatum, Kevin Jackson, Kelly Colby, myself, members of the equity team and other city leadership listened to community members, accounts and experiences of inequity and harm caused by racial injustice. These sessions were hard on all of us, city staff and community members alike, as most people who spoke shared personal encounters and stories of violence, mistrust and frustration across a spectrum of personal encounters with the systems at large. We were listening clearly throughout the process and made adjustments along the way. After the first session, we started working with third party facilitators who are not city employees to facilitate the sessions. Because of the COVID 19 pandemic, we conducted the listening sessions virtually via Zoom in a matter of two and a half weeks. We conducted four town hall meetings, 13 listening sessions hosted by the city. Two listening sessions hosted by community partner Ronnie's house. Two listening sessions for city employees, and collected information from a community survey and a staff survey. We had more than 30 hours of listening with at least 560 individuals across the community lists, listening sessions and town halls. Many people participated in multiple sessions, which led to almost 1600 voices across the sessions. When adding attendance to all sessions together, additionally, 412 community members participated in an open ended survey to provide written input. We also engaged city staff in the process through two listening sessions and a survey engaging a total of 503 staff. Community outreach to underrepresented voices is a challenge in normal circumstances and even harder in a pandemic where physical connection is prohibited, and even more so given our short time frame. We tried to get creative in reaching out beyond the city's normal social media and website reach. We blasted out information through the Neighborhood Resource Center listserv, through local churches and through the housing authorities email list. We also had the Housing Authority inspectors distribute fliers at barbershops and beauty supply stores when they were open, and our health team distributed fliers at COVID testing sites. You can find the demographic breakdown for our engagement efforts and listing processes seized in the report. Although we had a fairly diverse group of participants, we acknowledged that due to both the rush to get these started and the limitations of in-person outreach efforts, we missed robust participation of important voices, including black men, youth, people from Central and West Long Beach, including Latin X and Cambodian folks. We also struggled to ensure complete demographic data collection for every session, so we had many who do not specify their identity. Data was collected throughout the entire listing process. We received a lot of written information from both community and staff to help us analyze what we heard. We partnered with Dr. Amber Johnson from Cal State, Long Beach and a team of her students to help conduct the qualitative data analysis on the audio transcripts, chat transcripts and notes. I'd like to thank Dr. thank Dr. Johnson and her team for their partnership through this and her willingness to work fluidly with us along the way. Dr. Johnson's team took hundreds of pages of transcripts, coded them for themes and categories, and distilled the data into a summary narrative that you'll find in the appendix of the report. From this rich information, key themes emerged, including divests from police and invest in community police and government, accountability and transparency, support youth and education opportunities. Affordable housing and housing protections. Economic Opportunity. Health Equity. Equity and environmental justice. After the listening sessions and data analysis, nearly 50 community members and subject matter experts were invited to participate in the stakeholder convenings. These stakeholders were selected based on factors such as residency and Long Beach, participation in the listening sessions, and ensuring representation from organizations that support and provide services for black people and people of color in Long Beach. Stakeholders were asked to review the data and summaries and provide feedback to ensure the community's voice was clearly articulated and represented in the analysis of this report. It was during the stakeholder process that we encountered one of the most challenging aspects of the reconciliation process. Throughout our listening sessions, we clearly heard the need to center black voices. However, we also heard from non-black community members that they felt the process was not inclusive of their experience of racism and inequity. During some of the drafts, we moved away from the term black to communities of color in an effort to be inclusive as possible. This resulted in backlash and hurt from the stakeholders for what they perceive was erasing the black experience from the report, which was certainly not our goal or intent. The stakeholders ultimately requested that we include the terminology black people and people of color and were pretty union unanimous on that, which included both Latino and Cambodian stakeholders who were standing in solidarity through the process. As a public as public health professionals, we let health data drive our efforts and the data show us that black health outcomes are often the worst among people of color due to generations of systemic racism, as described in the beginning of this presentation. We believe that if we create a community where we focus on eliminating black health disparities, we will create the systems, systems and supports to eliminate disparities in our next Cambodian, Filipino and Pacific Islander communities, which will ultimately get us to a healthier Long Beach for all residents. As in many outreach efforts, there are some stakeholders who disagree with the city staff recommendations. To respect this input, we agreed to include their direct feedback to the city's report so that you, the City Council, have their input available for consideration. We made this promise to a subset of the larger stakeholder group and it can be found in Section five of the report. Please note that the work of the smaller work group may or may not reflect opinions of the larger stakeholder group to the degree the city felt, those requests could be feasibly achieved. Their suggestions were incorporated into the city goals and strategies. Moving from a stakeholder phase. The initial report was created moving us into phase four, which is catalyzing into action. As we await your review, feedback and suggestions, we are starting to think about the work plan for each goal and will ultimately move us into ongoing action. Kelly is now going to walk you through the goals and strategies and I'll briefly touch on the potential actions and budget. Speaker 7: The report highlights four main goals that emerged in the community stakeholder meetings and surveys. Under each goal, there's anywhere from 3 to 8 strategies 21 total strategies in the report, and over 100 potential actions to support these strategies. Our next steps will be to turn the potential actions into work plans, including what can be accomplished in the short term and what will take longer to complete. Plans will also include metrics to ensure accountability to the work. Go one and systemic racism, a long beach and all local government and partner agencies through internal transformation. Go one is really about getting our own house in order. Acknowledging that government has been long been the creator and perpetrator of racist policies and practices. It's our role and responsibility to proactively to dismantle the systemic racism. As you will see in the report, the potential actions are outlined under the strategies listed here. The first strategy acknowledge the history and current role of racism in Long Beach. Specific actions focus on researching and documenting the role of racism in our history as a city and incorporating this in public facing documents as well as reviewing and updating city policies that are outdated or have disproportionate impacts on black people and people of color. The second strategy Create measurement tools to understand depth and scale of racism to inform and evaluate change. This requires deeper analysis of our city's social, economic, health, safety, and other data to understand the impacts of structural racism. To identify wellness indicators. And to create measurement tools. To be utilized. To evaluate response and demonstrate progress. The third strategy is to center voices most impacted by systemic racism in policies, practices and programs. A core principle of equity is ensuring the voices of those most impacted are centered in policy practices and program design and implementation. The focus here is engaging voices that are not otherwise been engaged, utilizing innovative engagement tools and creating opportunities for authentic dialogs. Four Strategies Build Organizational Capacity to support anti-racist reform with removing the Office of Equity and Language Access Program to the city manager's office to highlight the importance of their work and further support its capacity to retraining , engagement and utilization of the equity tool kit, as well as building a cohort of equity champions across city departments to ensure equity is embedded across the city. The first strategy is to ensure all levels of the leadership and staff fully reflect the diversity of Long Beach. There are nine actions outlined in the report focusing on reducing systemic barriers to city employment, including mentorship, leadership and growth opportunities, and building strategies to ensure implicit bias does not exist in hiring practices. Six Strategies to Use in Equity Run through Evaluate Policies, Processes and regulations to eliminate racism. This includes utilizing equity, toolkit, data and community input to evaluate past and current policies and practices to adjust to adjust based on impact on black people and communities of color and ensuring that all city staff reports include racial and economic impacts on various groups. The seven strategies is ensuring equity is in our budget. Contracting and procurement is a key to utilizing an equity runs and budgeting and resources, expanding community voices in decision making for budgets, and ensuring that decisions are made openly and transparently. Is also focused on creating and implementing policies to ensure city contractors, vendors and consultants reflect the city's diversity. The final strategy under the school is to engage and collaborate with local and private sector partners to implement transformation across systems. This includes working closely with educational transit and other governmental anchor institutions to address racial equity and utilizing joint use agreements to expand access to facilities citywide for important programmatic opportunities. This also includes collaborating with private sector partners in projects and investments based on community needs and priorities. Second goal is to design and invest in community safety and violence prevention across the nation. Violence is considered a public health issue that has strong and evident negative impacts on individual and community health and wellness. A fundamental public health approach moves from reacting to violence to a focus on changing the social, behavioral and environmental factors that cause violence. The actions outlined in this goal provide an opportunity to systemically look at the social and economic barriers which perpetuate violence in communities and begin to address them. While the City of Long Beach has a long history of engaging in community based violence prevention, including weed and seed in the safe Long Beach violence prevention plan, these efforts have been funded primarily through grant opportunities and end when grant funding sunsets. Its first strategy here is strengthening community based violence prevention and intervention systems, focusing on de-escalation and trauma informed communities, and strengthening funding. The second strategy focuses on investing in a broader continuum of public safety, including community based violence prevention and safe civilian addiction services. And the third focuses on increasing reentry networks, which includes exploring creation of a one stop shop and increasing access to much needed services. As you had heard before, there has not been a lot of investment in violence prevention efforts. And so the focus here is to identify and redirect general fund and other funding sources into non-law enforcement programs for violence prevention, redefining public safety to include more social infrastructure support so that more programs are eligible for public safety specific revenues. And reviewing our violence prevention programs to improve what's not working and investing what we know works but needs to be scaled. Our third goal is redesigning the police approach to community safety. Following the tragic killing of George Floyd, the Long Beach community called for reimagining police practices and assurances that none would disproportionately and negatively impact the black community and communities of color. An example of reimagining police practices includes identifying calls for service that could better be addressed by mental health professionals or homeless outreach workers rather than police, and also strengthening police officer training, accountability and hiring practices. The goals outlined here align with those requests. The first strategy is to explore non-police alternatives to law enforcement. Emergency response. This includes creating non-police civilian response teams to respond to nonviolent calls. Creating an alternative dispatch system for nonviolence calls to engage mental health professionals in trauma informed crisis response and engaging more mental health and medical personnel in homeless response. The second strategy focuses on redesigning police oversight and accountability through improved, improved complaint and discipline practices. The actions here focus on CPC reforms. The third strategy redesigns police tactics, training, retention and accountability as focuses on ensuring our police team reflects the diversity of our city. That recruiting standards include higher levels of education or experience as additional training on implicit bias, trauma informed responses and much more, and mechanisms to improve transparency and accountability for the department. The final strategy is pursuing advocacy with agencies to enhance police oversight and accountability. These focus on state and federal policy reforms to improve reporting and transparency around police misconduct and to improve public trust. Our fourth goal is to improve health and wellness in the city by eliminating social and economic disparities and communities most impacted by racism. We know that medical care, genetics and an individual behavior only account for about 30% of health outcomes. 70% of what predicts health comes from social determinants of health. These include the neighborhood where you can afford to live, the condition of your housing, your parents educational levels and stress load, your family's income. Whether we have safe places to play outside the quality of our food, education and environment. These are called social determinants of health. We know that to improve overall wellness, we must invest early in people's lives to create opportunities for success. Focus on economic opportunity, housing and environment. This goal acknowledges and recommends strategies and actions to build opportunities across these areas. The first is to advance health equity. This includes many actions focusing on increasing investments, programing and access to public health services, mental health, food security, libraries and park spaces. It includes exploring the opening of an Office of Youth Development to include mentorship opportunities, youth, job skills and community based youth programing. It also focuses on exploring a community health center for black people and people of color, given the disparities in healthy birth outcomes, diabetes, asthma and heart disease among others. The second strategy focuses on advancing economic equity, which includes many actions focused on increasing access to employment opportunities and jobs. Strengthening small business opportunities and digital inclusion. Establishing geographically based economic empowerment zones. Enhancing the role of the jobs coordinator for plays. And strengthening education opportunities. Job skills and financial literacy for young black people and people of color. Our third strategy is advancing safe, healthy and affordable housing. This includes identifying mechanisms to increase development of affordable housing, expanding proactive rental inspections, investments into previously red line housing to ensure safe housing stock, and addressing the overrepresentation of black people experiencing homelessness and ensuring strong implementation of the inclusionary housing policy and tenant protections. It also focuses programs to increase homeownership for black people and people of color and investment in alternative forms of land and property ownership. The first strategy is advancing environmental and climate justice. This includes equitably increasing access to green spaces in the city and green jobs, decreasing air pollution, particularly in black communities and communities of color. Identifying funding for the cities, Climate Action and Adaptation Plan. And exploring investments in renewable energy resources. The first strategy is, is identify new investment in health, environment, youth and economic equity. There are many plans addressing these issues outlined under go for yet few are funded. The strategy focused on identifying new and sustainable funding to support recommendations in this new city plans to promote a more racially equitable city. It also seeks to explore funding for the African-American Cultural Center. And the strategy is cannabis equity, focusing on increasing opportunities for cannabis entrepreneurship, strengthening the cannabis equity program and utilization of measure. M.A. Cannabis Revenue to invest in youth development, reentry programing, public health, violence prevention and economic equity to support communities most impacted in the war on drugs . This is a robust racial equity and reconciliation plan, focusing clearly on addressing the impact of systemic racism in our city and working to mitigate those impacts through focused policies, programs and investments in the city. Strategies include short term, medium term and long term efforts. So how do we start in year one? First of all, the city manager recommended funding, specific strategies and actions in his budget presentation last week. His proposal and his proposal included 3.3 million in funds to invest in this effort. 2.5 million in structural funds and approximately 782,001 time funds. These include 1.5 million to the Health and Human Services Department for Youth Development, Violence Prevention and trauma informed responses. Redesigning the heart team from firefighters to public health, nurse and social worker response. Locating social workers and libraries to support connection to services and funding. Be safe at 11 sites. Public safety funding includes a new Office of Constitutional Policing, support for reforms and innovations in the PCC and Fire Diversity Recruitment Program and civilian ization of 34 sworn positions to 28.7 civilian positions. The budget proposal also includes institutionalizing equity in our city. Reasonable share more about this plan. Speaker 1: An immediate action. In order to move this work, there will be an expansion of the equity infrastructure within the city. As you can see here, there are several ways in which equity practices will be infused into the work across all departments by way of using the equity toolkit for decision making, incorporating the equity impact assessment into all staff reports. Increasing the quality and use of data to inform decision making. Implementing staff trainings to build capacity on racial equity. And identifying equity champions in each department to help move this work forward. Starting October 1st, the equity office will be realigned from the health department to the city manager's office. The equity team will be aligned under me as the new deputy city manager overseeing this work. The current structure of the equity office will be expanding to include another 1.5 full time employees. And, as mentioned, equity champions will be identified across departments. Language access is included in this realignment as well. Speaker 7: As discussed in the Health and Human Services budget presentation earlier this evening, funding will also allow the Department to open a new Office of Youth Development, strengthening existing violence prevention efforts and out of focus on reentry and continue the department's equity efforts focusing specifically on health and housing equity. I will be focused on on including new staff as well as investing in our community and different programs around violence prevention, health equity and youth programing. We also redesigned the heart to model, as previously discussed from firefighters to nurses and social workers, build social work program at libraries. So that will be a partnership between the Health Department and Library Services to place social workers at three libraries to help connect people to the services they need. It will be supported through trauma informed and homeless grant funds. This builds off a successful pilot last year. Library services will realign library hours across libraries to allow its three flagship libraries to be open seven days a week. And one time funding will be utilized to enhance senior program at the Expo Center and the Be Safe program, which will operate 11 park sites across the city. Well, the Office of Constitutional Policing was not a direct outcome from the listening sessions. The police department has heard the call for rethinking traditional policing in a manner that will help implement equity, justice and constitutional public safety in our entire community. This office will support the Department's goals of policing within the parameters set by the US and California State Constitution while protecting the rights of all people. The office will be responsible for ensuring the Department is up to date with best practices in policing, legal mandates and community expectations, guiding the expansion of data analytics for accountability and transparency . Engaging with key stakeholders and other city departments for inclusivity and equity. Additionally, $150,000 will support a study of CPC to see to identify ways to improve oversight and accountability. The Fair Diversity Recruiting Program will continue with one time funds to support diversity and community outreach in the fire department, and 34 sworn positions will be converted to 28.7 civilian positions. This will transfer task currently assigned to sworn officers such as managing public safety equipment or responding to nonviolent 911 911 calls which include property crimes in which the caller simply needs a written report and instead be handled by nuns for employees. In terms of economic equity. In Year one, the Office of Economic Development will be working to open an Office of Economic and Digital Inclusion, which will be a partnership with technology and innovation. This will coordinate and implement everyone in digital inclusion, a road map and reconciliation report goals and provide ongoing oversight for the economic equity study outlined or sorry cover with CARES Act funding also provide funding for the Center for Economic Inclusion for Home Ownership Assistance. Economic Empowerment Zones in North Long Beach, Higher Learning Center. The Inclusive Business Center program will coordinate diverse small business diversity councils, small business navigation and inclusive small business procurement program. And finally, the Teen Center Workforce Training Program will partner with Parks, Rec, Recreation and Civic Gateway to deliver job training in high need neighborhood teen centers. Speaker 1: So we've shared a lot about our process and the road ahead, which is where the real work will happen and the potential for transformation lies. Our immediate next steps include taking the Mayor and City Council's input, conducting legal reviews and assessing feasibility, feasibility of implementation, and developing detailed implementation plans that include actions, funding sources, lead department and staff and timelines for completion. We call this an initial report because this is just a starting point. We commit to remaining responsive to community engagement and our current context, whatever that looks like moving forward, expecting that key initiatives will evolve and be refined over time within the framework and goals adopted by City Council. We will also develop processes for ongoing assessment and feedback and provide routine status updates and engagement opportunities with community members. This could include, but not limited, limited to monthly updates at the Human Relations Commission meetings and ongoing communication with the broader stakeholder network to share updates on progress and opportunities for input and collaboration. We can't undo the damage racism has done during the last 400 years, during a two month process or over the course of one fiscal year. This work takes leadership with a long term vision and commitment. We thank you for your time and willingness to take a bold stand to end systemic racism within the city of Long Beach . Your support shows a true commitment to this work, and that is remarkable in itself. I can't end this presentation without giving another big thank you to the incredible equity team who brought all of this work together to the city managers, team department leadership and city staff who also jumped into this process. And a huge thank you to the community members and stakeholders who did not hold back their two hearts in order to push through to the next level. For all of you, I'm grateful and look forward to moving this work forward together. And that concludes our report. And we are now available for questions. Speaker 0: Thank you. Thank you very much, Mr. Kelly Company. First, I'm going to turn it back over to Councilman Richardson before I go to public comment. Thank you. Vice Mayor, I just want to acknowledge before we go to public comment, support letters that we received by elected officials and community based organizations. I'll be quick here. Congressman Alan Lowenthal, Congresswoman Nanette Barragan. We received a letter from the California Legislative Black Caucus representing all ten members of the CBC, Senator Lena Gonzalez. Board member Juan Benitez and Felton Williams. NBCC Trustee Joe. Joe. And took we received a coalition letter by 29 black nonprofit and community leaders. We also received individual letters from Black Lives Matter, Long Beach, Californians for Justice, My Girls in Action, Long Beach, Forward Investing Youth. Long Beach. African-American Heritage is the Heritage Society of Long Beach. Long Beach Community Action Partnership. Long Beach Public Library Foundation. YMCA of Greater Long Beach Community Development. The Children's Clinic. The Nonprofit Partnership. The Justice Collaborative. The Long Beach Center for Economic Inclusion. Long Beach Branch of the NAACP. Ronnie's South. Success and Challenges. United Way of Greater Los Angeles. Love Beyond Limits. Dr. Wade Martin, Long Beach Ministers Alliance Safe Passages African-American Cultural Center of Long Beach, 100 Black Men, Abby Street and more. Thank you, Vice Mayor. Okay. Thank you very much. Contribution. Could you please call for public comment? Speaker 4: Our first speakers, Dawn Watkins. Your time starts now. Speaker 5: Hi. So this process was formed as a result of police violence. The mayor, city manager, city staff reconciled, acknowledging harm sustained, but yet no reconciliation by those committing that direct horror in the hands of the state. The police, they were allowed to disrupt and change this process. Removing, defund LAPD, the most documented words from the process. And in the listening sessions and added things like constitutional policing and more money for training which were not found in the CSB summary. You know, we appreciate these efforts. But while we condemn the murders of George Floyd and Amad Arbery, we need to condemn their own killers like Daniel Martinez and John Fagan. Who? Tyler Wood. Fernando Archuleta. Salvadoran military. Jason Cardone. Sanchez. Matthew Hernandez. Jonathan Cole. These are officers in our department who have killed people who have excessive force records, who have multiple items in their records of violence that have cost our city hundreds of millions of dollars. Bradley Lewincamp. Nicholas Farah. Christopher Brammer. Victor Ortiz. Lorenzo Rebeck. Mandatory. There's about 100 officers that I know who have killed and used excessive force. They have shot and luckily have not died. This is harm that has to get reconciled by and by our police department. You can't condemn what's happening across the country. And then here allow a department. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speakers, Caravan for Justice. Your time starts now. Speaker 5: The Hart team is not this is not the solution for trauma, de-escalation. Cahoots is a 31 year old program based out of Eugene, Oregon, whose was initiated because the state was trying to create a more citizen evolved, accommodating community. This was their way of reimagining public success. Over 31 years ago, with success, the cahoots models create calls including conflict resolution, de-escalation, harm reduction, substance abuse, suicide threat and specializes in trauma and force de-escalation a training that our police department in the Hart program does not possess. Also, for cities trying to implement the model, the youth program will offer development and training, material, operation manuals, policy development, classroom training, consultation during the process, assistance with hiring and technical advisory during the whole process. Section two of Bill SB 2054, the crisis that has already confirmed the complexities of emergency issues surrounding crisis and mental health, intimate partner violence, community bar, the substance abuse and natural disasters cannot be addressed more safely with greater impact and more cost effectively and efficiently with community organizations. Not only does Law Beach realize it needs radical change. Our state has made it definitive that there is a severe problem that must be rectified. The numbers have already been crushed. Long Beach, if they implement cahoots in Long Beach, can save over $60 million every year of their budget. Other cities that share a similar crime and mental health demographics like New York, San Francisco and. Speaker 1: Indianapolis. Speaker 5: Have already begun establishing cahoots base programs in their cities. Speaker 4: Thank you. Next, speakers will need a diploma. Your time starts now. Speaker 5: Yes. Thank you and good evening, honorable mayor, vice mayor and fellow members of City Council. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you tonight. Again, my name is Dr. Moore. I'm a proud resident of North Long Beach, a Mother Nature commissioner. And I also participated in several of the discussions regarding the reconciliation program to address the racial inequalities that have been brought to light by the recent pandemic. The social and racial injustice. And the reconciliation initiative. The desired outcomes that I would like to see for the youth are more afterschool and summer programs as it relates to STEM science, technology, engineering and math. Exposure to these programs in these areas help to prepare our youth for for the careers of tomorrow. Tutoring and resources. Such programs that would be of assistance with helping with a proficiency requirement that lead to college preparedness, readiness and completion rates. These programs foster a college growing culture that is that is sustainable for all members of our community, most importantly, for those in underserved communities. Internship programs and trade programs such as workforce development and service programs. These programs provide job, career and readiness exploration. I know that my concern for you, as well as other members outlined in the Reconciliation Racial Inequality Reference Reconciliation initiative as well as I ask that you take great care at. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speaker is Kevin, Georgia. Your time starts now. Speaker 0: Hi. My name is Kevin Yeager, District four resident The recommendations from the Framework for Reconciliation are great, but they do not go nearly far enough. And that's because our city's true priorities are shown not by the number of different things we can say we did, but where we put our resources in the budget. These 3 million and investments only amount to about 1% of LAPD's budget. And again, we're here right now having this conversation in response to decades of police violence. LAPD continues to receive 44% of the general fund, 240 million, only 4 million less than last year's 244 million. Cutting APD 1.7% relative to last year is not nearly enough. The message from these conversations was to divest from police, invest in black communities. We can solve our entire budget shortfall and invest in critical new programs. By cutting LAPD's 240 million and cutting LAPD doesn't mean cutting public safety. When thousands of renters are evicted in the coming months, LV PD won't keep us safe. LAPD officers can't keep us safe from COVID. They can't even wear their masks consistently. There won't be federal when federal agents show up trying to deport our community members. LAPD will not be there to keep us safe. Please invest in real public safety by funding housing, immigration, defense, health, language access in accordance with the people's budget. Thank you. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speaker is Kimathi. Your time starts now. Speaker 5: The city created a reconciliation process without community stakeholders, mainly to fit into the city's budget structure and process. This alone is a practice of white supremacy because it perpetuates centering of the dominant cultural practices. Nevertheless, there were listening sessions and town halls with over 1500 participants from our community. The mayor and a few council members have publicly admitted that, yes, racism is a public health crisis in Long Beach and black folks have been harmed for generations. However, the police, who are the main predators of harm to the black community aside from COVID, have never apologized for any harm throughout this reconciliation process. Teresa mentioned the painstaking stakeholders meeting that we had for 3 hours, trying to convince the staff and Tom Modica specifically that it wasn't ethical to alter the data that was collected during a reconciliation process that admitted harm done to black people in the city. Yet black people were erased and the voice of the community demanded it be put back in. Hence the document you see today. It was really disappointing to see one of the council members post on social media that the word black is all over the document. Let me say that was both rude and hurtful to see him belittle the work of the community who helped put the word black back into the document. That was an example of white supremacy practices from that council member. Erasure of black people in documentation are physically driving them out of your neighborhoods or city is white supremacy. This process is not to point fingers at individuals. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speakers maniac be. Your time starts now. Speaker 0: I'm going to finish what Don said. You can't condemn racism and police violence across the country, but not do it once in the report. No police violence has been condemned tonight. And that is a problem because that is not reflective of the community. The question is, what is reconciliation? It is a victim driven process. This is not victim driven. This is institutionalized racism right in the face of the people that you're claiming to be reconciling with. The fact that time you claim that you are data driven. That's what you said to me. And in the same conversation admitted that words were removed. Defined was nowhere in the report. Black was taken out eight times with the data is where those things came from. So you're a liar if you claim to be data driven, but you allowed that process to be changed. And only by us having hoopla and and anger and frustration did you change it. But this process, civilization, what is that? This is all just a crock because it's only going to be 1%. Racism is systematic and structural. This report and this budget does not reflect a structural and systematic method of combating racism for black people at all. And there's no discussion of defunding and reinvesting police budget in a significant way. Then this is just a farce and it's not victim driven. And the people that are guilty of perpetuating racism are trying to co-opt this process and make it sound nice with beautiful pictures on documents and nice, flowery words and reports. But no significant changes are being made if only 1% is coming out of the police budget. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speaker is Pastor Leon Wood. Your time starts now. Speaker 0: Thank you very much. I want to thank you, the mayor, for having me on the program. I would like to say that Long Beach has a lot of high and lows. Over the years, I've been coming here as a little boy for years, and I remember that it's always had some racial issues. And I want to thank Councilman Rex Richardson for his leadership in giving me an opportunity to speak about them and having others speak about this as a longtime member of the black community and faith communities. I know the history here in Long Beach. I know the obstacles young black men face, and I know the needs of our communities. You can look and see that if a community has a really high education system, full employment, and people are treated well, you have less crime and you have less, less violence. Obviously, we don't have those things because we have high crime and high violence are structural. Change will address the inequities black and brown households are burdened with. And we want to see the recommendations in this report to come to life that actually go in and make structural change. And every home that's suffering in the Long Beach community. I've been looking and success and challenges this summer. We had the Freedom School and we were able to to work with young schools virtually. And we really saw that what takes place when you really give some love and care for young people and try to help them move forward. You also see how the parents react when someone cares about. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speaker is Patrick Swimmer. Your time starts now. Speaker 0: Thank you. My name is Patrick Swimmer and I'm here on behalf of the Long Beach Young Democrats. On June 10th, our organization took emergency action to support this framework and other policies to address the racial injustices within our city, such as defunding the police at least $40 million to 2017 levels. So we appreciate that the council felt the urgency to act in time for the budget. However, something this crucial for the health and safety of the black community and our other communities of color requires a more thorough process and should not have been rushed to completion in less than two months, especially at the expense of the integrity of the data you collected. The participants of the study were not representative of the communities for whom this framework was developed. Even still, among the community members who did participate, an overwhelming amount said that their number one priority was to defund LV PD. But according to attachment and the executive summary of the budget, the police department moved only from $264 million last year to 260 million doubt this year. Rather than listening to the participants of this study and the countless community based organizations who have called for the same the police to remain essentially fully funded and only 3.2 million is allocated for the implementation of this reconciliation process. We support the purpose and goals of the reconciliation, but the implementation of this plan must be done in concert with the greater structural changes called for by the community, specifically defunding APD and reinvesting in our communities to a meaningful degree Black Lives Matter. And that should be reflected in our city budget and operations. Thank you for your time. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speaker is Max Norse. Your time starts. Speaker 0: Now. Hey, folks, good evening again. I just wanted to chime in and make sure that you know that we need more affordable housing in Long Beach if we're going to ensure to keep what black community we have left here in Long Beach. We need to implement the housing division where tenants can go and handle false accusations from landlords rather than face eviction and court fees there and having the record at Jeopardy! Which affects their ability to rent a new home or even stay in Long Beach. We must continue to listen to black community voices and defund the police and fund the need. Black community voices and defund the police and fund the needs of the community in order to make sure we invest in the most marginalized. Imagine if we created affordable housing units in District three and five people in those units would have longer life expectancies defined. Thank you. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speaker is Rebecca Rose. Your time starts now. Speaker 5: It is insulting to see the city council vote to talk about talking about racism, reconciliation. We need answers yesterday. It feels like you guys think we're stupid. We aren't stupid. We're watching. We are busy. Like you are busy. We are overwhelmed. Like you are overwhelmed. But the people of Long Beach actually care about those most affected by police brutality and institutional racism and all the other intersections that cause struggle and suffering within the capitalist system. If you aren't radical, then you aren't left. So stop pretending. We we all know the Long Beach City Council are Republicans pretending to be liberal. You give the appearance of caring while you while we hold the burdens of your inaction. So come that. Come the outcome of the reconciliation guidelines is to divest from the police and invest in the community in terms of public health and education, especially in bipoc communities. This means a lot of police officers will likely lose their job, but if they are in the business of helping people, they can find work to help the community without the use of force. You can remove a uniform. You cannot remove your ethnicity. The jobs created from investing in the community. You will employ the people with an honest desire to protect and serve a kind that doesn't put others lives at risk. We need you, the City Council, to expand your imagination beyond the current structures. Based on the current distribution of funding, it is clear that you take punishment more seriously than prevention because Opiates PD received about 44% of the general fund, while other departments that directly serve serve the community. Speaker 4: Thank you. Next speakers, Ryan Ballard. Your time starts now. Speaker 0: Good evening and thank you so. Speaker 3: Much for this opportunity. Speaker 0: I first want to say in this public forum that my family extends our sincerest condolences to our mayor and his family. But is with that same spirit in mind that I express. Speaker 3: My thoughts on tonight. That is the spirit of humanity. Speaker 0: I hope that our elected officials will view this as an opportunity to right an historical wrong. Clearly, the community is hurt. Those who spoke before me spoke with such eloquence, and if I could, I would echo every one of their sentiments. We realize that this is not an endpoint, but. Speaker 3: This is merely a start. Speaker 0: But many in our community included, are wondering what's different now. We hope that we will really see tangible change, because for many of us, this is this is all too normal. The death of George Floyd and many, many others is typical. So what changed in this time? Speaker 3: So we're hoping. Speaker 0: That you will vote fully support what this initiative is intending to do, what we hope that it is intending to do, and that is to really abolish the racism that many of us have suffered, not only abroad, but here in the beautiful city of Long Beach. So I would hope that you would vote not only. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speaker, Sharon Senegal. Your time starts now. Speaker 5: Hi, my name is Shereen Sinegal and I'm the executive director of Ronnie House. I lift all the concerns and pain of my black brothers and sisters. I lost my husband to gun violence, the pain that drives my purpose. I'm not alone in this nonprofit. Leaders across the city work from a place of loss and life experiences that has positioned them to be the best equipped to lead the execution of the recommendations on the reconciliation plan. With that said, I urge the Health Department, Economic Development and other departments to invest in community organizations that work from that place and support and collaborate, allow them to lead the way. Thank you to city staff for your hard work in the reconciliation. You will find purpose in your pain and to Councilman Rex Richardson for your bold leadership and to other council members. Thank you. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speaker is Tiffany Davey. Your time starts now. Speaker 5: I want to thank everyone who's spoken, especially all the stakeholders. Speaker 0: And those. Speaker 5: Who supported. Speaker 0: On city. Speaker 5: Staff for their time. I think what we're hearing. Speaker 0: Is. Speaker 5: Really. Speaker 0: We want to understand where we are reconciling. Speaker 5: And with whom and to really address. Speaker 0: The harms. We must go. Speaker 5: Further. It was my recommendation. Speaker 3: That we create a Truth and Reconciliation. Speaker 5: Commission, something to truly institutionalize equity going forward. These voices that you're hearing on the phone have. Speaker 3: More to say and have said have given. Speaker 5: Ours. Speaker 0: And I look forward. Speaker 3: To hearing from them. Speaker 5: More and then leading the way as well. Speaker 0: I want to thank all those who stood in. Speaker 5: Solidarity. Speaker 0: With the Black Lives Matter movement here, specifically. Speaker 5: In Long Beach, and our efforts to highlight and gain. Speaker 3: Justice prefer to cast. Speaker 0: Victim of white supremacy within our own city. Speaker 3: Our recommendations were sent to the city. Speaker 5: Clerk. Speaker 0: In full. Speaker 5: Defund the police. It's simple the creation of neighborhood justice centers. We need true movement towards addressing centuries old issues. Speaker 0: While this is not an impact that I. Thank you. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our last speaker is Dave Shukla. Your time starts now. Speaker 0: Hello. Well, first of all, if I could correct suggestions, the impetus for bringing this item forward and through the chamber for a very amazing and heartfelt presentation, the better than expected. My name is Dave Shukla. I am the eldest grandson of Bashir on the group of five Shukla, whose name I do not invoke lightly. To do so is to claim one of the oldest familial traditions on this planet. Things like the transatlantic campaign, 400 years of racialized capitalism in America. These are relatively small things in the time, history and perspective of my people and my family. There's a lot with this reconciliation initiative that is a good starting point. Obviously, we've heard a lot about how it needs to be expanded. One Direction. We need a decade old program. We need to revisit this every two years by the anniversary of the murder of George Floyd. We do this in person in two years. We need to start thinking about zero budgeting within two years and fiscal year 2322. We need to think a lot about our budget, obviously, but specifically for having the public safety budget come on the 18th. I've been working 18 hour days for two, three months. We have a much more important item for the city coming up the day of the action plan. Thank you. And that concludes public comment for this item. Thank you. Thank you very much. Now we got a lot to come to mind and then councilman's comments and we'll have Councilman Richardson to speak and then we'll go through the glasses. Thanks, Vice Mayor. Just a few amendments that I have more comments I'll to back up. If I if I run out of time. So first, I want to acknowledge all of the comments from the public. I want to let people know this is not the city declaring that we have achieved reconciliation. This is the city acknowledging that we need to take steps with the goal of achieving reconciliation. It will not happen overnight. I'm not confused about that. I hope that you are not confused about that. This will that will require hard work, dedication and continuing to build and shape our city. Now, a few points here that I want to lift up. There have been a lot of issues tonight with interpretation. I want to start by just acknowledging that we need to correct the interpretation process, particularly if we're doing using remote process here. So I want to see that. I want to see a two from four and I'll put that in my motion, a two from four on how we can think about ways to improve the interpretation process. Secondly, I want to acknowledge the fact that racial equity acknowledges barriers across race. There's a lot of focus here on the black community. The community has demanded that we center this experience on the black community. But I also acknowledge that there are significant barriers facing our Latino population and our combined population. And so I want it reflected in this motion for staff to go and engage directly with the Latino community and the Cambodian community and find out what process they'd like to do to make sure that this reconciliation process moving forward includes them more intentionally and specifically. I also would like to include as a as a as an amendment here that I'd like to see. I'd like to see some tangible change in in order to do that. We have to track, track and measure progress. And so I'd like to see benchmarks and reports on a six month basis. And I'd like to see see it recorded in disaggregated data by race and ethnicity. I want this reflected in my motion. I think that there needs to be some ongoing oversight to some of this process. One of the recommendations within the framework talks about reimagining Human Relations Commission. I think now is the time for us to engage directly with a Human Relations Commission, to create an equity commission that can work hand-in-hand with the Office of Equity. And so begin that I want that reflected in this in this motion to begin the process of shifting the Human Relations Commission to an end and rethinking its scope to work hand in hand with the Office of Equity and and provide some public engagement and civilian oversight to this process. There are a number of other things here that I want to jump into. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to work through it. If I run out of time, I'll come back up. So on goal number three, as it relates to KPCC and investigations, I want to ask a question of staff. I see that we have a of resources in this budget and within the plan to bring on a consultant and begin the process of changing our charter to update the PCC. My goal, I think what's important, what I've heard from the community is that we don't want to see small adjustments but rather an overhaul. So sort of like get rid of the PCC and build a modern oversight commission which will take some, some time, but we want to do it on the next general election. And so I want to understand from staff, one is that the plan here and to more specifically with respect to evaluating other accountability processes, with respect to investigate and other things, are those included within the scope of of this this contract or this consulting that you're bringing on to help work with work on this? That's my first question. Speaker 6: So we have included $150,000 in the proposed budget to address the PCC. The our vision is that we would bring on an outside expert who could help us independently review how our structure works, compare it to other structures, and give us best practices. Give us ideas on how a commission could be changed or reformed or improved. We're also looking for short term improvements that the election would not be allowed to be on the ballot until 2022 per state law. So we would have two years under the current system if the council wanted to change it in the future. And so we see it as a comprehensive review that would be year one. And then going forward there would be $150,000 to help implement. So we believe that there are some changes that can be made that would help the current commission do its job a little bit more efficiently. And. Better. And then we could look at all the other best practices as well. Speaker 0: Thank you so much. You have one minute, sir. Okay. Thank you. So in that so I'll just stay on this topic and read to four for another. And so in terms of goal to I want to be clear that we're beginning the process of C.P.S. within the scope of that. We also want to look at just the investigations process and the new commission should have some independence. It should have is restore public confidence that you have some some some authority to conduct some investigations. I don't understand what can be done before the election in 2022 and and what the process looks like in the march between now and 2022. So that can come back in two from four. I think on the issue will then go to on youth development, violence prevention. I want to I want to understand it further. And this is questions that the capacity or building on violence prevention, is this a mechanism to bring in more community based intervention workers and things like that to help us achieve violence prevention? How are you thinking about this? That's for Kevin. Speaker 7: Yeah. So in terms of the violence prevention structure would be to we would hire one additional person as part of the city's violence prevention team to help manage and coordinate that program. At this time, we only have one full time equivalent supporting all the violence prevention efforts within the city. So we'd bring one new person on and then through that work with community efforts around coordination of efforts, but also providing funding and resources to community based organizations to to engage in violence prevention work that that they are known for. Speaker 0: Councilman. I'm out of time, so I have to back up. Thank you. Speaker 6: And Vice Mayor. Mayor, if I can ask a question. So I think we're going to hear from the council a number of ideas and comments and things that they would like to see. For staff, it would be really helpful if we had that in the form of a motion so that we can track what is it that the full council supports. So I believe I heard Councilmember Richardson start in saying he was making a motion. I just want to confirm that's the case. And there were six items that we had. If we could follow a process where we have a motion and substitute motions and others that would help us get clear direction. Speaker 0: Yeah, we have video of a motion by Councilman Richardson. Yes. Okay, fine. We'll come back you. We'll get that done in that order. Okay. Consequences in the hands. Speaker 1: So I just want to say a big, big thank you to Councilmember Richardson for having the courage and the brilliant ness of putting something together like this in, especially as we are facing in this very difficult time. I also want to give thanks to staff. I for this presentation that they gave. That was really great. I know that this work involved a lot of facilitating and reaching out and being creative and and it was long, hard and very emotional for all parties. And I think that, you know, to be able to do this and in such a quick, you know, time was also very incredibly difficult. So I commend you for your efforts into putting this all together. I'm also incredibly grateful to all of the residents and community members that have been involved in this process by engaging in this very painful but necessary and and absolutely overdue work. This report puts in black and white. What would people of color in Long Beach have been have known for for many years? So I'm grateful that we're acknowledging the significance of having these truths come out and and and supported by our city leadership. We should continue to keep in mind that this comes only after decades and decades of our city being unresponsive to experiences of people of color and their activism in the face of systemic racism and white supremacy. We need to really keep that in mind going forward. It's important for us to keep that in our mind and know how critical it has been to be able to listen and actually discuss all of the things that have come out in this report. I'm heartened by some of the policy changes provided in this report, and I think that we have an excellent starting point. Again, I will say an excellent starting point in beginning to address some of these issues. I am particularly excited to see some immediate and short term movement on expanding our language access programs to better include our residents, including immigrants. On very excited about the amendments made to this motion to have something separate for the Latino and the Cambodian community. I, I think that these kinds of structural changes, especially when attached to increasing funding for staff and all the responsibilities are are a good way to create an equitable outcome for us. I also think that it's critically important that we. That that we have space to have these conversations. And in our actions as counsel for, you know, we as counsel have the responsibility to listen to our constituents and hear them out and see really listen to what some of the solutions would be. Majority of participants in the reconciliation process so far have unequivocally voiced support for reinvesting resources and in other departments like youth and programs. One of the things said that I want to see is also investing funds in in prevention of violence. I think that that's very important. So with that being said, I just want to say thank you, Councilmember Richardson, for bringing this forward and really listening to our to our residents. So with that, I just want to say that I fully support the motion and I'm happy to second this motion. Speaker 0: Very much come to me. Speaker 3: Oh, sorry. Did you take the wrong time, sir? Speaker 0: Yes. Yes, sir. Speaker 3: Okay. Thank you. Just one point of clarification, Vice Mayor, when you say council members have 5 minutes each time by the council members themselves. Because sometimes when we ask a question, it takes another two or 3 minutes for an answer. I just want to get a clarification on that. Or is it just 5 minutes of total conversation to the council member and staff? Speaker 0: You know, the rules say the question and the answer. Speaker 3: Okay. Yes. Want to get clarification on that? Yes, sir. Okay. Because it can be a little bit can be a little frustrating. Yes. First of all, I want to thank. Thank you. First of all, I want to thank Ms.. Chandler for taking the leadership in this and and her honesty. She was very straightforward in saying that there were some mistakes made and acknowledge those and that and and address those. And that's is going to make everything better. That's where we're at right now. I mean, let's face it, there have been mistakes all over all over the place, especially in the treatment of people, the treatment of our LGBT community. Keeping the women. And, you know, when it comes right down to it, I see it as a perfect storm. And I will say I said it before, I'll say it again. This started because the atmosphere in our country began with a racist. It began with Charlottesville. It began with his in the willingness to accept the the the decision of a Mexican-American judge who was making a judgment, an adjudication on his. Trump University. It started there Alachua and then a Lach was let George Floyd unfortunately that rest his soul lost his life because of racism. Because of the atmosphere that was created in this country by. And then we have a pandemic. And what did the pandemic do? It raised to the to the surface the fact that there are a lot of inequities and injustices out there in the community when it comes to public health, when it comes to health care in general, that, you know, people can't afford it. And people are having a difficult time getting access to the proper medical care that they need. And then on top of that, we have a down on economic downturn that raised even more issues about wages and disparities in wages and disparities in jobs. And, you know, men making white men making two, three, four times more that than Latino women, African-American women and women in general. And so what we have here is, is the perfect storm. And I'm glad that this came forward because it's putting it to the through the the discussion is putting that on the table and the very painful discussion that we have to have with one another. And it's and it's time and we're we're in a we're in a in a in a in a in a current time right now where we can have this discussion, where we can put it all out there and just put it on the table and, you know, let's clear the air. And I know it's painful. Miss Chandler experienced that pain and we continue to feel that pain and we're working through it. And we will we will we will survive this. We will work this through. And I want to thank Councilmember Richardson for bringing this forward as the idea. And I want to know that that we know we were present. I hope that this document will be a living document. That will be a document that we can go back to, that it will not be shelved, that it will be a document that we will always revisit and make better because we're going to continue this discussion and it's going to grow. Council Member ten there has said it perfectly. You know, we we still need further, more discussions to be held in the Latino community and in the Cambodian as well as to the Filipino community. And we need more input from our LGBT community and women. But I see this document as being alive and being able to add to it to make it all that much stronger. And I'm looking forward to I know Councilmember Richardson has that finished on his amendments that he has for his motion. And I'm looking forward to some of those supporting that. But as a whole, I certainly support support this framework. And I think it's a very positive step moving forward. And I'm very proud of Long Beach. I mean, the people came out, they spoke their piece, and they're adding their voices to this document as well. It's typical is a typical conversation, but it's one that's necessary. We have to have. Thank you. Speaker 0: Mayor Raymond Miranda, councilman. Yes. Speaker 1: Thank you, Vice Mayor. I really want to take a moment first to recognize our council members that really worked hard to bring this forward. Councilmember Richardson has been leading a lot of the conversation, as he's known to to like to get out there and roll his sleeves up on everything. But we really have to thank the fact that we've got Councilmember Austin and Councilmember Dee Andrews who have been leading this and having their own conversations in their own networks and really facing some of the historical racism that has existed in the city of Long Beach for a really long time. And I say that because when I got on council as a bright eyed, bushy tailed progressive that ran on police reform, when I tried to talk about some of the racial inequities, it was really uncomfortable. And I think that we're having this conversation as an entire city, and it's really uncomfortable, and that's okay. And I know that our staff, like Teresa, who got thrown into a new position and then thrown into it and thrown into this leadership, have found themselves in difficult moments. And I remind everybody that if we didn't have these emotional moments, if we didn't have tension, if we didn't have difficult conversations and accountability. We wouldn't be doing the right thing. And that's how we know that while this process might not be perfect for everybody, it's a process that the city really, really needs to have. I look and I see that we've had council members that have been on this council for a long time stepping up and leading on these difficult conversations. And it it makes me feel really hopeful. I also see young black women that are leading and speaking up on almost every council meeting that I've never spoken at a council meeting before. And the fact that we have people like Don and Shereen, but also Theresa and others that are sharing their stories and trying to facilitate a conversation while also experiencing this difficult moment is really hard. And so I feel very humbled to be a part of this conversation. And I never in my 13 years of doing community organizing work in Long Beach thought that we would have such an open conversation. And so I know it's been tough for people like Tom, and I want to applaud Tom for for being present, but being in the middle of every single stakeholder that has something to say about this work. And I know that that's not easy, but I also know that this conversation was started because Black Lives Matter and they didn't feel like they mattered. And until somebody says, I, I am a black woman or a black man, and I can tell you that I feel respected, that I feel like people in my community see me as someone who contributes and matters, and we haven't done our job yet. And so reading this really in what the speaker said is this is about reconciliation for the entire city, but it's about police, us in particular. And Black Lives Matter have have spoken up community members have signed letters. All the organizations that spoke that Councilmember Richardson listed earlier signed a letter asking for 12% of the police budget to be cut. And I know that when the budget came out, we were really you know, we felt like we were in a really good place. We were at 5% that it was higher than L.A. But then it came back that maybe the numbers weren't exactly what we needed. This is the very first sign that we need to have a transparent budget next week whenever the budget comes back from PD. Our new budget book. I understand we've been in a difficult situation with COVID, but our residents need to see exactly what is in our police budget. I, as a councilwoman need to understand what is in our police budget so that we can match those priorities. I think it's very important that we recognize. That this is really hard for our or our police officers. Nobody can question. Speaker 0: You have one minute. Speaker 1: Okay. I'll make motions when I come back up. But I couldn't have this vote tonight without grounding us in this. I have always been outspoken about reforming PD, but I also know a lot of police officers and I'm talking directly to our police officers right now. I do not believe. At every single one of our police officers. Is inherently racist. I believe that our police department has lacked accountability and transparency. Is positioned in a military way that allows it to operate without the council having full oversight and without the voters, the constituents, all of the residents live here, whether their voters are not to have a say. And that is what this process has to be about. This process has to be about transparency and accountability and making sure that people's tax dollars are going to make every single person feel safe in the city, not just some. And so I wanted to ground the rest of my conversations and not that I recognize that. And I recognize this is a hard moment, but we cannot let this moment pass this by without making real reform in this direction tonight that we give stop is where we start. So I'll come back up. Thank you. Vice Mayor. Speaker 0: Thank you. Thank you very much. Councilman Austin. Speaker 3: Thank you, Mr. Vice Mayor, can you hear me? Hello? Speaker 0: Hello. Speaker 3: Okay. I. So, first of all, let me just just say, I would really like to express my deep and sincere appreciation to everyone who has been involved in the preparation of this framework document. Now, I salute our city manager for for taking it on, Teresa Chandler, for leading this charge. Dr. Davis, your introduction was, you know, heartfelt, truly felt that reading it. And I want to thank our Health Department Mobile's policy and the many community stakeholders who weighed in and provide hours of testimony over the dozen or so more listening sessions. Those sessions were not easy. Weren't easy to listen to. And conversations about race are never easy or comfortable. And I think it should be noted, and it has been that this is a monumental document that demonstrates our city's commitment to being more inclusive and equitable from the inside out. This document represents a clear denunciation of racism. And it's a beginning and an earnest attempt to repair a broken system. I think it goes much further than addressing police violence and accountability. You know, as the city council member representing the eighth District, I'm reminded of the abhorrent redlining practices that existed in my neighborhood just a few decades ago. I would not have been able to own or live in the home that I live in. You know, 40, 50 years ago. The first black family integrated Bixby Knolls in 1958, Dr. Charles Cherry bought a beautiful home on Cerritos Avenue in Bixby Knolls, and that family was met with vitriolic acts of racism and rejection by their neighbors, who say they did not receive a warm welcome. And being the first being the first black in the first minority is never, ever easy either. Today we vote against racism. We vote against anti-Blackness. If this vote tonight honors the lives of Medgar Evers. Trayvon Martin. George Floyd and many, many others. This vote tonight is when I take this vote is on behalf of my three black sons, my future grandchildren, to live in a more equitable society. As for our youth, our black and Latino youth, and for my youth to be able to live in a city that extends opportunities and supports their dreams. You know, I like to also pay some recognition tonight also to some of the great works that actually preceded this framework document. And I think we'd be remiss if we didn't acknowledge Dr. Lydia Holly and the Reading Sea Program and that grant. I know Traci Colombo is still with the city and she worked very hard on that. Dr. Alex Norman in the state of Black Long Beach. I think it's also, again, important to recognize that this is a beginning. It's a start. And I'm encouraged that Councilmember Richardson has made some amendments to extend this this opportunity to really, really dig in deep and talk about our our racial differences, our cultural needs as a city and include, you know, our Latino and my brothers and sisters, because it's important for us to continue this conversation. You know, I said the conversation about race is never and systematic oppression is not meant to be comfortable. But we should get comfortable in having these conversations because I feel like we're going to have to have this conversation for many years to come. You know, I'm impressed with this document. I think it's comprehensive. And if we are able to implement half of what is being recommended here, we are going to be a better city for it. And so I'll just just add to my before I know my time is short. Speaker 0: Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Speaker 3: The CBC reform package to reform our civilian oversight to provide more accountability. I'm glad to see that that in here and the commitment in our budget to do that. I do believe I brought an item a few weeks ago that actually calls for everything that that that that that Councilmember Richard Simmons is asking for in his amendment . So I'm not sure if that's really necessary. I also want to see greater emphasis on reentry support. I'm glad that we're doing that. I think that is critical, particularly of today with the release of thousands of inmates from CDCR and other institutions. We're going to have to have a plan to support these these these people that will come at home to our city. Cannabis Equity. I want greater emphasis on on ownership and business opportunities. And and I'm glad. Speaker 0: To ask you, time is up, so. Speaker 3: I'll reach you. But I'm glad to see that the equity will be under the city manager's office because that shows a real commitment to equity in our city. So with that, I'll pick you up later. Thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Councilman Austin, Councilwoman Price. Speaker 1: Thank you, Mr. Vice Mayor. I thank you for giving me the opportunity to say a few, share a few thoughts on the topic. Obviously, we all agree every single member of this council in our city team, that racism is a serious issue and that it's important that we as a city take it seriously. And I love the approach of starting internally. I was very pleased to see the number of city staff members that participated in the listening session. I know that some of my own staff participated in the listening session and some of the ideas that were shared regarding training and hiring practices and promotional opportunities and some of the things that were raised are topics that have been close to my heart for a long time. In terms of gender equity, of course, being that that's an issue that I've personally experienced. So that's been a priority for us to see that being expanded throughout the city and every department in terms of opportunities and access was very, very good for me to hear and for me to get a recap on what those listening sessions were like with the staff. I think the time and energy that's been committed to this topic from both staff and the residents speaks to the importance of this topic. And I want to thank everyone who took time to be a part of that conversation. I know that we had about 8% of the 500 participants, 500 individual residents participated in these listening sessions. And of those, about 8% of them were third district residents. And I know that we've hosted a number of town halls and produced some interviews on this topic to further engage our residents at one of our town halls, we had over 200 participants. And so I want to thank all the residents who have participated on this issue, on on on all sides of the issue. We've had a lot of residents express an interest in rerouting police dollars. We've also had a lot of residents reach out and express a lot of support for continuing police funding. And so we've we've heard from every resident and we welcome that inclusive attitude as far as our office, because we want to hear the diversity on the topic. I look forward to the continuing engagement on this as we continue to work to make this city the best that it can be. I want to thank my colleagues on the Public Safety Committee. Councilman Austin and Councilman Super. We are going through a process on the public safety committee that is a little bit of a slower process. That's a multi-phased approach where we're first and foremost finding out what it is that our police department actually does in regards to some of these topics. And then hearing from them what some of the best practices that are taking place around the nation are, and hopefully working with the stakeholders to develop recommendations similar to what we'll talk about in the upcoming agenda items tonight in regards to recommendations to the full Council for changes. And we'll be doing that consistently between now through October and as we develop some new policies and practices in the full Council, we'll certainly incorporate those and the public safety discussions as well. The document that we have before us today provides a lot of information to build upon and to work from, and I look forward to having more in-depth discussions with the council and city staff as each of these proposals and ideas is researched and evaluated to see what is feasible, what can be implemented, and what works for the city of Long Beach. Recognizing that we can't take any sort of cookie cutter approach. We have a very unique city. We have a unique police department with an amazing police chief who is leading his team and is very open to progress and creativity and inclusivity. And I look forward to having him be our partner in this process. So thank you very much. Speaker 0: All right. Thank you very much, Councilwoman Price, Councilman Richardson. Thank you, Vice Mayor. So I'm going to keep working through calls on goal number two. I was talking about youth development and violence prevention, community partnerships. So I know that we're developing this office. But my expectation, my hope and my understanding in talking with the health department is we want to sort of go back to working hand in glove with community as it relates to intervention workers and youth support. I know that the City Council's moved forward a measure for four November that would apply additional resources should it should it be adopted to develop and strengthen some of these partnerships. I want to I want to go back to the health department. Did you speak a little bit more about how sort of is this approach that we're going to just hire a bunch of staff that's going to do the work? Are we going to or are we going to develop, you know, go back to developing community partnerships and do those things? Speaker 7: Um. Councilmember So the, the intent would be to hire two staff for the Office of Youth Development. Um, one would be sort of a program manager level support as well as a program coordinator to, to really engage with our community members and then to start to really invest in peer navigators and other, and then with other community youth serving organizations in the community. So the focus right now, based on feedback that we've received, would be to invest in to community based organizations, to focus on peer navigation and the ability to link and youth to different services for mental health services, as well as skill development to youth for managing difficult situations and also mentoring opportunities . There's also a lot of focus on the ability and the ability. So job skills and training, the ability, academic supports and all of those. So the intent would be to, um, to invest in community based organizations now and that and as future funding of it becomes available, the same would be in place for the violence prevention program . As I indicated before, we have sort of one FTE dedicated to violence prevention in the city right now. Now, we would hire one more person for that space to join that, to better coordinate and work within communities. And in that space, we would, um, we would invest in our community based organizations focusing on violence prevention and intervention efforts in the city, and really focusing on reducing community level trauma and gun violence. Um. Speaker 0: Moving forward. Thank you. And the reason I ask that question, I think it's important to me and it's important to understand the vision here. I think the vision should be building a capacity within our communities that, you know, people who, you know, many based organizations that are here, people who live within the communities because it's 24 and they you know, they know it's a part of when, you know, I do that on my staff. We hired people that are within the district. They you know, they are it's a different commitment and it's 24 seven and they're really, you know, care about what you know, the transformation. And that's just called community empowerment model. And so that that's really what I'm what I'm looking for here. I want to go three. I want to talk a little bit and asking questions about officer constitutional policing. I know that this wasn't referenced in in the process of the framework. It came in towards the end. I'm just not clear on what it is. I know we'll have a more careful conversation when we get to the budget, but I think that any examination of public safety reform, it certainly has to have buy in from from the department. But we also need to make sure that it maintains the whole point is to build public trust. So I'd like to know and understand, you know, could could you be prepared to talk either next week at the budget meeting or whatever, about efforts that we can do to make sure that there is public trust in that process , public participation in that process, and also an understanding of what the one year work plan looks like from office constitutional policing, because, you know, the health department's put forward a one year work plan. We saw what the Economic Development Department is doing in terms of one year work plan of the equity is putting forward a one year work plan. So I'd like to know what office constitutional policing plan to take on within the first year. So that's a question for Mr. Moore. Okay. And Councilman Wilson, you have one more minute. So I that's my question I'm waiting for. Speaker 6: So, yes, we can certainly get into that. The chief is eager to talk a little bit about the efforts and all the things that they're doing that really hasn't been the focus of this effort in the last two months. It's been more of the listening and getting to some of the high level recommendations, but the police department certainly has a lot to share. I'm proud of the efforts that they're working on and that they're thinking of how they can do things differently and look at best practices. And that's part of the Office of Constitutional Policing and it's focus. So I would suggest we get into that next week when the Chief has a chance to present his budget and really talk in his own words, him and while inhibits who's kind of leading that effort to talk about the constitutional policing effort and what that would entail. Speaker 0: Okay. I'll give you back the amount of time. Thank you. Consulate Councilwoman Pierce. Speaker 1: Thank you. I'm sorry, I. I will pick up now on the emotions that I wanted to talk about. I totally support the moves that Councilmember Richard Richardson mentioned. And I to agree there's a constitutional policing understanding that more and understanding where the oversight is. You know, I think that the question that I brought up before was how do we get to transparency? How do we get to accountability? I support completely overhauling the PCC. There's a lot of great work that's been done nationally about the best models to do that, and I think we as a city have already demonstrated that we know how to put together a commissions that are civilian oversight commissions and we need to do that. But we also need to make sure there are changes put in right away. Something that I would like to include as a motion, as to include a report on the cahoots model. And honestly, I read this and I've never heard anybody say it, even though I've read it through some of the reports. So I hope I'm saying it the right way. But it was mentioned several times throughout the reconciliation process. I have it in a couple of emails and letters from my constituents. I think a report on that would bring us to a place where we could decide what might be the next best step for things like the hunting. I would also like to understand a little bit more about the police hiring. One of the things that's happened in the last several years was we did an H.R. audit. We talked about some of the outdated regulations as it pertains to cannabis, and we made changes for most of our departments, but we did not make any changes that I can recall, as it were, in regards to police officers being tested for cannabis use or for being able to be hired if they had smoked cannabis or use cannabis. Given the state law right now, given the fact that so many of our black community members have been incarcerated for a job that is illegal now, I think we need to make sure that we're aligning our police department. And I know that when we brought this up with H.R. during that study, it was told to us, well, there's different standards for police. Well, I look at this the same way that I would look at a glass of wine or a beverage. We don't need officers. We don't need anybody on our city staff or on taxpayer dollars coming in under the influence of any drugs at all or alcohol. And so I would expect the same thing for cannabis. I'd like to have a report on what the standards are for that, and perhaps that is something that's keeping some of the diversity challenges at bay a little bit, not you spend as much time. So to be clear, so far, I would like to add into a motion a report on the Cahoots Model. I report my support for the PCC and also a review of police hiring. The next thing that has been brought to my attention through this process and also talking to my constituents is the process that happens whenever our police officers. Well, let me back up. The process that happens whenever residents might have their cars impounded. So I know that there are people that have had their cars impounded whenever they've been brought into the police station. I hear tales and this is why I would like a report on this, that they once they're released, even if they weren't found necessary to stay in jail or found guilty, they're still responsible for paying their income fees, which can be 100 bucks to somebody like myself or somebody that's without a job. Can can mean a lot. And I know one of my constituents had her car in impound for several months and likely didn't even get it back. And so I want us to look at some of those policies that exasperate some of the poverty and some of the challenges our residents might face whenever they come into contact with the city. Not just PD, but like I said, telling. Speaker 0: Councilwoman Pierce, you have one minute. Speaker 1: I will go ahead and take a break. At this point, my next I'll just I'm not sure if anybody's queued up after me, but I think we have some questions, so I'll go ahead and queue up one more time. Thank you. Speaker 0: Goodbye. And thank you, Councilman Supernova. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I'd also like to thank everyone who participated in this effort, because it has been a huge, huge task and it's not gone unnoticed. I also want to thank Councilman Price for for referencing the Public Safety Committee. I think there's a lot of valuable information coming out of those meetings that we're holding monthly, and it'd be great to find a way to get that integrated into this system here. Also, Councilman Richardson mentioned division and I think we can get there with. Clearly articulating what the vision is. My greater concern is with the execution of many of the ideas. And I think Kelly Collopy has multiple initiatives to execute, and I guess it wouldn't be fair to ask her. But the city manager, is there going to be a process where as we we get feedback from Kelly policy on how these things are going that those those items would come back to council or we can provide assistance or reshape these initiatives. Speaker 6: Absolutely. So what you're approving tonight is really just some general direction. It's a concept, it's a framework. There is high level recommendations. You're approving kind of staff to keep moving in this direction and be working on these items, at which point we would be bringing them back. You'll notice in the report some are saying ongoing and immediate. Some are short term, long term, medium term. And we put timelines to those so similar to the Everyone Home Initiative to Affordable Housing Plan, we would be working on those and bringing those back. So they all need to still go through legal review, through financial review, through implementation, feasibility and then ultimately council policy approval. Speaker 0: It great that that would work. Implementation, feasibility. Also, I just want to complete the thought with my conversation with our fire chief because I did reference this agenda item one when I spoke to him. And that is I just think we have to be very cautious on proposals of balancing a budget by cutting core fire services. These are just essential services to the black community and communities of color with sworn personnel that cannot be, you know, so that was my point here, that we want to be very cautious on just even the consideration of cutting off services. That's it. Thank you all. Thank you. Councilman Chippenham. Councilman Arango. Speaker 3: Thank you, Vice Mayor. And, you know, this is getting very frustrating for me. Richardson has some motions he wants to make. Yeah, he had to keep recovery queueing. I concede my attempt to Councilmember Ritchie let him finish what he can. Speaker 0: I think I think the proper thing to do. Thank you. That was made during I think the appropriate thing to do, Mr. Vice Mayor, would be to suspend the rule of suspend the rule or extend the rule. I think we're getting out of the discussion and more into the specifics. So. So if you're okay, I would request that we just suspend the rule for the rest of this discussion when we're done with public comment. We're really in the meat and potatoes now, if that's okay with you and I'm hearing you exactly. But you're the last ones cued up, so I just want you guys. Speaker 1: This is not your mayor. Mr. Vice Mayor, I've been cute for a while and haven't been. Speaker 0: Well, you can, but I haven't seen you up here, so I'm just like Mr. Richardson. Speaker 5: Okay? I'm not asking you to go ahead. I just didn't. Speaker 1: Get the last one queued. Speaker 5: I think that. Speaker 0: Yes, it is. Okay, so queue up and we'll put you there. Okay. All right. So if you want. Okay, great. Okay, so I'm going through. So I was on goal three. We talked a little bit, our constitutional policing. We got the response that we're going to hear more at the next step. So that's good. Thank you. I know that the topic of demilitarization came up but wasn't included in the recommendations. I've been looking at what you know, what modern cities do. The idea here is to just make sure that any purchases of things that are not within the normal scope of use of a you know, of police officer has some additional level of scrutiny by the city council before publicly, you know, purchases are made. So it's not sort of a consent calendar or buried within a consent calendar, but a little bit more sunshine. And so I'd like for staff to look at some of these models and I see them all over the place now. They add 60 days, 90 days. Notice the city council when you're buying things like, you know, you know, automatic weapons or or tanks or whatever it is, I mean, I think we need to understand these purchases a bit more and city council needs to and needs to have the time to dove in. So I want to include in my motion for staff to look at some options for the city council to consider that help address demilitarization. So I want to make sure that that's included in here, you know, as we move forward so that I want that reflected in in this motion on goal. There's maybe some other stuff I may come back to, but but on go for about health and wellness and economics. I want to make sure that I know that we saw what the what the one year plan is for economic development. I want to make sure that if I heard Kelly mention the job coordinator on the project labor agreement, she said PR instead of play, I knew what she was saying. I want to be clear with the public. I think that the play is up for negotiation now and I think it should be reflected in the economic developed economic equity piece of this, the very specific goals aligned with the independent jobs coordinator targeting whatever it is we're going to do. I think that should be very clearly set out in the CFF or however this is going to come back in terms of the strategy around the first year on economic development. So I want to see that part come out. I also know that there was in the slide, it's called out a number of things, economic empowerment zones in procurement, all these other things. I want to say that some of the dynamics may change in November in terms of Proposition 15, if it passes, which is the restoration of a front of affirmative action. If that happens, we need to be positioned to we need to understand how that may open up the playbook a little bit in terms of procurement and the things we can do to really make a meaningful difference for local, local businesses of color, minority owned businesses, black owned businesses, Latino businesses, women on business and so forth. So I want to make sure that we are in this next year's work. Clay On Economics, we are paying attention to that because I want to respond to that. Should that be adopted in November and go into effect in January additionally? Speaker 6: So so are these two items added into the motion or are these are these more comments now? Speaker 0: These are these are in the motion. Okay. I want to see. So you're already we already have the economic equity sort of one year plan in the presentation. I want I want to understand those two parts of this. So the local jobs coordinator and how we can connect procurement to whatever new opportunities come out of the proposition. I think that proposition is maybe about 50, whatever the proposition do. Okay. Five, Thank you. Okay. So next related to the housing and so there's been a lot of discussion in the budget, in the people's budget and over the years about aligning sort of our work around housing and this we can't talk racial equity. I'll talk about housing. 80% of black households in Long Beach are rental households. 70% of Latino households in Long Beach are rental households. I certainly I grew up a renter, but I certainly support homeownership and we need to make commitments to that and we have to work toward that. But but what I what I think what what the community is asking for is for us to be more specific, more strategic about ultimately aligning and creating a division sort of dedicated to this. And what this looks like to me is you have a proposal for a housing and homelessness equity coordinator. Already you have I see in development services you've already made some changes. You have Christopher Coombs focused on housing. Now you have a housing authority to focus on, on, on renters, in subsidies. You have resources that we've begun, begun to deploy around rental assistance. And, you know, should additional resources come out, that's something we want to do. We've been engaged over the last 18 months and moratoriums and renter tenant protections and all of these. Issues, but it's not centralized within our system. And so we can that effectively creates a barrier. And so I want to I want to, within this first year, have this housing equity person focus on beginning to align this to create a front door on this issue. So this is so this isn't adding an additional like budgetary action. What I'm saying is, like within what we have, let's align it and see how we can put a front door. Does that make sense? Tommy Kelly on with what I'm asking here. Yes. Okay, great. So I want to make sure that that this rental housing operation, the vision, however, is going to land. I want to make sure that this is reflected in the into the recommendation. Do that. And we've covered the majority of things that I have here. I'm going to pause and just keep listening to my colleagues if they have anything else but that. That concludes my comments at this point. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Mango. Speaker 5: Thank you. Speaker 1: Just as a quick question. Speaker 5: Councilmember Richardson, did you say automatic weapons or semi-automatic weapons? Speaker 0: I want you know, I want to be clear, I'm not an expert on the weapons that police department carry. So I want to be clear. What I'm asking is for staff to bring some options to us around demilitarization. The things I'll be looking for is giving counsel additional notification, oversight, oversight. So as things come, we're aware of it. You know, I don't want to make I just militarization get out. Militarization shouldn't be an automatic thing. That's the point. It should be we should be heading in a different direction. And you already have city council in place. Going to have to bring me some bring me bring us some options to think about. Speaker 1: And I am supportive of that idea. Speaker 5: But I also. Speaker 1: Just want to be clear with our constituents that the consent calendar to date, as I as I've been on the council, has never included the purchase of a tank or an automatic weapon or any of those things. Speaker 5: I understand the general concept you were going for, but I just wanted to be clear about that because I. Speaker 1: Quickly received a text from a family member and just wanted to ask me that question. And I thought I would be public about the fact that. Mr. Chief Lulu, do we have any tanks or any of those things? Speaker 6: Chief Looney or Chief Hébert, if you could respond to that. Speaker 0: A vice mayor and members of the city council. No, we do not have tanks and we don't have any military equipment. I know that's part of the national narrative, but at one point I can't wait to actually talk about the things that this police department does and what we have so we can get away from all these . Things that people are thinking that we have. Speaker 1: Especially because in chief. Speaker 5: Linda, please feel free to correct me. Speaker 1: But offices across the country are trained in how to occasionally and very few officers, by the way, are trained in how to take apart and ensure that an automatic weapon that's been. Speaker 5: Taken. Speaker 1: From a resident who should not have one because they are illegal. Even the police need special training to be able to do that because it is so dangerous and you. Speaker 5: Don't want to. Speaker 1: Put people or officers in harm's way or innocent bystanders. Okay. So now that. Speaker 5: That's clear, I want to thank the city. Speaker 1: Staff. I want to thank Theresa Chandler and Tom Modica and all the other city staff and community members who participated in all of. Speaker 5: The feedback and listening sessions especially. Speaker 1: I know that so many of our. Religious leaders have been a. Speaker 5: Big part of this. And I just want to thank them. Speaker 1: That they've been doing this work for a generation. And today, as they stand up for and. Speaker 5: Continue to push forward just. Speaker 1: It just the amount of respect and praise and appreciation for them and their. Their fortitude and. Their leadership. Speaker 5: I want to say that I see one major thing missing from this reconciliation. I mean, I've heard from the public on a lot of things, but this particular. Speaker 1: Thing hasn't been mentioned in a long time. Speaker 5: And as budget chair two years ago, it was one of the most important things I heard. Speaker 1: From minority communities and communities of color was that there wasn't investment in the infrastructure, in the communities that need that. So if we talk about health, we need to talk about sidewalks. And I'm not saying take all the sidewalk money as it's distributed today and move it. I'm saying we need to add $10. Speaker 5: Million of additional sidewalk. Speaker 1: Repairs. I worked. Speaker 5: With Councilmember Odinga on. Speaker 1: Making sure we had funding for a park that was in his community, that had a. Speaker 5: Group of community. Speaker 1: Seniors that walked every day. And that walking path was of. Speaker 5: Extreme importance to him and that. Speaker 1: Community. I worked with Councilmember Andrews on a business corridor improvement that is still almost to completion, but these walking paths and corridors are critical to minority owned businesses and our communities of color and the health and wellness of our city and our residents. Speaker 5: And so I'd like to find. Speaker 1: A way to. Speaker 5: Add additional. Speaker 1: Funding for alleys. Sidewalks and business corridors. Alleys need to be repaired. Speaker 5: They need to be paved and they need to be well-lit. We need to talk about the. Speaker 1: Things in public works that also contribute. Speaker 5: To the safety and. Speaker 1: Well-Being of our community. Speaker 5: So I appreciate everyone who's spoken. Speaker 1: Tonight, and I appreciate. Speaker 5: That this dialog will continue, but I hope that these things that have been brought up before. Yes, we've made significant investment in these things in the last six years. Speaker 1: But it's not enough. Thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you. Councilwoman. Mongo. Councilwoman. Yes. Speaker 1: Thank you. I support all of the items that Councilmember Richardson mentioned. I think they're all things that our community members have spoken on. And I guess I do have a question for our city manager. Obviously, PD has been a target of a lot of this conversation. Well, PD be responding to this. Well, we have another opportunity. I know that. I mean, I think he's right. Like, I, I feel like we have asked time and time again for a full report from PD on everything from hiring to training, and that that has been really difficult to get agendas in my four years on council . It seems like the prime time to be able to do that and I know we've got them on the Budget Committee or budget presentation next week, but I don't know if that's the appropriate time for us to dove in all the way to all the PD stuff. So. Would you inform us of when that might be? Speaker 6: Yes. So that's actually one of the recommendations that's in front of you tonight. We added that it is a recommendation to come back in a study session to have the discussion with the council. The police chief is absolutely right. There has not been in the last two months that kind of, I think, appetite or desire to really dove in and talk about what is PD do currently. And so during the listening sessions we heard loud and clear they did not want to be part of the listening sessions, and we respected that when it came to, you know, creating all of the recommendations, we had all of our departments review those recommendations and be able to provide input into what you've seen tonight. But the police department has not had a chance to come in and really fully and publicly explain the training that they do. What they have for equipment, how they put things into practice, and to have that dialog with the community and the council. They are eager to do that and that is one of our recommendations. I do suggest that you take some time for that and for us to, you know, prepare that larger presentation because there is a lot that they do that this community and city can be very proud of. And and I think the council member mentioned it, Richardson is they also have a workplan of what they want to continue to improve and to look at. And so we we recommend scheduling that. I will work on when we've been able to do that and that work is is starting to happen right now in the Public Safety Committee, as Councilmember Price mentioned. And we can bring more of that to the full council as well. Speaker 1: Thank you. And I think as part of this recommendation, not only having it one time, but that needs to be, you know, on a regular basis every year before the budget process starts. We need to be able to fully understand what's happening in our police department. And so I don't know if I need to make that as a part of the motion, but I would hope that annually we have a full review of police practices and any of the work that comes out of this reconciliation process over the next year. I would hope that we have that coming back to us and a full report. I know Councilmember Richardson had in his motion every six months for a full report on the on the framework that we're talking about. But P3 being, you know, the size of the budget and just feel like we haven't had access. I think that that needs to be included in there. So. I'll move on to my next my next topic, which should be my my last topic. So it's mentioned under health. There's a bunch of things that are put underneath health. And I think that the beginning of this report does a great job. Not only I mean, Dr. Davis, like just, wow, I want to say how much I appreciate your voice right now. We know that that this I do not think if this conversation was being had four years ago, that your voice would be so present and so center in this work. And while some people might not love that that I gave thanks to Tom, I do give that to Tom and his leadership, because that hasn't been the city that we've had for the last ten years. So grounding it in health, we then put in a whole bunch of other things. The climate work is really, really important because I think I've said many times over the last several months, the Environmental Committee and the Sustainability Committee, our commission have met a couple of times. They did make a recommendation, a letter of support. I hope that that letter is reflected in the comments and maintained in this report for the long term, but also to the comment around the the jobs coordinator and some of the jobs pieces. I also want to make sure that in this report it's reflected that people have been talking about a resilient recovery. And essentially, if we could make sure that we're talking about what jobs could, as we're closing the climate gap, that climate gap, it's getting late. Sorry for our black community members and our communities of color. We want to make sure we include a review of how our Climate Adaptation Action Plan could provide jobs pipeline for those front line communities, communities of color and our black community members. So that is my last addition. Hopefully that made it as a motion and I am done speaking. Speaker 5: Thank you. Speaker 1: And you of my time. Speaker 0: Thank you very much, Councilman Richardson. Thank you. So I think I'll go ahead and wrap this thing up. So I want to acknowledge Councilman Mango's discussion on infrastructure. I do know that you've been talking, which is excuse me for you wrap this up. I like to speak. So when you finish. Absolutely. Go. Go for it. I was going to acknowledge that the friend had to go for it. Oh, thank you. Thank you very much. You know, and I want to thank every single individual took part in this conversation to come up with this report. You know, as the elder councilman both in office and in age, you know, I can tell you stories about Long Beach in this city. I was not allowed to buy a home in the big city, not because of the color of my skin. So I went to buy me a very expensive car. Then it was brought to this, you know, to the car. And they told me, I have a school district. So that's not the image of a teacher. That kind, you know, car is not the image of a teacher. So I remember when I and other black individuals could not go past almeida's hill and other streets without risk of getting beat by police. I remember when my mother used to earn clothes as a net as a maid in the Wrigley District, which is the big city. Being here for so long, though, I have also seen the inequities to other communities of color, like the Latinos and bodies and Filipinos. Racial equity goals in this report are great but cannot confidently say that I like how we went about this process. Cobra did not help our public outreach process. They are members of our community and still feel left out or a sentiment that this process divided racist. And that's it. Because the beginning that all of us on this does is continue to do the work in our districts. And I'm hoping that our community based organizations truly come together and work for the benefit of our community. I don't want to go under the five minute situation because everyone knows I am going to stop here and that everyone will participate in. And I want to thank you for all the print, Glenn, the Adams. Thank you very much. Now you can finish introducing you Vice Mayor. So I just want to acknowledge. So on the infrastructure conversation, it is reflected in terms of infrastructure. And there's a proposal for economic equity zones in special districts in areas like north central west Long Beach to explore infrastructure and things like that. And John can speak a little bit more about that. Also, the questions about investing in the budget. The mayor made a made a proposal at the end of this fiscal year to begin visioning in a but zero based budget like process. I support that it's already in work, so I didn't lift that up in the motion. But that would be an opportunity to look at things like infrastructure, investment and all that. So I think it's included in Councilmember. If you want to meet a place in the motion, I don't know that it's needed, but I will if it is important to you. And then. And then you want to respond to that? Speaker 1: Sure. I felt, though, that there wasn't any specificity to it. So I talked with Ms.. Chandler and Mr. Modica last week about how I'm looking to hear and outcomes and more specifics. Speaker 5: In the weeks ahead. And so I'm comfortable with it not being as a. Speaker 0: Part of the motion. Okay. We can. Okay. And I'll be looking for that as well. And I think your city staff has heard you. I want to just thank the entire city council. I have to say this. You know, I deal with 191 cities in SCAD region, and this is a step further than any city in Southern California is taking to racial equity. You know, I'm not qualified to say it is one of the most bold steps in the United States on racial equity. But I'll tell you, having been engaged in the National League of Cities, the Governance Alliance of Racial Equity, we're building on the things that we've learned, and we're responding to the moment when other cities haven't even begun to learn how to have these conversation. These conversations haven't been pretty. I've seen I've heard peers on both sides of the conference calls, but I've also seen so many tears as a result of racial injustice in America. And this is a pivotal point. This is the time for us to have these conversations, Leon, and really make a meaningful difference and hopefully put our city on a better course where it's not okay for race or zip code to determine your outcome, but rather our city is not successful. And until almost all of us are successful. So so I want to offer my sincere thanks to the to the city council for this conversation as a zero thanks to city staff, a sincere thanks to all the community members. And, you know, I know that there's this is a big commitment we're making. I know folks want to see us go further. And this does not preclude us from continue to do that. But this is a meaningful step, a beginning of an important conversation in our city. And I look forward to continuing this work. And the city council looks forward to continue this work as we move forward. So that said, I thank you, Vice Mayor, and I yield my time. Thank you very much, Councilman Richardson. No. Can we have we have a motion with Councilman Richardson and the second man councilwoman sending us. Could you please call for the vote? Speaker 2: District one I talked to District three I, District four. Speaker 0: I. Speaker 5: District by. Speaker 2: District six. I strict seven. Speaker 5: District eight. Speaker 2: District nine. Speaker 0: All right. Speaker 2: Ocean cares. Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Right now, we're going to move going to move on to our first round of public comment related to none agenda items group. We have anyone signed up.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to review a report on Racial Equity and Reconciliation Initiative and provide input and policy direction. (Citywide)

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Speaker 0: Thank you. Thank you very much. Now we're going to move on to item ten crap. Would you please read that? Speaker 2: Communication for Mayor Garcia. Recommendation to approve Mayor's Designees as argument writers for the Long Beach ballot measure appearing on the November 3rd, 2020. General Election Ballot. Speaker 0: However, any private company inside of. Speaker 2: There is no public comment on this item. Speaker 0: So please have a first and second. That's when Richardson and. Cameron Pierce, could you please come for the vote? Speaker 2: District one. Speaker 1: I. I. Speaker 2: District two. I'M District three. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 2: District four by district five. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 2: District six. Speaker 0: All right. Speaker 2: District seven. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 2: District eight. District nine. Speaker 0: All right. Speaker 2: Motion carries.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to approve Mayor’s designees as argument writers for the Long Beach ballot measure appearing on the November 3, 2020 General Election ballot.

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Speaker 0: Thank you. Item 11, please. Speaker 2: Communication from Councilmember Richardson recommendation to increase appropriations in the general fund group in the City Manager Department by 3300. To provide a contribution to the Dracula's for a mural painted at Howden Park prior to the grand opening of the expanded Howden Park Community Center on June 30th, 2020. Speaker 0: Yes. Well, consider Richardson's first as president. Oh, it sounds 1/2. You please call for the bill. Speaker 2: District one. I district to. I District three. I district for. Speaker 0: I. Speaker 2: District five. Hi. District six. District seven. Speaker 3: By. Speaker 2: District eight. By District nine.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to increase appropriations in the General Fund Group in the City Manager Department by $3,300, offset by the Ninth Council District One-time District Priority Funds transferred from the Citywide Activities Department to provide a contribution to the Draculas for a mural painted at Houghton Park prior to the grand opening of the expanded Houghton Park Community Center on June 30, 2020; and Decrease appropriations in the General Fund Group in the Citywide Activities Department by $3,300 to offset a transfer to the City Manager Department.

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Speaker 0: Nine. Speaker 2: Motion carries. Speaker 0: Thank you. Can you please go to item 15? Speaker 2: Support for your report from Financial Management Recommendations. Adopt a resolution authorizing city manager to execute a contract with W.W. Grainger for furnishing and delivering maintenance, repair and operation supplies and related materials for a total annual contract amount not to exceed 1,200,000 citywide. Speaker 0: Is there any problem coming inside of. Speaker 2: There. No public comment on this item. Speaker 0: I have a I have a first by Councilman Richardson. I need a second. As Andrew's vice managers. Second. It was called for the Bell District one. Speaker 2: I district to. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 2: District three. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 2: District four. Speaker 0: I. Speaker 2: District five i. District six. Speaker 0: All right. Speaker 2: District seven. By District eight, by district nine.

Resolution

Recommendation to adopt resolution authorizing City Manager, or designee, to execute a contract with W.W. Grainger, Inc., of Lake Forest, IL, for furnishing and delivering maintenance, repair, and operations supplies and related materials, on the same terms and conditions afforded to the City of Tucson, AZ, through Omnia Partners, in annual amount of $1,000,000, with a 20 percent contingency of $200,000, for a total annual contract amount not to exceed $1,200,000, until the Omnia Partners contract expires on December 31, 2022, with the option to renew for as long as the Omnia Partners contract is in effect, at the discretion of the City Manager. (Citywide)

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Speaker 2: District one, district two by district three i. District four. By District five. By District six. By District seven. By District eight, by district nine. High motion carries. Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Item 18 you please with the item. Speaker 2: Communication from Councilwoman Price Chair. Public Safety Committee recommendation to request that the special order issued on January 16, 2020 become a permanent policy change for the Long Beach Police Department. Speaker 0: Yes. Councilman Price, would you like to make any comment on this item? Speaker 1: Thank you, Mr. Vice Mayor. I'll be very brief. I think the entire council received our update from the last Public Safety Committee meeting where we outlined a four phased approach to look at a comprehensive approach in our police department, including the peer support and bystander programs, practical application policies and procedures for use of force training and hiring standards and post action review procedures. We're hoping that we can conduct these different phases in parallel with council so that we can incorporate anything we discuss in council at public safety and vice versa. Speaker 0: Thank you. What if I become an insider? Speaker 1: Sir, as we and I expect that the Public Safety Committee will bring forth certain recommendations, tonight's recommendations is. Susie, you're cutting out. Oh, I'm sorry. I thought that I had reached my five minute time limit. Can you hear me? Speaker 0: Oh, no, you just started. Go ahead. Speaker 1: Okay. Oh, okay. Well, I was I was laying out that the public safety committee is going to have a four step approach to look at things from hiring practices, use of force practices, post action or incident review procedures, and bystander ship and peer support programs. And at the end of every one of those seven. Solutions will bring forth some recommendations to the. Speaker 0: You can read our full council. Speaker 1: So for their consideration, tonight's recommendation is silly. Once all the procedures that the city has to undertake. Speaker 0: You cut it out. This is private. You cut it out. Hello. Mrs. Price. Are you there? Which is why I mean, there. Was. Speaker 1: Someone else from the public safety committee that could report. Speaker 3: I'll do my best. I really wish that the special order was actually attached to this document because it's pretty meaningful. In January 2016, Long Beach Police Department put forth a number of special orders that that I think should be publicized. And unfortunately, that document isn't what this is. This particular this item I would like for this moment to actually come back, because I think it needs to have the sunshine that it deserves from the public and so forth. I'm not sure Councilman Price is listening, but. I would love to to to to continue this item so that we could. Could actually share that document and make sure that the council had, as they can understand and the public understand what those special orders were, because it's, I think, very important to add that transparency and sunshine on the policy. Speaker 6: So. So, Mr. Austin, if I can just. Speaker 0: I guess. Speaker 1: I'm. Yeah, I apologize. I'm back. Speaker 0: Okay, fine. You like to continue? Speaker 1: I don't know what Councilman Austin said, but I agree with him. He's on the committee. I just want to thank the the police department's been really open to allowing us to have this process. And as we're doing this process, we're realizing that there's a lot of things that they had already proactively put into place that are part of the national conversation now. So we have to bring those forth in and go through whatever process the city needs to go through to make them permanent order such that they appear in the training and policy manuals, because right now the special orders don't appear in the manuals. They haven't been formalized to that level. And we're hoping that by this recommendation they get formalized. Speaker 3: Councilmember Price can can just give a report on what those what the special orders were. Speaker 1: Sure. Speaker 6: Yes. So I'll start. This is Tom and we can have the chief jump in as well. We're also going to cover this partly in the budget presentation next week as well as we talk about what those special orders were that were implemented both in January and then the ones later with the carotid. So we fully understand the item of of wanting to make those permanent. As Councilmember Price mentions, there is a process that you go through to have police practices and policies put in place in accordance with all labor laws and poobah and and state bargaining and all those things. And so that is the process we will be following. But there are special orders in place right now, and then they'll become permanent as we complete that. So if Chief for Wali want to comment on just the major topics that were included back in January, because that was some very substantial change that P.D. put in place back in January. Speaker 0: Hi, everyone. Thank you, Mr. City Manager and Vice Mayor and Council Member. So his comments in the special order specific to tonight is really about use of force in the January 2020 special order that we put in place to implement a lot of changes to our prior policy, which included de-escalation, duty to intervene, sanctity for human life , and outlined those in a pretty lengthy document. So the special order actually affects the entire department and it's implemented when we find an immediate need or need to make an adjustment policy or procedure while we're going through the formalized policy implementation process. And through that process, we can have revisions and adjustments to the special order language. We do a consultation with the city attorney on the policy meeting, confer with labor unions, and then that goes into once we're done with that, it will go into our CPD policy manual. In the meantime, know that special order access policy and as Councilmember Austin mentioned, is very robust. And there there are a lot more components to it that we can discuss at a later time. Thank you. Thank you very much. Cosmos Consequentialist, do you still want to delay this or. Speaker 3: No? I think it was explained here, so I don't think we need to delay it. But I would request that the staff provide a memo with all of those special orders to the entire council so that we know exactly what we're doing here tonight. I think the Public Safety Committee made a recommendation to bring it forward of the city council to support those those those special orders. Adding the weight of the city council behind these policy changes, I think is very, very important. So I would ask that you support what's before. Speaker 0: Us this evening. Thank you very much. Contribution. Do you want to speak on the side? Yes. I'm just sorting through my book. I don't see any backup material, so I'm pretty sure these I think I have an idea of what we're talking about. What are we asking the council to do? I think you're talking about, you know, getting a report. On what? What changes city chief implemented? That's something we hear about. But what about what is what is this motion? I'm not clear what we're doing. I don't see any detail. Speaker 6: So this is Tom. I'll jump in there. So this is a report coming back from public safety. In in in all fairness, we probably should have kind of, you know, put some of the staff reports behind it. I think this just kind of came as a report from Special Public Safety Committee. We can certainly provide a memo with the various reports of the various special orders. I liken this to kind of a resolution of support. You know, I wouldn't advise that the council change policy without knowing what it is and going through the all the bargaining process. But this is a sense of the council, essentially, that you'd like us to continue making those policies permanent so we can cover that next week. What those what those are in the budget presentation and then also give you actual copies of the policies that the police department is working to make permanent. Speaker 0: Okay. I think it's not unfair to to know what I'm I'm sure they're positive, but I just don't have anything in front of me. So I'd like to see what we're endorsing or writing a resolution in support of. And I do remember I did get a memo from Public Safety Committee. I didn't I don't have it in front of me. Um, so is there an opportunity? We're doing a study session. What are we doing? A study session on what our PDAs are going to be working on? We're got a study session scheduled by way of the vote we just took on the reconciliation plan. Is that correct? Speaker 6: Yes. It hasn't been scheduled yet. Honestly, our schedule is pretty full until we get through with the budget and then we can start looking at adding some additional study sessions in price. Speaker 0: Is there some room to you know, I mean, I'm happy to support it because you have to look at it. But is there some room to do this next week when we deal with public safety? Was a question to Councilman Pryor. Speaker 1: Yes can. You hear me? Speaker 0: I think you were cutting out. I didn't hear what you said. Speaker 1: Can you hear me now? Speaker 0: I can hear you now. Speaker 1: Okay. Yeah, that's fine with me to continue it till next week. The memo that I drafted for that council is an update of public safety. Did have an overview of some of the special orders, but I think that detailed overview would be fantastic. Speaker 0: Okay, good. Thank you. I support that. Is that it in Richardson? Yes. Vice Mayor. Okay, Castle. Councilwoman Pierce. Speaker 1: Thank you. Two questions for staff. One is I think that Councilmember Austin brought it up. But I just wanted to be clear, for community members that are engaging in this process, the Public Safety Committee is going through, as Councilmember Price also mentioned, a series of these reviews. What is the process for the city council and the city staff to change policy within the police department? Speaker 6: So I'd have to ask the city attorney to help us with that. In general, you know, those types of policies and the operations of departments are delegated to the city manager who delegates them to the departments. We certainly listen to counsel and the council certainly sets overarching policy, but the implementation of specific practices of how things work in the city by charter, it tends to be, you know, under the city manager and under the department. So we can certainly have our city attorney weigh in more and give us a further understanding. Speaker 1: I think I think specifically my question is it's not just the department, but the policies with our police officers. It's different from other departments. Right. Often some of these might require us to do a meet and confer. And I'm sure that there are lots of community members that are watching that don't know what a meet and confer is. So you could just talk about that briefly just as a transparency for community members. Speaker 6: Yes. In general, under state labor law, any policy that affects the working conditions has to go through certain types of varying bargaining processes with the the labor unions, whether that's in fire police or anywhere else in police. There are additional standards related to state law and post and all of the different training requirements, you know, that they're governed by under the state as well as local policies. Speaker 1: Thank you for that. And that can take anywhere from one meeting to 20 meetings some time. So I just want to be transparent with community members while we're doing the work right now and the public safety team is doing the work as well. It takes time to implement some of these because of that that process. The second question that I had. Was around the process for committees because I also just chaired two joint committees. And we just I just kind of assumed that the joint committee, the staff would put the detail in, but it's up to the chair to put those details into the agenda item if we're having a report back. Again, this is I'm assuming we're going to have a lot of key committee meetings through the end of the year with report backs. And just I think to council member Austin and Richardson's points want to make sure that those committee reports are included in the agenda item. So should that be on the council side or is that on the staff side? Speaker 6: Now, in general, when the committee meets and has their discussion, when they make whatever motions they're going to make that all, we can't take direction from a committee. And appropriately so. The Chair put this on for the council to to take action. Where I think the breakdown was is normally it is the department's responsibility in the city to help, you know, put forward the the report that came out of the committee, which has been transmitted by the chair. So we will we will tighten that up and provide some more of that assistance. We've already had some of those discussions. Speaker 1: Awesome. Thank you. And with that, I support moving this forward to next week. So we're voting today and having a fuller discussion next week during such a conversation. Yeah. Speaker 0: Back. You comes home first. I do have any problem coming inside of. Speaker 4: Yes. We have Dave Shukla. Time starts now. Speaker 0: Hello? Very briefly. I'd like to see this come back in a couple of weeks as we've heard these processes. Are public processes that have pretty well-established norms. I. Don't want to impugn anyone's intentions here. I just I just don't think this is the appropriate way to kind of implement a lot of the changes that we've been talking about. We need to be a lot more careful and deliberate, especially when it comes to California labor laws. Yeah. I mean, I think that that that this work really is the meat of what a lot of the community members have been talking about. And it's really for them to tell me their process. Not from me, but. But just. One last point. I, I really think it's important that this committee, the agenda items that are brought forward by council members, that we will really be intentional about how this is actually supposed to work with the committee. Thank you. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speakers and control. Speaker 5: Good evening. Um, this is an Cantrell. And, uh. I'm glad that some of the council people were as confused as I was about this item, which says. It refers to a special order that was issued on January six, 2020, and that become permanent policy change for the police department. It sounds like tonight. You were saying that this is going to be discussed next week. Um. But the Council is being asked to. O prove this. Without seeing what the policy changes are going to be. I would think since January six, maybe there's been a change in what you were going to ask. The policies of the police department be changed to. So. I will look forward to a list of this in writing which was not included in the staff report and. Hope that when this comes back next week that it'll be more clear and it be things that. Everybody agrees needs to be changed. Thank you. Speaker 4: Thank you. That concludes public comment for this item. Speaker 0: Oh. Thank you. Councilwoman Fries, are you okay? Speaker 1: I would like to just comment on that on that. Obviously, the Public Safety Committee meetings are open to the public. We actually have public comment at them. And what happened at the last public safety committee meeting was there was a report provided on the special orders. And so we did inquire as a council, I mean, as a committee to the city clerk, what the process for was to get the recommendation before council. So so we did what we were, we were told we were supposed to do, but obviously the special orders aren't included. However, they were discussed at the public meeting that is is preserved and can be viewed. But but I agree would be would have been very helpful to have the special orders. In front of us. I do want to ask the chief, is there somewhere that's publicly accessible where people can access the special orders and policies that's available on a public facing website? Speaker 0: Yes, ma'am. Councilmember Price and the rest of the council members. I know a couple of times in different items that have come up. The question has come up about transparency for the police department. And I want everybody to know that's listening out there that all of our policies and the special orders that everybody's asking about are all available online for anybody and everybody to see. We're an open book so you can get on there. You can research with a topic you want and everything our officers are allowed to do or not allowed to do. Our is on our website. So please, when you get an opportunity, please read those. Thank you. Speaker 1: Thank you, Chief. And I did do something that I've done as a practice for several years is I do provide a summary of every public safety meeting to the council, the city manager, the city prosecutor, the city attorney, the the public safety chiefs. Just so they understand what we covered in the Public Safety Committee meetings in case they didn't have an opportunity to watch those. And I did do that in the situation so that the council members, at least for tonight, would have that information. Because I knew that the the materials are available online. But if we could, Mr. City Manager, if we could please get a copy of the actual special orders for next week's meeting. That would be very helpful. And I think in the future, if we bring something forward from the Public Safety Committee, we would ask that city staff assist us in augmenting our recommendations so that we're not providing inaccurate information. Speaker 6: Certainly so, yes. The way we we like to support our council commissions, we we have somebody assigned to each one in the case of public safety and the police department. And we will work a little bit closer with you to when those reports come out. They really should be the city staff that helps to write that and then work with you to have that formally transmitted as the chair to the committee so that there's a record that we we provide all the all the backup documentation. So we're already changing that process for this particular committee, and we'll provide more support. Speaker 1: I appreciate that. And we'll take note of that process for the future. Speaker 0: Thank you. Thank you, everyone. The original motion was by Mrs. Brice in the second. Oh, excuse me, Councilman Richardson. I'm sorry. Vice mayor. Okay. So I understand this was this was a business staff didn't presented and it completely understood that it's going to you know, I understand Tom's response. That's going to make sure that, you know, all the committees when it comes to council, there's, you know, the legal review staff review it. It comes back under the title of the chair, but it's been vetted through staff and all the documents are there so that I completely understand. And so what we're voting on tonight, to be clear, that's to continue with our week. Speaker 1: Yes. That's what we're voting on. Speaker 0: Correct? Right. Thank you. And so we have a first and second phase in the second by Austin Architecture Place Crawfordsville. Speaker 2: District one. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 2: District two. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 2: District three. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 2: District four. Speaker 0: I. Speaker 2: District five. I District six. Speaker 0: II. Speaker 2: District seven I. District eight. Speaker 3: II. Speaker 2: District nine.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to request that the Special Order issued on January 16, 2020 become a permanent policy change for the Long Beach Police Department.

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Speaker 0: Thank you. Now for item nine and 17, councilman. Awesome. Can you please chair the council meeting? I will be accusing myself of both of these items, asking that school district is my employee. And after those, thank you very much. Speaker 3: Okay, Counsel, we will take item number nine, hoping to read the item. Speaker 1: Work from fire recommendation to enter into a reimbursement agreement with LBE USD to reimburse the Long Beach Fire Department $30,870 to provide a junior lifeguard preparatory course citywide. Speaker 3: Is there a motion to have a motion from Councilmember Craig? Do you have the can you read the who? Who was the motion? Who made the motion? And the second on the timer. Councilmember Austin. I made the request all the way through. You can comment on it as well. No, no, I will. Councilmember, did you make the motion? No concern replaced in that time. Speaker 2: Councilmember Orson, let's have Councilmember Rank as the maker of the motion, all seconded. I just wanted to comment on it. Speaker 3: Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Councilmember Price. And thank you all, Councilmember, also for allowing me this opportunity to speak on the title. As you know, our youth is very important to us, and this program has one of those benefits that we always look for in a community program. It's been a great partnership that the city has had with Longmont Unified School District in regards to its Junior Lifeguard program and especially the program as it has grown in the last couple of years. It has grown to the extent that many of the kids that are being recruited and who participate in the program come from our most communities and need our disenfranchizes and are just going to the communities in West Langley and Moorestown as well. So many of the kids come from Cabrillo High School, which is in my district and Silverado Park, and understand that there's also a bus goes around. It picks up kids from other schools who are interested in participating in junior lifeguards, specifically during high school walk in the water. So I want to thank the school district for its partnership with the city of Long Beach and working together and getting this program going. It's a great opportunity for kids to learn about lifesaving. It provides an opportunity for them to look at a career path that will eventually lead not only to a great paying job as a as a lifeguard, but to other life, other great benefits that it has for people as you grow up and become a community members. So with that, I want to thank the city and leadership for working together. I hope that this program continues to grow. It's my understanding that there is the Marine safety officer that manages this program, and I hope that that position will stay active from here on out. Not only this year, but a years is very important that we keep this program going for not only the future of our kids, but the future of our beaches as well. And, of course, the commissioner, I really see this as an opportunity as well for people to really get to enjoy the beach or to feel safe. With that, I pass it to Councilmember Price. Thank you. Speaker 2: Councilman Austin, thank you very much. I want to echo Councilmember Romney's comments this. My children have participated in this program for a number of years. I think we've been a junior guard family for a decade now and still going. The program is phenomenal and I did not think the program could get better. But when Chief Medina Deputy Chief Medina took over as deputy chief, he instituted some changes into the program that I think have actually made it so much more representative of our city and the diversity of our city. The program with Long Beach Unified allows kids who maybe didn't grow up swimming, maybe didn't learn that skill early enough in life to qualify for the junior guard's program, to now have a path forward. It gives everybody an opportunity to have a path forward to get into the program. And the qualifying test is no longer such a huge burden that kids shy away from the program because they don't think they're going to pass the qualifying test. And Chief Medina has created a mechanism to get all kids in the city if they're interested in this program, like he was when he was a youth in the city . The opportunity to do so and I very much value the program. I love that we have a partnership with Long Beach Unified School District. And I think throughout these budget discussions, I'm going to be highlighting the work of our lifeguards and the work of this program, because I think they are a group who are you know, they're very subtle in their approach and in terms of advocacy. But the work that they do to save lives every day and the rescues that they do every single day and the work that they do to teach the youth that are in the program, including my own children, skills about respect, skills about life saving, skills, about being members of the community and following rules. Those are life lessons that I think our children are going to have with them forever. And I'm so grateful because this is one of the few programs that are available for youth in the third district. And I'm so grateful for this program because it's it's really a fantastic program. And I, I cannot say anything more than Councilmember Wrongheaded about the benefits of it because it's bringing in youth from all over the city. So I wanted to highlight this program, as did Councilman Ranga, and just share with everyone that this is a tremendous program. We should be looking at every which way we can to support the growth of this program, not stifle it or make it idle because. Speaker 3: Thank you. Any other comments from the council? Speaker 0: Councilmember Richardson here. Speaker 3: Yes, go ahead. Speaker 0: Thank you. I don't want to chime in. I've been following in this pilot program for some time now. I want to acknowledge the fire department. School board member Megan Carr, who have really worked with us to make sure that the North, Long Beach, Jordan high school kids get access to this. I got to say, this is you know, we've talked for a very long time about it is to connect our coastline to our communities and uptown. And it's really been a promise that we haven't been able to figure out how to meet in our city. But this is a good program and a great career pathways and additional opportunities in an area and a zip code that more youth than any other zip code in the city by proportion and by round number. So I'm supportive of this program. I think it's a strategy toward helping diversify our police, our fire department, and and I look forward to supporting this program moving forward. So I'm happy to add my voice, my support to this this program. Thanks. Speaker 3: And thank you for those comments. Any other comments from the council? Speaker 2: Council members. This is Mary. Just wondering, are we using the Q in system? Because I was there, but I'm not sure if you are able to see it. But I want you to say thank you to both of these. Both. Long Beach Unified School District and and our department. Fire Department. This is a great things come out of programs like this that found in the opportunity for our youth to be able to have such a valuable experience is is very mended. So I to support this and this item going forward. Thank you. Speaker 3: And thank you. And I will just say that. No, I don't have a Q. Beyond that. So at this point, I'll just add my words to this. I think this is I agree with everything that has been said by my colleagues, but I also think this is an amazing example of joint use agreements and partnerships with the school district. And I see this, this opportunity expanding work and so great work by everybody involved in this. I'm going to let the public comment on this. I'm. Speaker 1: No public comment on this item. Speaker 3: Harry. None quite complete, although. Well. Speaker 1: From District one. All right. District two, I, District three, I, district four. Speaker 0: I. Speaker 1: District five. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District six. I'll put it over to District seven. I District eight. District nine. Speaker 0: I. Speaker 1: Ocean carries.

Contract

Recommendation to authorize City Manager, or designee, to execute all documents necessary to enter into a Reimbursement Agreement, and any subsequent amendments, with the Long Beach Unified School District (LBUSD), to reimburse the Long Beach Fire Department (LBFD) $30,870, to provide a Junior Lifeguard Preparatory Course at Cabrillo and Jordan High Schools for LBUSD students, from February 3, 2020 through June 30, 2020; Authorize City Manager, or designee, to execute all documents necessary to enter into a Reimbursement Agreement, and any subsequent amendments, with the LBUSD to reimburse LBFD $26,750 for tuition for LBUSD students to participate in the summer Long Beach Junior Lifeguard Program, from July 6 through August 14, 2020; and Increase appropriations in the Tidelands Operating Fund Group in the Fire Department by $57,620, offset by reimbursement revenue. (Citywide)

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Speaker 3: Thank you. Next up, we have concern item number 17. Can you please read the item. Speaker 1: Report from Parks, Recreation and Marine recommendation to amend contract with the Long Beach Unified School District for food preparation for the 2020 Summer Food Service Program Citywide. Speaker 3: Thank you. So was there emotion? I was talking about what I'm going to do bring this item as well. Did you call this? No, I did not. Councilmember But I be happy to make the motion. The second. Speaker 0: Greg Richardson. Speaker 3: Thank you. The motion by Councilmember Vargas, seconded by Councilmember Ranga. Which. Can we get a blue staff report? Speaker 5: So, Councilmember, this is our summer food program. The reason this was pulled is Vice Mayor Andrews has a conflict because of his employer is Long Beach Unified School District. Speaker 3: Great. They're both in second. Is there any public comment on the photo? Speaker 1: There was no public comment on this item. Speaker 3: All right. Let's go to a different one. All right. Speaker 1: District two. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District three. I am district four. I am district five. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District seven. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District eight. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District nine. Speaker 0: I know. Speaker 1: Ocean carries. Speaker 0: I'm fine, thank you. Ask him to take over for me. Okay. I'd like to apologize for the last system. The system is literally. So please text it to queue up. And I have it here. So I apologize. Apple could not see it with a quick please. You know, queue up here with me. I have to be on the phone. So okay with that, would you? Okay. Now we're going to go to enter into our first budget during the 2021 fiscal year growth. Could you please call.

Contract

Recommendation to authorize City Manager, or designee, to execute all documents necessary to amend Contract No. 35537 with the Long Beach Unified School District, for food preparation for the 2020 Summer Food Service Program, to increase the contract amount by $765,225, for a revised amount not to exceed $1,069,525; execute sponsor/site agreements with the City of Signal Hill and nonprofit organizations; and, execute any documents, including amendments, necessary to accept funds, implement, and administer the 2020 Summer Food Service Program, from June 15, 2020 through August 21, 2020; and Increase appropriations in the General Grants Fund Group in the Parks, Recreation and Marine Department by $755,904, offset by grant revenue. (Citywide)

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Speaker 0: You know, queue up here with me. I have to be on the phone. So okay with that, would you? Okay. Now we're going to go to enter into our first budget during the 2021 fiscal year growth. Could you please call. Speaker 1: Report from Public Works. Recommendation to conduct a budget hearing to receive and discuss an overview of the proposed fiscal year 2021 budget city wide. Speaker 5: It's actually mayor and council. I think we would prefer to do the the first presentation of the budget and then do the CFP and then we would get into questions on. Speaker 0: Okay. Speaker 5: So Mayor and members of the city council or vice mayor and members of the city council, we are here tonight to really walk you through the FY 21 proposed budget that was released yesterday. I am going to be going through the staff presentation and the city manager's proposed budget. The mayor wouldn't normally be here today, but due to the passing of his mom, he's working on arrangements for her, for her services, which are coming up. And so he's asked me to, in that moment, do his presentation at the end of my presentation to kind of some of the mayor's recommendations on top of the city manager's budget. I think somebody might have an open phone line and then we will get into the CIPA presentation. And so as we start this budget, I want to remind ourselves how many accomplishments we have to be proud of. We have spent nearly $100 million or have received or have spent or will spend $100 million on COVID 19 response. That's over 80,000 free public tests sheltering for our homeless. Free medical care. Food. Rent support, business assistance, residents assistance. The the scope of the investment that the city has done in COVID has been spectacular. We have supported over 20,000 bids, put online sessions to help our small businesses. And we've issued nearly 13,000 building permits. The council has passed some very significant housing policies, including inclusionary housing tenant assistance policies. 650 new affordable housing units are in the pipeline. We have also just finished construction on our year round homeless shelter, the very first one. The final touches are going on right now and then we'll be opening that later this year with a private provider who will help 125 people find housing while they transition into other, more permanent solutions. We have continued the largest investment in infrastructure in or I'm sorry, largest infrastructure investment in a generation. And we've also opened the brand new Billie Jean King Maine Library and the LEED certified City Hall and Civic Center Plaza just a year ago. Heal the Bay is continuing to notice our progress on our water quality. And 87% of our city's beaches received A and B grades during the summer. And our animal care and compassion saves approach is working. And our live release rate is is very, very high, over 89%, I believe. And so it's important to remember that we are a full service city. $2.6 billion in operations. We provide a wide array of services through our 23 departments. We're a very complex organization. We have 37 different financial funds that represent a number of different operations, and they each are funded in different ways. The majority of those funds, though, those $2.6 billion are restricted by law for certain operations. And the general fund is the only really complete discretionary fund, which is about 20% of the budget. And really, that is where our tax dollars go. Before we get into the budget, I do want to really focus on some of the challenges that we've had and also really explain some of the coronavirus services that we are providing. And so we are in the middle of the biggest health crisis that we have ever seen in our generation. And it is a global pandemic. So not only are we addressing that for our community, but we are also addressing the major fiscal and economic challenges that are occurring that have been completely exacerbated by COVID 19. We've seen movements to end systemic racism with thousands of people taking to the streets. And we also have the largest general fund shortfall in recent history. That 30 million. That shortfall is $30 million in fy21. We are seeing huge revenue losses, a 9% loss in sales tax. 38% loss in our hotel bed tax and over 40% loss in oil revenue. At the same time, our costs continue to grow as the costs of services increase. We are seeing nearly 20% unemployment and we have that major economic uncertainty both locally, state and nationally. And so we are prioritizing the health and safety of residents in light of that pandemic. And this budget maintains core services in a balanced way while making some very difficult reduction decisions. We've had to balance that budget with an approach that considers a number of different factors and at the same time we're implementing bold actions and investments in the areas of racial equity and reconciliation. And we realize that this budget is really just a first step. So let's talk a little bit about COVID. We have responded incredibly swiftly to the biggest health crisis in a generation. Over 100 personnel have been dedicated to our city's emergency operations center since March. It's the longest running disaster that any of us can remember. And disaster response. We have over 8000 cases reported, tracked and investigated. We have established free medical care for over 4100 individuals and what we call a rapid assessment clinic. We have sheltered over 300 people experiencing homelessness, first in our community centers, and then as we transitioned into hotels. And we've tested over 123,000 people through our city free drive thrus and then also through our private medical providers. Right at the beginning of the pandemic, we went out to the community and asked for support and raised $1,000,000 very quickly and used that to support nonprofits in our COVID 19 response. This council created the first ever eviction moratoriums. We also provided business support through delays of fines and fees. We created brand new permitting processes to quickly get businesses back up and running again. We had creativity in adapting to new models like Open Space and Parklets and Open Streets. We created, we found and we distributed free personal protective equipment. We've also managed a huge warehouse with $1.7 million or million items in inventory of that personal protective equipment. And we've created a COVID business inspection task force, which has visited 4700 businesses. We also rerouted city staff into dedicated call centers, managing thousands and thousands of calls. Just in the past 60 days. It's been over 24,000 calls or 400 a day. We will have spent, as I mentioned, over 100 million that we are planning on on spending or receiving. We also are investing in our community support programs, $14.4 million in the areas, things like homeless, sheltering, food insecurity, nonprofit relief, youth leadership, the arts, digital inclusion, also investing in business support programs $6.75 million for recovery grants, transition grants, helping with technology, helping with PPE and other things. And so the pandemic has really changed our operations and our focus, and we've had to make that our number one priority and divert significant staff time. We've drafted our city employees as emergency disaster workers and have them doing completely different jobs than they thought that they would be doing. And so we've done things like provide a relief to residents and businesses. We've done fee waivers, find cancelations, we changed street sweeping, we've done rental relief. All these are incredibly important, but they've also had adverse impacts to our revenues and our expenses. And there's been some some silver lining as well as we look at different ways on how we provide service, how we reimagine our work. We do a lot more over the phone now. We do a lot more in terms of telecommuting, in terms of online services. And so that telework has really become the way that we operate. And and it's worked very well. And so on June 23rd, the City Council adopted a resolution acknowledging racism as a public health crisis and created this framework for reconciliation. And so that was a bold, bold move that this council took and really took our city to the forefront of the discussion on racial equity. The team went out and held four town hall meetings and 13 listening sessions in a two month period of time, engaging over 600 participants, an incredible level of outreach. And we're investing in the work that and the ideas that we heard. $3.2 million are in this budget in the area of racial equity and reconciliation, 2.5 million structural and 702,001 times. Here's a summary of those items. And we're going to be bringing this plan to you next week, and we'll talk a little bit more about the specifics when we get there. But in the area of health, youth and violence prevention, we have a $1.5 million increase structurally for racial equity. These are things like youth programs, violence prevention programs, trauma informed responses to community needs. We're redesigning our heart team model and moving it from a firefighter sworn program into the health department, using nurses or social workers. We're looking at using social workers in our libraries. We started a pilot last year and we want to continue that. We're looking at some different library models. On investing in libraries seven days a week. We're looking at our senior program at the Expo Center and making the only program that serves kind of a northern part of Long Beach permanent. And we're investing in summer youth programing in areas of high need, including the Be Safe program at 11 sites. In the area of public safety, we've created a new office of Constitutional Policing in the police department to really look at data and reforms and new ways of doing things and best practices that can be implemented along with training. An implicit bias and implicit bias training. We're looking at supporting an effort to look at the PCC $150,000 that in the first year would be to bring an outside expert on to look at all the best practice models, to look at what we're doing now with the PCC. How can it be strengthened potential ballot measures, other models and then ongoing to be able to provide staffing for that, for that body, whatever it becomes? We are investing in our fire diversity recruitment program with one time dollars and continuing that great program. And we're re-envisioning how we do policing looking particularly at civilian ization and converting 34 sworn positions to about 29 civilian positions. In the area of equity. We've got a brand new deputy city manager, that's Theresa Chandler, who's going to be overseeing all of this work in addition to other things. And we are enhancing the staffing for the Office of Equity by a position and a second one that's one times. And then moving that Office of Equity into the city manager's office to elevate the importance of that work and to have it also touch a broader area of the city. We're implementing training for our city employees at $100,000 for implicit bias and equity and also investing in our language access program. And so when I brought the budget approach to you back in May, we talked about using what we call a balanced outcomes based approach. And we knew we had a $30 million shortfall we had to address. At the same time, having to invest in racial equity and reconciliation. And so we prioritized and protected those core services while adjusting others to what we have to understand are acceptable service levels. They may not be what we're our hopes and dreams, but they are the level of service that we can accept. And this budget is balanced using both structural, which are permanent solutions and one time solutions. So before I get into the areas of reduction, I think it's important that we recall what's in it. So what is maintained. And so this budget preserves emergency response, including PD priority one and priority two calls emergency medical and fire services. We're investing in our infrastructure for sidewalk and potholes. We've got our major facilities maintenance. We're investing in our parks and facilities and public spaces. We continue our graffiti abatement programs in our landscaped medians, continuing our are clean teams that pick up trash on the streets. We continue our youth and senior programing and and improving and implementing affordable housing. We're investing in our business assistance programs, in our water and gas customer service. Continue to have strong economic development and business programs. We still have our multifaceted homelessness response and in fact, more money than ever due to a lot of federal grants coming in to address homelessness. We've got investment in technology in our green fleet and in our energy efficiency and greenhouse gas reduction efforts through upgrades to city facilities. We continue to do a permitting and inspection for businesses so that they can do what they need to do and invest in our animal care services and tree trimming. And so as we look at how we're going to reduce and solve that $30 million deficit, we came up with a five step plan to those savings in reductions , assistance from employees, new and reallocated revenues, strategic enhancements in efficiencies and innovations and service reductions. And I'll go through each one of those because it's important that you understand those. So the first one is assistance from employee groups. We're seeking $11.3 million in the general fund, which could come in in a variety of ways, including employee furloughs or other types of contributions while we negotiate longer term contracts. It's important to say now we don't have a lot of details in the budget on the specifics because that really needs to be done at the bargaining table with our partners in labor. And those discussions are ongoing. So those furloughs are one time solutions. They do have limits. They're not a permanent reduction in work hours. And we're going to have to deal with the structural solution in the following year. And it is a huge impact to our employees. It is the potential for up to 10% loss of pay for a year for non sworn employees, which could mean 26 furlough days. If it were that level, we would be looking at closing city services, most city services one day every two weeks and we would have a loss of productivity by 10% in hours available to serve the community. So there will be community impacts. But it does provide much needed immediate relief in the budget. It helps avoid significant layoffs. We estimate that is the value of about 106 positions that would not be eliminated, and it helps minimize permanent structural service impacts to the community. In the second area cannabis business. I'm sorry, second area is new are allocated revenues. So we are looking at where we can bring in some additional revenue. The voters, when they approved Measure May, which is a tax on cannabis, they gave us a range and from 6 to 8% for medical and from 8 to 10% for recreational . And the council set it at the lowest possible rate as that industry was getting started. We are recommending that the council increase it by 1% as allowed by voters and that would bring in about $800,000 in revenues. And those would cover structural things like racial equity and reconciliation in addition to cannabis oversight and other services qualified under measure. Amy, we're also looking at bringing in some more measure Measure A for maintenance, about four and a half million dollars, which prevents additional reductions to police and fire. We're looking at a new youth sports registration fee. There currently is no fee, just a $10 fee for equipment. And so raising that to $25 and the mayor will talk a little bit about that in his presentation at the end. We're looking at increasing fees in our Eldorado Park and also on our beaches, going from $0.25 to increasing by $0.25 every 15 minutes at the beach parking lots, which is comparable to our other beach agencies and increasing our ambulance rates. Our costs are going up as and we're looking to cover that with revenue. And this would also line up with the county rates. We're looking at some additional support from our gas fund, bringing in about $1.3 million in transfer. And the gas fund also is having investments and they do need additional revenue to make those investments. They are currently 32% below SoCal Gas and there has not been a gas rate increase since 2016. And so this budget does propose a 10.4 overall effective increase. We have some increase in towing fees to keep up with the cost to provide that service. And Measure B is in this budget for the first time at a 1% increase in the total, which was approved by the voters. And that money would be dedicated for arts and Convention Center in the budget. The third area is what we call our strategic investments. We have a capital improvement program of 491 million, which you'll hear about later in the presentation later tonight. And that's in the area of airport mobility, public facilities, utilities and harbor. And I want to focus a little bit on mobility and facilities as this is what we hear about the most from our community. This budget has a $1.2 million and alleys 13 million. And our arterial streets. 14 million in arterial corridor enhancements. 11 million in residential streets. Almost 10 million in ADAS. Sidewalk curb improvements. 1.6 million for Fire Station nine. And investments through AB 32. Energy efficiency in our facilities. And so a big portion of those dollars are from Measure eight, and it's $18.5 million in investment. The Council also asked us last year to really help out a a jewel of the city, which is Sunnyside Cemetery. It was having a long, strong I'm sorry, prolonged financial problems and really couldn't operate as a nonprofit anymore. And so that's been transferred to the city. And but it takes money to be able to to keep it up. And it's about $300,000, which is included in the budget measure passed. And that is calling for a new ethics commission. And so we are bringing on a staff member to support that work. The work is likely needed is more probably 2 to 3 staff members. But we do believe we should start with at least one. It's important that we have dedicated staff into this commission and the city attorney's office will reallocate $150,000 in cannabis funding to support their work on the Ethics Commission. We're also investing in our health department ten administrative focus positions, a non general fund, but these are funded off of grants to help them manage the money that that is in the health department. 98% or roughly so is funded out of grants in our health department. We're investing in animal care, a full time veterinarian, and $100,000 for medical supplies to support compassion saves. We're investing in our park needs as the water rates go up, we need to also raise the dollars that we put towards water to keep the same level of service. And with all the grants that we're receiving, it's important that we invest in infrastructure, in people who manage all those grants. And so the financial management department, while taking some pretty significant reductions, is investing in a grants officer. We're going to have 1.5 million for our runoff elections that are November ballot. We'll have money for our redistricting and census, which is measured and approved by voters. We will also be investing in looking at fire operations. How can we save money in the fire department? How do we look at different service models? How do we raise revenue? How do we lower costs at 200,000? And we are looking we're investing in our homeless rapid response like every year and also setting aside some additional water budget. This budget has several strategic studies. We're studying the CPC. We're studying our fire operations. We're implementing a multiyear citywide Ph.D. study. And we're going to be investing our AB32 funds into energy efficiency projects that both reduce our greenhouse gas emission footprint and help save us electric or money on our electric bill. In the area of the police and fire academies. They are continuing to be funded in this budget and we do think that we're going to have higher than normal attrition in these years, especially in the police department. And so we are planning, even though there are some reductions in PD and some in fire, that to keep those academies. And however, if we always have to estimate how many we may lose to attrition and if it's not enough, we would be asking you to cover that with unallocated measure revenues to avoid any layoffs. And so we also in the safer grant area, unfortunately, looking at the dollars and looking at what is left and how much money we would be able to have and to invest in the future, we are recommending that you forego the decision to go after the safer grant. We would have to spend about $4.1 million to draw down the SAFER grant, which is currently valued at about 1.7 1.8 million. And so I'm sure this will be a subject of a lot of future discussion, but we just believe right now, given what we know in our budget situation, not to pursue that engine 17 remains in the budget. It is funded by a measure for another year. And of course, situations and circumstances can change in a year. It efficiencies and innovations is the fourth area. So we're looking at reduce cost from strategic investments. We've been investing in our cities fleet for the last several years to get our new, more modern fleet, and that's helped us save money. So we are now looking at about $900,000 that we can reduce out of what we spend in our fleet fund. We are getting efficiencies from our investment in technology and lbe coast our new enterprise resource program saving $600,000 and we've got other efficiencies from lbe coast and our east citation technology and accounting efficiencies. In the area of public safety, we're reimagining and redesigning the delivery of public safety services. We are looking to reduce 34 sworn positions, but replacing them with 29 civilian positions, which saves $3.8 million. An example of this is taking 16 police officer positions and instead using civilians to respond to priority three, the lowest level calls that come in to the dispatch center. We also have city police officers that oversee our public safety equipment and facilities and having those be civilians instead. And our helicopter air support unit would be civilian ized. We would streamline our jail operations and consolidate into one jail in down in the public safety building and eliminate 12 non sworn positions in the fire department. We would shift that from a sworn firefighters to civilian nurses or social workers. Saving $450,000 and we'd be transferring our crossing guard program out of the police department to public works. This budget includes both contracting in and contracting out. Wherever we can, we like to replace contracts, work with city staff when it saves money. And that's what we're doing in this budget and saving $1.1 million. At the same time, we evaluated some options where the private sector may be able to do it for lower cost. And so the city manager is proposing about $950,000 in savings. The mayor has an item later asking us to reconsider that. So that will be up to the council to take a look at. And then we're also eliminating vacant positions where we can. So the last area is really service reduction. So after we've done all of that, we know that we still have reductions that we have to make in terms of services. And so our goal is really here we're to provide core services at acceptable service levels. We still need to meet all of our local, state and federal mandates and legal requirements. We have to preserve our organizational capacity so that our our employees out on the street have the support that they need to operate effectively. And so we do not do a across the board approach. I ask all departments to submit reduction ideas and then we go through them and look to see what that balanced outcomes approach is. And so all departments ended up taking reductions except for the health department. They only had their very little general fund, only about 2% of their budget. And and that really is in the area of homelessness. And so we're looking to actually increase in the health department through the equity work. But then all other departments took reductions in this process. And so in the area of public safety, we have proposed 59 sworn police positions being eliminated. That's 54 and police and five and fire. And of those those 34 in police and four in fire are part of the civilian ization efforts that I mentioned earlier. There are some reductions in the area of vice and traffic and narcotics field detail the K-9 team over time, reducing some of the blue line officers and eliminating the Long Beach Unified School District contract in fire. We've got a reduction of 1.9 million. But the specifics are really going to be identified through that comprehensive study in FY21. The FAA 21 reduction will be covered by a one year delay of vehicle capital replacement. So there is money for FY 21 and the structural solutions will be helped to be identified through that study. They are eliminating positions through the heart. Teams transfer. They're eliminating a marine safety officer and reducing some career non-career lifeguards entitlements. And disaster preparedness is reduced to public safety dispatchers. Throughout the organization, we're looking at reducing our administrative services. We've got management reduction, support, position reductions. We're redistributing workload that comes at a cost. We already have employees who are doing an incredible amount of work, and now we have fewer people doing the same amount of work, if not more work. So we'll have an impact on the organization and you'll see some of the positions. Here are just examples that are being reduced. We are reducing in cannabis and oversight and enforcement. That was a brand new program that we put in place. We are recommending a 30% reduction in the positions, which is seven positions. This will have an impact. We won't be as nimble as we get new applicants or a few. Counsel wants to look at new policies, but we do think it makes sense. When we look at the balance outcomes approach and community service area, we really strive to minimize any negative impacts to residents. We had looked at our libraries and rather than reducing any one library or reducing all libraries by the same amount of hours, we looked at a different model where nine libraries would go from 5 hours or five days a week to three days a week. And our three newest flagship libraries would go from five days a week to seven days a week and still save about 300,000. Those seven day libraries can serve the entire region. The mayor has some comments on this as well in his recommendation. When we put this together, we weren't really sure if libraries were going to even be open during COVID, and they continue to remain closed except for a pick up service in the area of youth programing. We're looking at reducing our summer fun day and teen center by an hour a day. And we're also going to have a little bit less proactive property maintenance on our city properties. In the area of Thailand's, as I mentioned, we're reducing a marine safety officer and some lifeguard hours. We have to look at our landscaping in the marine areas and reducing that to kind of match what we do in the general fund areas. We are going to go to biweekly mowing of green spaces and going down in tree trimming from every year to every other year. And special advertising and promotions is the money that we get to do our communications and art and a convention, visitors bureau, business and special events. And so we are reducing two positions in special events. One position and public affairs, eliminating the recently added community concerts funding and reducing Museum of Art by about $18,000. Arts Council by about 25 or so. And Convention and Visitors Bureau by about 450,000. And so those really are the summary of the reductions. Altogether, it's about 136 positions are impacted, 77 of which are field positions and 59 are vacant. We're continuing to look at that and getting the specific detail and we would be going through a process with civil service that would determine the actual layoff process. We will work and do everything we can to try to prevent layoffs for city employees. And we've been holding positions vacant in the in the idea that we may need them for city employees, if at all possible. I did promise you, counsel, when we started this that we would also provide options in the budget and they were in there. We had to look at some very, very difficult decisions as the departments presented. And so these are just some of the real items that were considered and rejected. So these are not in the budgets, but they are listed so that you have some information on what we looked at. We had to look at things like closing branch libraries and our graffiti program and tree trimming and additional engines and paramedic units and our homeless services and animal care reductions. It was a very painful list. I do need to point out that a number of things are not funded or underfunded in this budget, including some of the initiatives that you bring to the city council. And we come back with information on. So this is the time to really revisit those lists as we give you those costs. And so I provided that in the budget for you to take a look at. We also have important unfunded and short term and long term liabilities, which include things like our ADA compliance and additional funding for tree trimming and plant water needs in our insurance and pensions and climate action plan and others. And so those are in the budget to review as well. And so we're relying on both structural and one time solutions to balance the budget. Normally, we only do structural solutions. That is really kind of a core tenet of the of the council. But I am I am recommending that you look at both and there's a reason for that. And because of the significantly challenging factors, the magnitude of the problem, the more we cut in terms of services structurally, the more impact on our residents and businesses who are hurting right now because of COVID 19. And there's also a lot that we don't know. There may be both positives and negatives coming. There could be additional money from the Heroes Act, which could be millions and millions of dollars under the House bill, and that could come as early as mid-next year. And so we're looking in highlights about $18.8 million in department reductions. We're adding back two and a half million for racial equity investments. We're asking for our employees to help us at $11 million. And then we are using some reserves, $2.9 million. For the one times in the budget we normally have one time dollars to invest and this year we do not have one time dollars to invest, but we still have one time needs. And so we are looking at funding that through some additional gas fund transfer and also some use of reserves. And so all told, between one time and operating, we are recommending in the manager's budget 6.1 million in reserves. It's important to remember we still have shortfalls for the next few years. They actually total about $76 million over the next three years. And after we solve this year, we're going to have $32 million next year than 23 than 22 and 22. Excuse me. And SAP is looking like it's going to be down for several years and we would actually deplete all of the reserves and all of the fund balance in just a few short years at the current rate . And Tidelands has some very significant cuts or losses in the in probably the next 2 to 3 years. But then it does get a little bit better out in the future years. And so the budget timeline, you know, we started this back in December. Then we took a pause through COVID, unfortunately, and restarted it back in May. And here we are today. So we are back on schedule. The team had to do a very abbreviated and prepare preparation of the budget, but we are back on the normal schedule. We've submitted that proposed budget and now it's up to the council and we have a lot of meetings scheduled. The community can get involved. We encourage you to attend the budget hearings to come to our community. Budget meetings will be four of those come to the Bossie meetings. We also have a survey that I think we're already at over 4000 responses now, and we have a brand new tool that we've launched called our Budget Balancing Simulator Challenge, which allows you to play mayor and city council and see the different choices you have to make. And it's nascent, it's in its infancy, it's not perfect, but it gives you a good sense of what could what those options are. And so I want to remind us all that this is a city of many, many accomplishments. We continue to be a full service city. We're addressing our challenges head on, and I'm so proud of that. From the pandemic to our major budget shortfall, to our work on racial equity and reconciliation. And we're providing those great services to our communities. And so I do need to end with some thank you's. Our employees have been amazing through all of this. They are. They put themselves at risk as emergency workers. They are out there doing the work of COVID. They're being reassigned into things they've never done before. Our police department, our fire department, our health department are protecting us. They're protecting our freedoms and our expression, freedom of expression and our health. All departments are pulled together during COVID 19. We've had the staff that have put together this budget are just phenomenal and it's amazing what they've been able to accomplish. The same thing in our Racial Equity and Reconciliation Initiative staff under some very difficult conditions. Our technology team has been adapting and helping us learn in this new world of COVID 19. Our city clerk and her office have been fantastic and learning how to do these huge teleconference meetings. And I do want to really thank our employee associations for really recognizing how serious this is and being at the bargaining table with us to look at both the short term challenges we're facing and also as we address longer term compensation. And of course, I need to thank all of you, mayor and council and the support of all of our citywide elected officials attorney, prosecutor, auditor, our clerk, our civil service director, our harbor director, and our water general manager. And so I know that was a lot. That's a lot for me. There's a lot in this budget to go over. I do want to briefly kind of go through the mayors recommendations. I will not do it nearly as eloquent as he would, but I do want to kind of read those into the record. Um, in the area of COVID 19, he's asking the council to consider public health councils that facilitate education concerning workplace safety and health guidance in the industry's most affected by COVID 19. And in that post-COVID-19 economy, he's asking the council to restore some of the positions recommended to be contracting out. Those include parking citation, customer service, public works, surveying and parking meter collection and maintenance. Also asking us to take a look at job training and how we help our disadvantaged workers and explore and supports penalties for noncompliance in the workplace. He's asking us to address and invest in the area of income inequality, and that could come in the form of public banking and really exploring that concept and universal basic income and adding some resources to start the intense study of those areas. In the area of racial justice and equity. He's asking the council to make justice fund funded and permanent, as well as the language access program and make those both structural. And that the Council should continue to look for opportunities to invest in black and communities of color by funding health partnerships, a community led crisis response, violence prevention programs and investments in public social, public social workers and mental health professionals in the area of housing and homelessness. Asking to create a right to counsel program for renters in light of the national eviction crisis. The area of public health and safety is to really look at the nine on one calls for service and explore that transitioning of non-emergency calls to models that have more emphasis on mental health and social services and in infrastructure. With the adoption now of Measure A, we have new dollars that aren't in here now, but they come in FY 23 and to start looking at a new five year infrastructure plan beginning in 23, when those moneys materialize in the areas of arts and culture, libraries and youth sports investing 1.7 million through Measure B, that's brand new money that we now have coming in into our local arts and and our convention and entertainment center. He's asking the council to maintain the existing library's hours for a year and with the opportunity to look at other ways to expand access when it's safe. And in the city manager's proposal, there was the youth sports program, and he's asking to keep those fees at their current levels. Looking into the future, he'd like the Council to consider implementation of the CAP Plan, Climate Action Plan and really look at the city's dependance on oil production. And how do we identify long term sustainable funding options to support those services as oil is likely not going to be in our future. In the future. And he's asking the team to look at different budgeting approaches, including the concept of zero based budgeting and really starting a process for the F 22 budget that brings community engagement even earlier in the process. As we look at just how we do our budget, what those approaches are and how to engage the community so that are there, those are the mayor's recommendations. There's also something been distributed to all of you and uploaded into the register on the specific dollar amounts that he'd like to consider and that those would come out of our measure be a rainy day fund reserve and our other reserves in order to fund those items. So I've spoken a lot. Vice Mayor, I will turn it to you. We can take a break and answer questions here or go on to the CIP program here, that short presentation, and then take questions so as to the will of the council. Speaker 0: If that's okay with you at a time. I'd love to have a copy report presentation, if you don't mind. Speaker 5: Yes, sir. We're ready to go. Here we go. I will now turn it over to our brand new public works director Eric Lopez. And please give us a minute while we pull up the presentation. Good evening, Vice Mayor. City Council and community members. My name is Eric Lopez and as your new director of Public Works. I'm pleased to present to you the city's capital improvement plan for Budget Year 21. Tonight's presentation will cover a few highlights of fiscal year 20, the fiscal year 21 proposed budget, a brief focus on Missouri and some challenges and opportunity for the city's capital improvement programs. I want to. Start by highlighting what the public works team has been working on in fiscal year 20. Starting on the top left, you'll see the Atlantic Bridge Community Shelter Project, which represents the city's first year round shelter for people experiencing homelessness. I'm proud to announce that active construction is now complete and we're working with the health team on the final preparations for this critical project. The Halton Park Community Center has been completed as has improvements to our city place parking structure and we are in the process of completing the Alamitos Beach concessions improvements and our first of several first new first new beach playgrounds. We've also done a series of street improvements and ADA curb rent ramp improvements. The city is proposing to invest a total of 109 million and new capital projects this year from a variety of funding sources, as shown on this slide. And you will see that the funding allocations have been organized by section of the Capital Improvement Program Book and Fiscal Year 21. Funding has been identified in the four sections listed here. I'll start with the mobility program. The mobility section of the CHP represents the largest section as a majority of funding that comes from the state and county taxes. For example, we have gas tax SB one measure R measure and measure W, Prop eight and Prop C. Some example of mobility projects that we've delivered include residential. Speaker 0: Street repair projects. Speaker 5: ADA ramps, arterial street improvements, and various EV charging stations citywide. Specifically in fiscal year 21, we're looking at a total investment of $55.2 million comprising of, again, transportation bonds, gasoline tax measure and general capital projects. This funding supports a multitude of uses. The top four main uses, as listed in this chart, include the arterial corridor enhancements, arterial street rehabilitation, residential street improvements and ADA curb ramp improvements, among others as listed here. The map on your screen now provides the city's infrastructure investment plan. I want to highlight the Green three segments, which represent the work that has been completed completed to date by the public works team. We are making great progress, but obviously still have some important projects ahead of us to improve the commitment that we made under the existing infrastructure investment plan. This map represents the major residential street investment plan for this fiscal year and the proposed plan for fiscal year 21. The proposed rates on the map represent fiscal year 20 projects, while the orange represents the proposed fiscal year 21 streets. Now to our Public Facilities program. The proposed projects for fiscal year 21 include energy efficiency upgrades as well as other facility improvements to city buildings identified in our facilities. Conditions Assessment. One example of work that is identified in our facility conditions assessment is roof replacement. And as an example, in this picture on the left, we have the Los Altos libraries that that was leaking. And so we were able to replace those roofs and and and put one in that's much more energy efficient. Thanks to a B 32 funds, the city will continue investing in projects that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, including our EV charging stations and public works. Looks forward to implementing more projects that will help reduce greenhouse gas emissions and improve energy efficiency citywide. In fiscal year 21, our airport plans to invest in improvements for accessing the terminal and rehabilitation of the airfield. The runway and the total of that investment is about $1,000,000. In our utility program in fiscal year 21, there's this total investment in this program is just under $46 million. It includes 3 million in council Measure W funds. Measure W was passed by voters in November 2018 and has been identified for use to construct new stormwater and water quality related projects such as the Long Beach Ms. treatment facility. Long Beach Energy Resources has proposed an $11 million investment in the city's pipeline infrastructure. And the Long Beach Water Department is proposing 35.8 million to invest in the city's water and sewer infrastructure. Now I want to take a moment and highlight Missouri and the investment it has made into the city's infrastructure. Everyone should be familiar with the measure investment plan and hopefully you've had the opportunity to visit the cities measure a web page at Long Beach dot gov. That measure. Speaker 0: A. Speaker 5: First, I want to take a moment and highlight some measure a investments and some projects that the team plans on completing this fiscal year. The top two pictures represent the Rancho Los Amigos project, which included repairs and improvements to the masonry garden walls. Archive room roof resurfaced. The driveway and parking lot replaced electrical systems and seismically retrofitted the exhibit rooms. The bottom two pictures represent improvements to the bank branch and the new branch libraries. Improvements include a replacement of the existing circulation desk where a new ADA compliant desk that not only improved accessibility but will also improve the user experience . The large picture on the right is of the Los Altos Library Roof Repair Project. In addition to the facilities discussed, investments have been made to the parks, facilities, roadways and sidewalks. Pictured here are Silverado Park, where improvements are made to the sports courts, including updating electrical equipment. The Martin Luther King Junior Avenue was repaved from Seventh Street, 2/10 to 10th Street. The project included resurfacing the roadway, sidewalk replacement, new curb gutters, driveway replacement, ADA compliant, curb rounds and traffic improvements. We also see the new playground at Jenni Rivera Park and improvements to sidewalk path of travel. Measure a proposed budget this year, we have a total of 18.5 million investments and mainly going into the mobility and public facilities programs. If you are the programs that are proposed to receive funding in fiscal year 21 for Measure R alley improvements, arterial street improvements, curbs and sidewalks, facility improvements, and some additional funding for Fire Station nine pictured above. We have some street improvement and alleys and the fire station. Since the inception of Measure eight in 2017, including the this year's proposed budget, almost 133 million has been invested into the city's infrastructure. It's truly hard to imagine where the city's infrastructure would be without the investment measure it has provided to the city's roadways, alleys , sidewalks and public facilities. In addition to the projects identified in the fiscal year, 21 capital improvement program, staff is also providing recommendations for investment. The future measure a infrastructure projects. This slide represents the total estimated investment measure A will provide for the city's infrastructure since it was passed in 2017. Originally, Measure eight was estimated to provide approximately $100 million. But as you can see from the chart, the amount has grown to just over 160 million. Um, what we've been able to accomplish a lot of work. We still have a significant amount of unfunded needs. And whilst that while significant, the city in the public works department has accepted the challenge and we are doing the best we can to address as many needs as possible. Investment in the city's infrastructure is driven by successful, successful strategic planning, which starts with understanding the specific details of our needs. This slide represents the various studies that Public Works uses to address the city infrastructure needs. In closing, the proposed budget of 108 million will continue to provide significant investments into the city's infrastructure during these unprecedented times. Without the investment imagery and recent county and state funds passed by voters. The investments would not be anywhere near what they have been. Not just this year, but in the last couple of years. That includes the CIPA report that we're here for questions. Thank you, Mayor and city council. So we turn it back over to you. Thank you for allowing us to really present all that information. And we have our finance team, our public works team and also our department directors here to answer questions. And then we're going to start doing department presentations as early as next week. So you're going to start seeing kind of the major city departments that we normally present to you and getting feedback from you on any others you want to see. So that concludes the staff report. Speaker 0: Thank you very much, Tom. I just want to congratulate you and a beautiful presentation. It's very robust. And I mean, you guys really did what we needed here. And now I want to tell my colleagues here, since we have such a large, you know, public comment group, I like to really allow them to start first with you guys or mine so you can hear what they want to ask you. So with that, I would like to turn it over to public comment in Korea. Could you please read the names? Seconds, 90 seconds, because we have a very large company coming through. Speaker 4: Our first speakers. Jordan, when your time starts now. Speaker 3: Hi there. Can you hear me? Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker 0: Hello. Hi there. We've been. Speaker 3: Anticipating this budget for quite. Speaker 0: Some time and I'm glad that. Speaker 3: It's finally coming forward and that there are some substantial public investments. But frankly, based on the protests and the ways in which we understand our city budget should work, I think the people wanted and expected a little bit more in terms of defunding the police. I think we need to, as a community, recognize that certain services that are being invested in the police department are suitable much more when they are given to community resources and community investments. I hope the Council will consider looking deeper into how you can integrate community programs, youth focused programs, senior focused programs, and specifically programs that start to circumvent the carceral system and bring justice to our black communities in Long Beach. I hope the Council will consider that when thinking about fiscal year 2020. Thank you very much. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speaker is Lisa Okamoto. Your time starts now. Speaker 2: Good afternoon or good evening, Mayor, and members of City Council. My name is Lisa Okamoto. I'm the directing attorney at Immigrant Defenders Law Center, also known as Index. And I'm also I am submitting a public comment in support of the renewal of the Language Justice Fund, and thank you for the mayor to increase, including in this budget . We are requesting for an increase amount $400,000 and in death is currently the legal service provider of the fund for its first year. As you may know, individuals who are forced into deportation proceedings in detention are up against a trained government attorney and are alone unless there are some intervention like not from nonprofits like us, or if the immigrant themselves can pay for the legal service, the longest justice fund is necessary to protect the due process of our language family members, friends and community at large through the referral of advocates like Long Beach Immigrants Rights Coalition in Dallas is currently representing 37 individual and family units. The average residency length of our clients in the city of Long Beach is 14 years. 79% of our clients are brought to the United States before their 25th birthday, 65% of them arriving before they were 18. And therefore, many of our clients only know language is home. The urgency, a need for representation, has escalated with the pandemic, as many of our community members are detained. Long Beach City Council should follow the steps of the city of Santa Ana, as well as the county and city of Los Angeles, in investing in this legal representation, as well as services that that invest in community and making sure that communities and members. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speaker is Tanya Jimenez. Your time starts now. Speaker 2: Good evening, Tanya Manners here from GSA Long Beach. This fiscal year, you are allocated to 43.8 million of the general fund to OPD, a hair shy of 44% of the fund. The proposal for the upcoming fiscal year allocates 239.7 million of the general fund to a over 44% of the fund. The actual percent of the general fund allocated so this year looking more like 48%. So however you want to frame it as a $4 million decrease from this year's adopted number or 4% decrease from this year's actual number, it does not meet the demands of the people. Maintaining the overall amount of staff by converting some sworn positions to civilian positions is a very underhanded way to reduce the slice of the pie. It does not accomplish what the people have been demanding that you defund PD, divest from APD and reinvest in bad policy. In the last 20 years, 89 people and counting have lost their lives due to fatal encounters with the LAPD. The lackluster changes that are being advanced in the budget proposal make a mockery of all the lives lost at the hands of APD since the department was created, as well as everyone that has and continues to demand that you defund and divest from LAPD, who are you all accountable to? To the money that will be pure in your collective direction, to an institution rooted in white supremacy that perpetuates violence against black communities and communities of color? Or is it the people as it should be, do better? Speaker 3: Thank you. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speaker is Jordan. And during your time starts now. Speaker 3: Hello. Council and city manager. My name is Jordan during. I'm also a member of DSA Long Beach. Tanya put it quite well, but I just wanted to say that, you know, we've been holding our breath for this budget and honestly, it's it's kind of embarrassing, but this is what we've come up with. You know, what is this? About $3 million for racial equity is like less than a drop in the bucket, especially through the fact that you're barely covering LAPD. Mr. Monica put it that there were protests to end racial inequality. That's not true. These protests were to end racial inequality and to defund the police. And the fact that you're not defunding the police. It's frankly despicable. Also, more importantly, you're talking about up to all these budget hearings, talk to the budget hearings, even though the reconciliation process got completely rattled by the fact that you took out all the comments that said if they'll be speedy. You also took out mentions of black people in place of a posse. So nobody has any faith in that process. So let's move on to what that means. So that means we're going to have to get back out in the streets to demand that you cut at least 50% so we can have 1200 more workers. That means we're going to be following you to the ends of the fucking earth and harassing you to make sure that you're actually accountable to us. So I look forward to seeing all of you through the month of August. Are you in my time? Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speaker is Dave Shukla. Your time starts now. Speaker 3: Next week, we're going to need to see the plan. I'd like to explore charter changes for the general fund because 51% of the operating budget does outcome based approach should be viewed within the capabilities and wellbeing economic market sense. Now, when we say diverse, we do mean to suggest, ladies and gentlemen, that there are two systems. Of just two systems for public access and participation. Two systems of social investment. One for the mayor and his friends. And one for everyone else. We mean to abolish the wrong system. And system. Ladies and gentlemen. Furloughs are a fine example of shared sacrifice, but they should not become shared punishment now. Instead of utility increases, we need to explore progressive taxation on AB32 strategic study that involves community factors participation and it needs to start with climate disadvantaged communities. The clear needs to be adopted in 2020 and the $11 million for oil and gas pipeline tell big fucking glass. That needs to be money we use to take that crap out of the ground. That rust itself is not going to get us through this century. Divest from the wrong systems, defund the police 50%. Start building the right city. A city of equity. Don't waste my time. Thank you. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speakers and control your time starts now. And Cantrell. Speaker 2: And I understand that you have a lot of cuts to make. I. I'm unhappy with the fact that the usual suspects are taking the cuts of the employees that are being furloughed, the library hours that are being eliminated. And I'm wondering if there's anybody. In top management that is taking a cut in their pay. We have. I believe it's. 80. Members of, uh. Paid employees that are making over $300,000 a year. And I believe that the cuts should start at the top, not at the bottom. Um. One of the ways that I. Think that we could save some money is to stop having. Recycled pick ups because there is no place to sell the recycled. Speaker 3: Uh. Speaker 2: Items. And, uh, as I understand it, they're just being burned at surf. So it would seem that it would save the city money to just have one pick up or. Speaker 3: To have. Speaker 2: Green pickup for the. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speaker is Seagrams. Your time starts now. Speaker 2: All right. So for two years, Black Lives Matter, Long Beach community allies have created and adopted the people's budget. They've done the work. They've put in the time and done the work. And with the clear and stated goal of ending anti-blackness and structural racism in the city and addressing a history of disinvestment in communities of color. Since. So since this land was stolen from the Tioga people over the last two years, these efforts have forced conversations and actions for equity and justice. These conversations have been going on and these community members have been doing the work. But it's interesting to me that Mr. Garcia at the budget release stated that you did not have enough time to change the budget in favor of the people or what the people are demanding, which is defunding the police and investing in communities, specifically communities of color. These are not new issues, Mayor. This is not a new process. This has been going on forever. There have always been brutal LAPD, LGB, PD and LAPD. There has always been this fetishization of development and gentrification. This has always been the case, and it's time for bold change as we see these systems crumbling. So I call for you as a member of District three to see the person looking at you to adopt the Long Beach People's Budget. I don't know why you're so proud. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speaker is Iris. Your time starts now. Speaker 2: When I said there may not is the one long listed botanical history. So no competition for this important epidemic. Is the removal from the hospital the longest? Oh. They made their partner proud. Good afternoon. My name is Edis. I'm a member of. I live in Long Beach and I want to renew the budget for the justice that just prevailed in Long Beach. We're not together until I get the warmest for some, Nicholas. Every medal. And my soul is the one that's simple. They have a lamp or portable medicine. Maybe I'll give for the up for the lack of money that my husband was detained on March 1st and he was detained until June 15th and he was released until June 15th. Adelanto Detention Center. And thanks to the help of the community, he was released to see other empty. Other than needle and thread on this up by the middle, either for better or for worse. Guess where? A while he was detained, I went into a deep depression and deep fear because I didn't know what I could do. See how that anti. As a reporter and confidant, I. Lech Walesa, under the rights of the immigrants, is a long way from gaining momentum on momentum. As I begin knocking on doors, I found the Immigration Coalition of Long Beach, and there were the ones that were able to help me out. See how they. Dante. Eyebrow raising is the font. Nicholas represents Austrian Rhapsody telling me in such a thorough walk, and through this help of this coalition, Nicholas was able to get legal aid while he was detained in the Adelanto Detention Center. Here. If there's some momentum, I get it kind of to guarantee electability that they recognize that it's the mantle of most vulnerable Minnesotans. This is the time to guarantee the health and the security of everybody in the community, especially those of us that are the most vulnerable. So you love it then. See, I'm being me. Get emphasis. You can probably if you noticed and ran into the multiple damages. Detention of immigrants is very cruel. And with the spread of COVID 19, it turns into a death sentence for those of us. Sia ever since I live in Israel will be a guarantee that it gets all those things more accessible. Allow them to see the use of invoices set up a schedule that they just fundamentally, if they feel like party know, it's important that our government guarantees access. Speaker 1: To all. Speaker 2: Everything that we need and to protect us, especially those of us that are most vulnerable. Sia. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speaker is Jamil Ochoa. Speaker 2: Hi, my name is Jemima and I'm actually going to be speaking in English. Can you hear me? Yes. Hello. Speaker 4: We can hear you. Speaker 2: Okay. Hi. My name is Jamila and I work with the Lumbee Immigrants Rights Coalition, but I am also a community member with immigrant parents. I am here after a long battle with the clerk's office, advocating for interpretation in Spanish for this very meeting for my fellow community members that speak Spanish only. I would like to speak about language, access policy and the justice fund. It is unfortunate that because I called the clerk's office in Spanish, I was treated poorly and mocked because I was asking for basic services that community deserves. I went through the whole process in Spanish and I was told that since March there has been no interpretation of the city council meetings until today. And let me tell you that I have gone through this interpretation process this evening, and my experience and of that community that I work with hasn't been the best. I am taking notes and I am willing to work with you to get this right. The city needs to invest in language, access policy and take this seriously. Our non-English speaking community needs to be able to understand what is being discussed in these meetings. I am aware that the Mayor has proposed structural funding for the language access policy and the Language Justice Fund, and we need this Council to approve and to provide adequate funding for the two programs that matter and are literally saving immigrant lives. Our community members not only worry about the bills they have to pay and that they can't even afford right now because of the out of work right now, but also the possibility of being deported at any time and being permanently separated from their families. It is the budget duty. It is the city's duty to take a stand and fund these programs as they reflect the community and the law. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speaker is Maria Lozano. Your time starts now. Speaker 2: Okay. Well, when I started. Speaker 3: Hello. Speaker 4: Yes. We can hear you. Speaker 2: Hello. Okay. Good afternoon. My name is Maria Lozano. So residents of the Willamette. I'm a resident of Long Beach. But then I was quite honestly thought of. I belong to the district number two. If I keep up with this, you're so relaxed. Excellently working. I'm here to. To present a petition about access to language. I mean, my mind and I personally like to say that my mother my mother is a senior citizen. If way up. I don't bill the gas out of selfishness. She went to pay a gas bill at your offices. Anthony, I want to, but I want. That's all. This went very well, Bill. She had a question regarding her bill. In one episode, let us leave you alone. And there was no one available that spoke her language. But I will get you into the lead. I think that being a resident of Long Beach. Then among all the rhetoric in personalities office in Ireland and. When we think we have a right that all police some personnel in your offices can speak our language. But I guess I'll know them on a circular. But unless they're comunidad Latina. That way our Latin community will not encounter these obstacles. If they're okay with the decision, says co-chair and whatever is. I do hope that my petition is heard. I do think you. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speaker is Ruby Mueller. Your time starts now. Speaker 2: See. I guess, too. Yes, I'm here. Get her thoughts. Testimonial. Throw it up. There it is. Do you want me to start with my meditation all over again? I did go first. Whether this service or just the word of the Spanish language, I think I can repeat myself because it is in accordance with what we're talking about here. CIA. When I started this article there, Roberto Garcia, the Argentinean. Good afternoon, Mayor Robert Garcia and all the council persons. My number is Ruth Miller. My name is Ruth Mueller. But then there's at least three. Don't know my daughter. I belong to district number eight. You saw Miembro de la quality on the Long Beach. And I'm a member of the Coalition of Long Beach. You may put this your name. My petition is the following. 7 million loss from those that we seek to renew the funds dedicated to the justice. But I love it. But it seems that you only got it to address a legal representation. De La Familia. Immigrants. Speaker 1: Of all. Speaker 2: Immigrant families. Yes. He broke the headlock by loading something that is the most common idea which will protect the family values of our entire community. I target Roberto Garcia. Mayor Robert Garcia. Guess so, guys. But it's time and we're stuck, and we need to help our community. The company that is studied with the community is willing to work with you. It's can be an architectural commentary. I also want to comment something else. In this example, I did see that they learned what? We need diversity. We need language diversity in all of your offices. But then after chat. To take advantage. But the reprobates are those. I love supporting me about it. They know that. That's too bad. Speaker 3: They allow me. Speaker 2: To take advantage. Speaker 1: Of all the opportunities that are offered by the. Speaker 2: City of Long Beach. And you know so it will start. Speaker 3: To look. Speaker 2: And not to make the in which a barrier. But for that, they do not need that much ground to. To make this community larger and more diverse. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speaker is Chico Zarzuela. Your time starts now. Speaker 2: Yes, I'm here. Yes, I'm here. Okay. When I started working on. Good afternoon. A wholesome adult in Long Beach. I live in district number two in Long Beach. The Department's policy on validating immigrants in Long Beach. And I do belong to the coalition of immigrants from Long Beach. Well, the other is God for a wonderful, special day, Long Beach. Today, I'm here to promote the justice fund for Long Beach. Baraka continued. That's the only thing you granted. They expect you back to continue the vital representation of all immigrants in this city. Has been, which is important to foremost. And the other thing would be that this is very important that we have security. So they all know the potassium of the eye that in case there's a desperate deportation by ICE. But then at the same time, we reckon we could have representation an attorney before an immigration court. Lamar, you're real looking. You granted me the most aliyah. Most of the immigrants that live here live paycheck to paycheck. You know, somebody almost I'm a native. If I got a lot of don't have the answers and we would not have the capacity to pay for an attorney or to pay for bail. David McCallum, you're the person other to me, the father of the mother of the family. We know that most of the people that get detained are also fathers and mothers with a family. The Solomon Islands also see hope. They only work to make sure their kids and their families get ahead. A economy outlook keep people almost impossible. They are. They contribute to the local economy and they do pay taxes. So yeah, people don't want to hear what the sample means already. I am here to petition for an amount, a just amount of $400,000. I those who are in Long Beach to the justice fund of Long Beach. Considerable conspiracy, so get them the message from those they are stuck to rather. And I also think that it's important that this fund be structured. Then the step up to seven them on their disability that they all feel they left Europe in such a way that it becomes part of every year's budget established within the city. I farewell the Rachel Mammal. I'm appealing to human rights. Speaker 4: Thank you. And that concludes public comment for this item. Speaker 1: Vice Mayor Andrews public comment is concluded for item 22. Speaker 0: You know, now we're going to go to our behind the diocese. And at first I was calling Austin councilmen, asking excuse to approach Councilman Richardson and Councilman Pearce. Speaker 3: Well, thank you, Vice Mayor. And I want to thank the city manager, Tom Mollica, his entire team for their work in preparing this very difficult budget. This budget proposal is very bold and represents a very different approach to some areas, especially when it comes to recognizing the need for public health and also the very different approach to our police budget. There is no comfort in what is before us today in any way. I think it's important to note that when we started the internal budget process at the very beginning of this year, our fiscal outlook was very much different than it is today. It was only a few short months ago that the full scope of the economic impact of COVID 19 became clear, and our staff had to work with all of the departments to identify how to close an unprecedented $30 million shortfall. While all departments were working overtime to address the immediate public health crisis. At the same time, the city council passed the city team with undertaking a framework for reconciliation and developing recommendations for investment to address racial racial inequities in only two months time. So I appreciate the immense amount of time and work that the budget team, the entire city staff have put into. Rising to the challenge is now before us. Enough can be said about that. Our city manager and Mayor Darcy have provided us with a rough draft, which we now will undertake the next 5 to 6 weeks to assess, deliberate and engage our community in a process of prioritizing how we move forward as a city. And there are some meaningful structural changes in how we conduct business here in Long Beach. Proposals that really merit our full attention. At the same time, the budget that we adopted in September would definitely not be the end of our challenge. A Budget Oversight Committee. Last week I had a very sobering presentation from our Finance Director, John Grosse, on unfunded liabilities and anticipated budget challenges in the coming years with additional costs and other demands. So therefore, this budget year, I think this Council and I'm challenge enough to also look at it in that context as well. With that in mind, our concern is to exercise wisdom and discretion on how we utilize our research fund in this year's budget and make sure that any use of these funds are in areas that provide us the best long term benefits for ensure that for our residents, our city operations and of course the taxpayers. We're still dealing with plenty of unknowns when it comes to COVID and how long we'll be dealing with the economic impacts of this pandemic. And so I think we need to be very realistic. And I do think there's room for some departments to do more. I don't also, because I'm also concerned about the furlough impacts on many of the lower paid employees. We're already struggling to get by. They work hard and they are probably most at risk during these difficult times and their families. So I hope to drill down on this further during our bills, hearings and council presentations, I want again take this opportunity to thank the mayor and city manager for making recommendations that are VOCs and innovative and looking for innovative, creative ways on restructuring how we provide services to our residents during these challenging times. I look forward to a robust discussion with the Council and encourage plenty of community engagement as we consider this upcoming budget or this coming fiscal year. But also look at I want us to really look at the fiscal health of our city and the model of the service we provide for the next several years. This is a long game, a long term approach that we need to be thoughtful about. And I'm going to yield my comments for now because I think we've heard a lot of great presentation from the manager, and I do appreciate the public comment. People were already engaged, paying attention and holding us accountable as city leaders. So those are my comments for now. I look forward to the process. Vice Mayor. That concludes my comments for now. Speaker 0: You very much. What you said. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I have some comments and some thoughts here. First of all, our staff and the entire city family. I know it's been difficult times, unprecedented times, but I've said it before. I'll say it again. Our city continues to meet this moment. We have been in an emergency operations mode for six months as we face a crisis on three fronts. When the pandemic first came to Long Beach, we laid down on our public health department to have the smartest, most comprehensive response across our region, aligning our response with meet. We led the most robust economic relief program in the region protecting workers in our most impacted industries residents, renters, businesses and more. And when community when thousands of community members hit the streets, demand equity and change. We met that moment as well and are meeting this moment now by acknowledging racism as a public health crisis and asking staff to make this a top priority. That's what they did. They developed their comprehensive racial equity and reconciliation initiative. Our chance to read it last night. They're meeting the moment today with a budget that invests in equity, reimagine public safety. Our city manager's office, the health department offers equity. They jumped in with both feet. And we're making tremendous progress. And I think the future of our city is better off for it. And while we face these crises, we have to take an eye off the ball on issues like homelessness. Investments in our communities. We committed we completed our Highland Park Community Center, which is a decade of advocacy to get that done. Just finally completed our first citywide bridge housing community to help move individuals out of homelessness in our streets and upgrade bridge back into permanent housing. These are big steps that we got done during sleep while facing the crisis on three fronts. Hats off to the entire city team, including our public works team and our new poll work. And so this body I feel it's a great starting point acknowledges and I know there's still a lot more that we need to do a few things to highlight. I think that it's important to note that our health department was invested in the middle of a pandemic. We invested in our health department. They received investments in this budget. I see that there are some tough decisions, terms of contracting out. I have some concerns about that. So I want to discuss that at some point in the future. I love the concept of creating library hubs seven days a week on three three sites, and I want to figure out if there's a way that we don't reduce service in some of these other other sites. So maybe we should think about ways that we can. Well, I want to make I love the idea of social work program going in. You know, the role of libraries is changing. We have to continue changing with it. Are you concerned about the increases? Do you support fees? I know that we may some money off the pandemic. If the restrictions have lifted. You may be able to save some resources heading into the early part of the next fiscal year. I'm really interested in learning more about the alternative response model new non-emergency phone number, the Community Health Councils, the alignment wellness with our health department enhanced warm responses to nonviolent emergency. I'm you know, this is you know, these are new ideas. Well, not new ideas, but these are new attempts for our city. And I really am curious to really better understand them. I want to acknowledge the commitment, racial equity in this moment, structural funding for justice, fund language access, funding the rights of right to counsel. I think there's a great first steps, particularly the right to council. I think given our housing authority, we have a number of different departments eviction moratorium, rental assistance. I'd love to see us begin moving toward sort of one front door on issues related to housing and with respect to renters as well. Given 80% of African-American population, our cities renters, 70% of the Latino population are cities renters. We need to wrap our minds around how we are doing it. I acknowledge and support the next victim in the relocation of the Office of Equity, the reforms part of a commission. The public has been very, very clear. They want us to repeal that and redesign a new modern oversight commission. Well, we just did an equity and ethics commission, which did a redistricting commission power to make commissions with my business. I love that we invested resources to make that happen. I want to pay more attention to the reorganization of the heart teams. I want to hear more about that. One, learn more about the office, the Constitution, policing in terms of what to think about it. I think now is the right word. You sent Councilman Newton's time. Speaker 3: You know. Speaker 0: I can't understand what you're saying. I go in and just finish out a couple of questions in one minute. Let's. School. Asking questions of the banks. She's at the Radisson. You will come back up. I'd love to finish now, Vice Mayor. Okay. Well, go ahead. Go ahead. Go ahead. We're going to stay close to that 5 minutes real quick. That's why I get there for you. So I got a few questions for you. I acknowledge the good things in this budget. I know there's been in addressed these questions. You know, I know that we're talking about people's jobs and livelihoods. So I ask these questions with great, great thoughtfulness. So I know that there's been a lot of public demand to reduce the police department budget. And I need some clarity on what's presented here. What would have been and this is a question for state. What would have been the proportional cut to the police department versus what is the proposed cut to get the effective proposed cut and what would have been proportional cut? Speaker 5: So Councilmember, I'm not sure I can answer the first part of the question on proportional cut. We did not do a proportional fund budget as we've done in the past. We looked at a number of options for each department, and then we we made those decisions. When you total the cuts to the police department that are included in the budget before you, it is a 5.2% reduction. Speaker 0: Okay. So so can you explain to the public how you arrive at 5.3%? I'm looking at this book. What I see is about 1.5 in a straight line. So can you walk us through through how you arrive at 5.2? Speaker 5: Yes. So essentially you take the number that's in that book, but that that was last year's budget. You then look at what the cost growth has been because that's what creates a deficit. So you add that amount that to and that becomes your new problem to solve. You then put in solutions. And in the police department it was about ten and a half million dollars worth of reductions. And then we had, you know, the other impacts in in PD like they're taking furloughs as well in their non sworn and others. You had all of that together and that is $5.2 million worth of reductions from the police department. It comes out to about 63%, I believe, of the solutions to the reductions that we had to make. Speaker 0: Okay. So, so I, I think it's important that we we talk about the sort of the fiscal context here, how much of our budget is made up by public safety in general. And over the past decade or so, what direction has has the budget trended in terms of growth? Speaker 5: So public safety has been about 70%. Early on it was in the fifties and sixties and it was growing and that was in the 2002, up to 2010, and it was nearing over 70%. The mayor and council and the city put together a program that was keeping it from moving beyond that. And we've been around 70% with the addition of measure. It started to go above that. And but with these reductions, we are currently in that same amount. So we did not increase that we know of. We haven't done that final calculation, but that is our best sense. Speaker 0: So in I asked that, but we can understand, you know, what is the risk if in hindsight that really wouldn't make this fair to everyone you can cue up again. Please keep your thought. Let me answer that one question. If you. Which is what? Because you guys really want to keep it fresh for everyone. So please. Yeah. Thought the next speaker right now is Councilwoman Pierce. Speaker 2: Thank you, Vice Mayor. I think that it's a it's probably going to be a little challenging because we've been doing the virtual for so long without having the five minute rule and to have it in place on a day whenever we probably all have a lot of questions. So I will do my best to set my timer and save my questions for a second round of. As everyone else probably will do. So I, I want to say that I think that this is a good first step, but I've never seen a budget like this come from our city staff in recognizing that this is Tom Morata's first budget as a city manager. It's not an easy task at all. And so I just want to thank everybody on the front end. I know that you're in the middle of contract negotiations with Labor, putting together a city budget with a $30 million shortfall and also tackling reconciliation at the same time, all which really take a lot of energy. So I want to recognize staff's efforts for that. I also want to recognize that I don't think this budget would look like it looks today as the very first step without all the community members that have been advocating and organizing and emailing and calling. And that's business owners, small business owners, people that are tied to tourism as well as the Black Lives Matter movement. And so I really want to say this is because of you that we are here with the city manager budget looking at this way and knowing that the next five or six weeks we have more work to do and hopefully get to a budget that really is fully reflective of the diverse community that we have while being mindful of our budget shortfalls. I like the general tone of it. There's a couple of areas that I really, really support. Obviously, the changes to PD, I think you've outlined one of the reasons why that number might look different. I know we've got a lot of community members that are looking at the chart and saying that it's 1% and some change. That's a difference. So I would ask that whenever the police budget does come in front of us as a staff presentation, that it's really clear on how we got that we are cutting 5.2% and making sure that that conversation is transparent and accountable. I know that one of the things that we've talked about is making sure that we have every line item that we possibly can have for our police budget in particular. I think that the budget is reflective, as Councilmember Richardson said, of the COVID concerns, that we have, the racial inequities that we have in the city, as well as trying to make sure that we're not cutting services. So I guess I would start by saying one area that that is a big flag for me is the Hart team and my very first budget on city council. We approved the very first Hart team. And I want to remind people that this idea came from me going on right along. So I went on three ride alongs with fire out of station two and I forget the exact percentage. And hopefully when the Hart team presents they can share this number. But it was somewhere like 80% of the calls for that police for that fire station were for people that were struggling with homelessness or mental health. And so the idea was not just to have social workers or paramedics out there. The idea was that if somebody called 911, that they would be able to get a Hart team instead of a fire truck or a firefighter or a police car, an ambulance, but that the Hart team could come out first. And I know that at least one of our teams can respond to nine on one call. So I have a very big issue and questions that we can dove into at that presentation around how are they going to respond to 911 calls, what cars are they going to use? How do we make sure that we've got first responders on those calls and that they're also being proactive? And so maybe there's a hybrid model that includes our firefighters and social workers, and you guys can present that at that time. Speaker 0: But yes, you have one minute. Speaker 2: That's one that's 5 minutes. It's hard. So other areas that, you know, I'll dig in more on the hard when that comes. But I wanted to make sure that folks knew that was a very big concern of mine. Our libraries plan. I love that we would have key libraries. The Downtown Library, which is now the Billie Jean King library, has not had seven days in years. And I think the community really deserves it. I think there's some good areas in police changes, but again, want to understand constitutional policing and why that would be housed in the police department and not the city manager's department. The other areas that I want to lift up are fully funding the justice for making that structural language access. We've been fighting for that to be structural for so long that I was happy to see the mayor's recommendations to make that structural right to council when we get to it. I've heard a lot of news stories and I myself have experienced a lot recently as well. And so I think that we absolutely need to have right to council. So lots of other topics to talk on. I know that we'll get to those. I'd like to be able to give staff kind of a heads up on some. My questions and concerns, which is why I'd like to begin a little bit. So I will, as public commenters, will yield my time and queue back up. Speaker 0: Thank you. That's Mango. Speaker 2: Thank you, Vice Mayor. I'll do some of the additional questions that we're headed down with Councilmember Richardson. So we were talking about PD in this budget is receiving a 5.2% reduction. And while I appreciate the question about public safety and when we're talking about PD, we should just focus on PD. And so my question would be for Grace or Jon. I believe that PD is 50%, 51%, 49% of the city budget. What was that number. Speaker 1: Councilmember? Yes, they're around 50%. The exact number right now as of the proposed budget, we still have to calculate because there are some moving pieces like negotiations for other groups that are still being considered. But on average, as Tom was mentioning over the past few years, they are around 50% of the budget on the expenditure. Speaker 2: So. Okay. So PD is receiving 62% of the reductions, 5.2% of their budget. And I'm just trying to help clarify. So one of the things that's important is that we also look at the specific things that are being. Re reallocated reauthorized. So I'm interested when PD does present their budget. We're talking about not utilizing sworn for priority three calls. So I would like a report by zip code for priority one, two and three calls last fiscal year. And then, uh, no, not last fiscal year. I guess I would say last calendar year if possible, or a comparable period to where we are this year. And then since we're doing public safety, I think we should set the table on the same for fire, the number of bells and fire calls by zip code. I think that would help give some perspective because what you don't want to do is if you are stating that, you're going to. Civilian eye is priority three calls. You don't want to then have certain parts of our city without the resources should an emergency happen. We're already seeing what happened with the civil unrest that happened and our ability to call in additional resources from outside the city. And it's also very unpopular to call in outside resources from the federal government or National Guard. And so we want to make sure that we have trained people here that know Long Beach and the Long Beach Way and the Long Beach authorities and issues. We don't want outsiders coming in and using their tactics, which may not really coincide with the values we have here in Long Beach. And so what I don't want to do is take some of our most vulnerable communities and then take away their police officers and replace them with civilians. And so I just wanted to see what that outlay looks like by zip code. I guess I agree with. A lot of the comments on things we want to make additional investments in and also agreement with some of the things that the mayor said related to frustration, related to some of the ideas that were brought forward by the city staff. And I think my biggest concern is when I open up the budget tool for residents to try to play along with the budget. You only gave them the options that you considered, but you didn't put all the options on the table. So similar to what the mayor said. I've been saying for two years, and I know that this year we were making great progress in starting our budget hearings in January and kind of going through our vacancy list. But we looked at vacancies made up $6 million. If you took the average salary times, the number of vacancies over a if it was annualized, it would be as much as $6 million. And so I think that that's an interesting component. I don't see where that is in this budget and that savings. And then I would also say that to bring forward a budget with $30 million when we only have one, we have a $30 million problem. I'm hearing from council members that there are a lot of items that are just not in agreement. And so I feel like the city. Speaker 0: Place is not. Speaker 2: Perfect. I don't even need the whole minute. I think that the city manager needs to bring forward an additional 5 to $10 million of potential cuts so that we could balance those things against the things that he has already proposed in this budget, so that we would be able to potentially consider some of those cuts and not take the cuts that he's laid out. Some of them, I feel, are, again, not options, and I've heard some of those listed, but I think that a robust list of all options need to be presented so that we would be able to make good choices. Right now, there's not a lot of choices to be made. It's here's what we're cutting. And if you disagree, we don't have the background in information from each department on what they proposed could be cut. So if a city manager, you ask every department to cut. How much? In their scenario. What percentage? Speaker 0: Thank you. Speaker 2: That was the question. I need the city manager to answer it, if you don't mind, sir. And then I'm done. Speaker 0: Yes. Speaker 5: We looked at reductions of up to 12% for most departments. For them to come up with some ideas and we do have a list, it's in the budget book of a number of different options that we've costed out. And so those are in there. We'll get you the page later. Speaker 2: But it's not the 12%. It's a fraction of that 12%. Speaker 5: It's not everything. There are things in there that I wouldn't don't believe were actual reductions there. You know, there's I do ask for a little bit of discretion as a manager to put things together that are actual reductions. And so that we put ones in there that we thought were real and were implementable and were part of the consideration for the council to look at. Speaker 2: Are you saying that departments put forward things that were not real? Speaker 5: Or there were things that were unverified or items that, you know, we we would never, you know, consider. So, you know, again, that's part of the process. We asked them to come up with some concepts and ideas, and then we have those discussions. Speaker 2: And then if they put forward things that are off the table because they are council priority, then you ask them to go back to the table and bring up more items or additional items or different items or not have that type. Speaker 0: Of event which has try to the 5 minutes you got. Absolutely. Well, please, you guys follow the rules. Speaker 2: Thank you, Vice Mayor. Speaker 0: Council. Well, thank you, Vice Mayor. First question is regarding public works. And on this, if it's in the budget book, in the interest of time, just send me that information or two from for memo would be great in response. So the question is how how much of the planned 2021 infrastructure projects are not attached to matching dollars to state or federal dollars and also a total dollars budgeted from Measure A. So if you understand the question, I'm the one. Speaker 5: So I got the second part of the question. Can you repeat the first part? Understood. The measure eight. No, it's the second one. Okay. Speaker 0: The first part. How many projects 2021 have? Structure projects are not attached to matching federal or state funds. Speaker 5: We want that. That's going to require some analysis because most of our project is something. Speaker 0: If that, you know, I get it. So I don't want you to even try to take a stab at it now. But if there's a simple solution to that, if you can let me know later, that would be great. Or in a to come work. Thank you. Okay, then. Moving to public safety. Um, if the city manager. I just let me know if this is acted or not. So I take the staff recommendation is not to eliminate engine 17. The recommendation is to eliminate the safer grant. Would that be accurate? Speaker 5: That's absolutely accurate. Speaker 0: Okay. So in that, again, if you could come back to me and if if this is in the budget book, I apologize, but I, I need some help explaining to residents exactly why we're turning down the save for grant money. I don't know what that total or total dollar figure, but some of those dollars were used to support E 17. So if we could get those numbers crunched, that would be great for us to share with the public. Speaker 5: Yes. So we do have a section in the budget book that explains some of it. I'll have John GROSS answer that question right now. Speaker 1: Okay. This is Grace. So part of the reason why we are recommending not to accept the safer grant and again, just to reiterate what you are saying, council member that does not have anything or exactly to do with Engine 17. Turning down the safer grant does not take away the funding for Engine 17 from the Missouri Plan that's currently in the proposed FY 21 budget. But the requirements of the SAFER grant require that we have to maintain a maintenance of effort level of staffing that's above our budgeted level agreed with with the grantor. And in order to reach that budget at staffing level, taking into consideration the attrition that's going to happen and the academy that is slated to happen late this September, we need to have another second class, an Academy class in FY 21 to get us to that maintenance of effort level. We are estimating that second class, which is unbudgeted to be another cost of about 1.6 million of one times that we have to find. And with the timing of everything and the anticipated grant award amount that we were anticipated to receive, we're only thinking that we're going to get about $1.8 million from the safe for Grant anyway . And then also we are required to maintain the state staffing level throughout the whole time period of the Grant Performance Awards. So that takes us into about FY 23, I believe, the three year grant period performance time frame. And so then we would need to find another additional approximately 2 to 2 and a half million dollars for continued investment into academies to keep that level at that amount. And that also means that we would not be able to include fire in any reductions in the future to help try to solve any shortfall. Speaker 0: Okay. Understood. Thank you for that explanation. And so I think I can extrapolate from that that you are not planning this for Tom Modica to answer a 2021 Fire Academy. We're doing the one this fall. But you don't have one scheduled for 2021, correct? Speaker 5: We have one for this fall, but not for 2021. Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you. Did I make it under 5 minutes? No, you didn't. Okay. Thank you. It was used 3 minutes to read. Minutes away. And good job this is going on. Next. Go to one. Speaker 3: Place. Speaker 2: Vice mayor, did you just say yes? Yes, yes. Speaker 0: Yes, yes. Speaker 2: Okay. Thank you. I lost you there for a second. I just I got I'm going to save out of my question. Speaker 3: But the. Speaker 0: But do you know what's wrong? We're not here. Isn't that what you come in. Speaker 2: You come out in the middle of the park like there are aspects of the budget. I really. Can you hear me? Okay. Let me try again. Speaker 0: Yeah, that's much better. Speaker 2: Okay. So I just wanted to thank city staff for putting this budget together. I know a lot of hard work went into it, and it really was a very difficult time for them to come up with the budget. So I really appreciate the work that they did. I'm going to save my questions for when we have the individual department presentations so that we're a little bit more I'm a little bit more efficient with my focus in regards to those particular budget presentations. I do want to let the city manager know in advance that I know he was copied on. A lot of emails that we've received over the last week. Speaker 3: For. Speaker 5: Third Council member. You broke up again. We heard, Mr. President, we heard over the last week. Speaker 0: Councilwoman Pryce, we can't hear you very. Speaker 2: And start learned about. Public. Speaker 0: You're going in and out. We can't hear you. Don't. Speaker 2: If you funding specifically police. Departments are being funded. And and the residents really wanting to have. Some assurance that. Okay. I will queue up back up in just a minute. Speaker 0: You got two marriages in. Thanks, Vice Mayor. You're doing an incredible job managing the time. I just want to get back to the question. I was I was focused on this context, the risk. I think it's important right at the beginning or what the pace. Speaker 2: About this any better. Speaker 0: Although I think the vice mayor moved right on. Back to you, Mrs. Bright. If it's okay, we'll come back to you. If it's okay that you're going in and out. Mrs. Brice. I can't tell you. Lords is in place. Thank you very much. Okay, so, so quickly, I think it's important we know this about the context of city manager financial management. Tell us about a little bit about the credit 70% and what risk that potentially. Speaker 5: So I believe the question is about kind of the elevated cost of public safety in the long term. So we have seen significant cost growth for both our police and fire departments just for the cost of providing the same level of service from salaries and benefits and pension. And so what we've seen in the past from studying other agencies is once you go beyond 70%, unless there's some other dedicated funding or source of revenue, it starts to put pressure and on the other services, the quality of life services. So when 70% is public safety, that is clearly an important service and one of our very most important. But there are only then there's only 30% left of the budget to spend on other services. So that is something that we keep an eye on. And the council's been very disciplined at trying to hit that balance of investment of services. Speaker 0: Thank you. I think it's just important that we that we understand that that this trend has been going on for a long time and our responsibilities. Therefore, we do have to talk about changing course in terms of of that trend in order to preserve a well-balanced city. Final question. I know that there's been some questions about civilian aviation, and I see two numbers. I see 34 sworn positions eliminated and 28.7 civilian police positions. What's the relationship between the two? Are they. Sure. Just a little bit more about these are these non these non sworn positions? Are they new hires? Are they the 34 sworn positions converted into 28.7 still positions. Speaker 5: So it's a reduction of those police officer positions. So those go away and then we add in additional positions that are new positions not yet hired that are civilian ized. And so, for example, in patrol, we'll have 16 police officers that are no longer there, but 16 civilians doing those services. Another example is in the area of air support, which is our helicopter. There's currently six officers that are providing that we would go more to a contract model with about two pilots, commercial pilots, instead of of the six officers. Those are two examples. Speaker 0: So those are some of the with this, I think, you know, there's some we got to stay focused on state and federal stimulus and what we have to do in the course of the next year. You have opportunities with the stimulus in discussions, the Additional Cares Act and the Heroes Act. That's going to require a lot of focus on state lands, Federal Lands Committee, Conference of Mayors and others. But I think the approach we've taken in recent months, I think it does bode well for our long term health, our fiscal health, our community health, our economic health. And and it's important to me that as Long Beach comes out, this recovery, we do so in a way that leaves no one behind in place, our community, on a better future footing moving forward. Thanks, vice mayor for the for the time. Appreciate. Thank you, councilman. Russian Councilman. Woman Price, could you please come back in? Speaker 2: Sure. Can you hear me? Speaker 0: We can. We can hear you now. Speaker 2: Okay. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I just want to go back in again and just thank staff for putting this together. Look, I. I understand we talk a lot about public safety budgets and what percentage is healthy and what percentage of the end of the day residents need to feel that the taxes that they're paying are going into critical services that make them feel safe. And I know that the mayor, the city manager and I received lots of emails over the last week from third District residents who really wanted to express their support for our public safety infrastructure and for continuing to have a system in place where when people call 911, they get a response and there's follow through on that response. So as we go into the next series of budget discussions with the specific departments, what I will be asking our police department, our chief, is whether or not the civilian positions that are going to be utilized to take initial police reports, which I think is a fantastic use. I'm using civilian investigators to do a lot of that work, I think is very prudent. There's a lot of agencies where I work that do utilize that. But what is the follow up going to look like? Will detectives be assigned to follow up on those reports? And can residents expect that they'll still get the same level of service from Long Beach PD, whether it's from a sworn officer or a non sworn civilian investigator? That's really important to me. I really appreciate the departments that came forward with creative solutions. And again, I just want to thank our city manager for at least putting this out there. There are aspects of this budget I love. There are aspects of this budget I really don't like at all. And I'm glad the mayor addressed some of those issues, and I look forward to talking about them further and BMC as well as with the entire department. Presentation. So thank you very much, Mr. Vice Mayor, and I hope you were able to catch all of that. Speaker 0: Thank you. VICE Thank you. Councilwoman Price. Councilwoman in the house. Speaker 2: Thank you, Vice Mayor. I just want to thank our team for this presentation and all the incredible hard work that has gone into it, into this budget proposal. I know that this is a very, very, extremely difficult job to do, especially now that we have COVID 19. So it's usually a hard thing to do any year, but especially right now. I also want to echo all of the comments that were made by my colleagues, and I also wanted to to say that, you know, I'm very glad that we're looking into some cuts, some that are more necessary than than others. And so I'm glad that we have this this document going forward and that we're going to be having a lot of, you know, discussions and meetings so that we can give our input here today, but also have an opportunity to give more input not only for us, the council, but also for our community. And that to me is very important. Going forward, I really am glad that we are talking about the Justice Justice Fund, because I think that's very, very important, especially to my residents and my district as well, is the language access. So I look forward to having more one on ones and and getting more details on, on all the cuts and, and where we're going to be able to cut. Because I think it's very important not only to all of our to all of our residents, but also to those who have other languages as their primary language, like Spanish or Combi or Tagalog, who are the residents that are most vulnerable? And we need to make sure that we include them in all areas of opportunity that we give to all. So with that said, thank you. Speaker 0: Moms and dads. Councilwoman, here's. Speaker 2: Thank you, Vice Mayor. Okay, I'd like. I'll try to be brief, although it's budget. So I think I want to pick up on the on the idea of of safety. Obviously, this is going to be one of the contentious items that we tackle on this budget. And I agree with Councilmember Price's comments. We need to make sure that people feel safe, that all people feel safe. And I understand that for some that means a police officer, for some that means social worker, for some that means a firefighter. And so when we've had a budget that's had such a high percentage going to our police department, this moment calls for us all to really reevaluate. Yes, the percentage, but I think the conversation is right. Partnering with the framework to say what are the services that we can provide that are not police services? And so I agree that the civilian positions that are here, I totally support that. I don't think that it goes far enough. I know that one of the biggest things that we've heard are people that are struggling with mental health, with drug addiction, that are survivors of violence, that's being a police officer in their full gear is triggering for them and that the conversations that they have with police officers is triggering for them. And one of the stories that comes up for me is a young gentleman who was shot and a firefighter was on the scene first and how calm that person helped the people at the scene. And so I think that when we talk about public safety, we have to talk about the public safety continuum, that it is police, it is fire, but it is what the staff has started to do in this budget, which is which is mental health, which is nurses, social workers. And so there are areas that I look to hear from staff areas that I'm interested in are our quality of life team. I was surprised to see that the full quality of life team is still in the budget. We had paired that down when I was first on council. We didn't have that many and then it. An amp back up. I know that there are other models like the hard times that have been successful. I know that there are some concerns within civilian staff about when they go out and how they're engaging people that might be struggling with homelessness or mental health. And so I really I encourage us to explore what a new model might be for the quality of life so that it's not with police, but it's with some other lifesaving department. Another conversation that Councilmember Price and I have been talking about is park rangers ethics. And, you know, as we talk about this, it's something that makes people feel safer. Bixby Park I've recently heard some concerns, particularly from my constituents, that they don't want to have police in the park. And I know that we have different levels of police in the park, which are important because of drug use and sales and everything else. But having a park ranger that's overseen by a police department is not something that I think this moment calls for. And so I hope that we can also have conversations about park rangers going back to the Parks Rec and Marine Department. And I also want to want to say that I think that the mayor has lifted up zero based budgeting. And one of the things that I talk to my constituents about is we can cut this budget, right? We can cut it, we can shift it. We could get to a healthy level, which is closer to 40 or 50% of our budget being PD instead of where it is now. But if we're not talking about how we budget every year and how we have a longer process and getting to zero based budgeting is the way that we can ensure that people have a voice. But we also have to recognize the inequalities in our voice because people are. Speaker 0: One minute Mrs. Fears. Speaker 2: Here. I just want to say as we embark on this. Our libraries are closed right now. There are people that don't have access to this meeting right now. There we have a digital divide still. And so I know that staff is working really hard to make sure we're engaging more people than before. And obviously the framework showed us that. But we have to be mindful about who we're governing for, and it has to be everybody in the city and not one group and those that have been left out for a long time that are asking for a realignment in this budget. I think it's fair and I think all the staff time that we've put to the framework in this budget demand us to follow through on that. Otherwise we will, as a city, lose complete credibility. And so it's more of a comment, obviously, than questions. I'll say my deeper questions for when the presentations come. But I'm really proud of this moment, and I'm really proud of the things that this council has done together, particularly during COVID that haven't been easy. And I hope that we continue that same. That same intention. As we move forward these next six weeks, because it is so important. So again, thank you staff for your work. And I'm thank you to all the community members that continue to speak about your truth. Thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilwoman Mango. Speaker 2: Thank you, Mr. Modica. I was confused by a comment you made. You stated that, and maybe I misunderstood. I know this is difficult on calls that the cut to the fire department is an elimination of a grant we don't have. I'm confused. No, I'm not advocating. And I guess just a follow up. Are we not advocating as a city to the federal government to essentially relax some of the safety requirement so we can still receive that funding? Speaker 5: We can certainly ask that question. The our understanding right now is that funding requires that you put aside additional funding to continue it after the grant expires. It also requires you to hold a second academy that we would have to invest in in order to get a maintenance of level of effort, level that you then qualify for the grant. It would then also prevent us from making any reductions in any sworn personnel for any type of fiscal problem or challenge we would have in the future. So those are the the main reasons we would essentially have to spend about one and 1.6, $1.7 million in order to draw down 1.6 or $1.7 million, plus the amount to keep the engine per the contractual requirements. Speaker 2: So I guess my ask would be, and I know I don't need to make a formal motion, but I would love for the Federal Legislative Committee and our legislative team to work diligently on advocating with our local elected officials at the federal level and to the FEMA office and others for changes to that grant so that we might be able to secure that funding and elongate the restoration that this council believed was a possibility. I guess I'm confused. I'm reflecting back on a discussion about the police department and pilots and gasoline and the cost of helicopters. And I guess I'd have to go back and pull my notes. But I remember hearing something along the lines of one helicopter in the air is the equivalent of nine or 11 patrol officers on the ground. And it's a a way to avoid high speed chases, pursuits, all of those things in a a much safer manner. It also reduces risk to the community when those violent offenders are fleeing that you're able to back off and let them do that. And I think we need to talk through what that means, because I understood the biggest cost of our aero bureau to be gasoline. And so if that is not the case, then great. But I don't know that pilots are very cheap these days. Agencies across the region are struggling to get pilots are actually paying for the full weight for any sworn to become a pilot. And so I would just state that if there are other things involved with that process. The community, I think is asking for civilian aviation is. Most likely asking for those that are most engaged in the interactions. And so at least that's what we're hearing from Janine and their approach to the thing. And so I don't know. I'm not saying that I'm an opinion one way or another, but it just causes some concern for me that I need more information. And then I also wanted to kind of follow up on another comment from Councilman Pearce related to the uniforms. Our department used to have a more relaxed uniform policy. More of our officers were in cargo pants and polo shirts with very thin bulletproof vests. Underneath their polo shirts. They were more approachable. Under a previous administration, we re-implemented a very, very strict uniform system that does have a different look to it. I don't know if there is a potential at the bargaining table to look at relaxing those standards back to we're not relaxing the standards, but restoring a previous left, I think the word she used with militarized uniforms and moved back to that and not nice one you. Speaker 0: Have one minute. Speaker 2: Thank you. Not just in our police officers service, but also in our our park rangers. I know that you and I have had some talks lately about park rangers and some intimidation that some senior citizens dealt with Eldorado Park. So I think we need to be cognizant of that as well. If you do consider moving parks and Rec rangers out of the police department, I will be firmly against it unless you take away their guns, because I want to remind the communities of the issues related to use of force that we had when we had sworn individuals reporting through a command structure where individuals at the top of the command structure had no knowledge of escalation of force, had no knowledge or training in utilization of a firearm. And it led to outcomes and. Different things that were not of great use. And then my final thing is for years there are things that we have implemented in the last 90 days that as a council member I led on and this council supported and we were constantly told we don't have the resources, we can't do it fast enough. That would take too much time, including specifically telecommuting. We talked a lot about telecommuting. And one of the things and the reasons that it was brought up in the past was that the cost saving measure and I don't want any ongoing job. Right. I don't see any costing specifically. Speaker 0: On that unless we have another. Speaker 2: Company. If I could finish my sentence more than 5 minutes. Speaker 0: We have to follow the rules. We only give our constituent 90 seconds. And you guys, why can't we follow what we voted on? Speaker 2: No, no problem, sir. I'll meet you for another 5. Speaker 0: Minutes, letting you know. Okay, fine. This is you guys. This is just not fair to our constituents. You will not. Speaker 2: Oh, that is not a fair statement. Speaker 0: I think that it is not a fair statement. What are you doing? We got 5 minutes, you guys. So my. Speaker 2: Problem. Speaker 0: That. Finish your sentence. Speaker 2: I can't even remember what my sentence was. Thank you for the interruption. I didn't mean it to be like that, but. Speaker 0: I. Speaker 2: Wish it was more equitable. Speaker 0: Councilwoman. Speaker 2: I'm good. Thank you. Speaker 3: You know. Speaker 0: Okay. We have a first class in the second. But Mr. Richardson, could you please call for both? Speaker 2: Mayor. I reviewed your request. Like math. Speaker 0: Yes, I understand. Second District. Speaker 2: Councilmember Mongeau had recused. Speaker 0: Okay. Fine. Mango. Speaker 2: Thank you. I would just like to know what the unloading of real estate costs that we could reduce if we continue a model of teleworking or employee hoteling at different locations for the future. Because we wanted to move most of our employees to City Hall, but there were still lots of offices that were not able to do that. And so if we knew what those real estate costs were, and we might be able to make some significant savings. Also in the budget tool online, there was a request from residents to determine whether or not we needed $250,000 for additional maintenance. If city staff could explain what has not been funded, that has either increased or is. Necessary but not budgeted for in this upcoming cycle. That would be helpful when that presentation comes. Thank you. Speaker 3: The. Speaker 0: But could you please call for the vote? Speaker 1: District one. I district to. I'm District three. I. District four. Speaker 0: By. Speaker 1: District five. I District six. And District seven. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District eight. District nine. Speaker 0: All right. Speaker 1: Ocean carries. Speaker 0: Thank you. Now we're going to go into our non non-related agenda items. Could you please, you know, nonpublic agenda items? Could you please everyone who signed up?

Public Hearing

Recommendation to conduct a Budget Hearing to receive and discuss an overview of the Proposed Fiscal Year 2021 Budget. (Citywide)

LongBeachCC

LongBeachCC_08042020_20-0715

Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Now we're going to move to item number 25 out of the Superdome. Would you like to start us? Thank you, Vice Mayor Andrews. Yes, I'm very happy to bring you the Mississippi now. I've got the item. All right, Larry, I forgot to agree that. Speaker 1: Communication from councilman, super nor councilwoman and Councilwoman Price, Councilman Austin, recommendation to request city manager to work with all other appropriate departments to evaluate the feasibility of implementing a temporary suspension of the health, fire and business licensing renewal fees for restaurants impacted by the COVID 19 pandemic. Speaker 0: Check it out. Okay. Thank you. Yes, I'm very pleased to bring this item forward and would like to thank the co-sponsors on that item. Also, I have one order of business here before moving on to public comment. We have a lot of folks lined up to speak. We'd like to get to them. But first, I'd like to reference a letter of support from Mayor Garcia. It's part of the support materials on this item, but he actually asked me to read it aloud for the meeting tonight. So it's. Dear Councilmember Steve Bernoff. I'm unable to attend Tuesday's council meeting due to Family Matters. I'm writing to express support for Agenda Item 25, recommendation to temporarily suspend health fire and business licensing renewal fees for restaurants impacted by COVID 19. Restaurants across our city have experienced a sudden loss of income due to the COVID 19 pandemic. Pausing annual fees and charges will help dining locations keep their doors open and ensure our economy is able to recover faster when the state of emergency order is lifted. Long Beach restaurants are destinations for residents and visitors alike. We know how important restaurants are to the livelihood of so many of our residents. These businesses are also important amenities for neighborhoods and a big part of the culture that makes our city so special. In prior city council meetings, we have been discussing this type of support for local businesses during the current crisis. This item has my full support and my thanks to you and the co-sponsors for bringing it forward. Sincerely, Mayor Robert Garcia. So with that, with no objections, I would like to move to public comment before the item comes back to me. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 0: And could we please come in? Could you please tell me you want to speak? Speaker 4: Our first speakers, Alan Gifford. Your time starts now. Speaker 3: I represent Tracy's Bar and Grill 5511 East Spring Street. That is a fifth District unit. We're Reno sisters who own the business would like to thank councilman and for all of his communication back and forth on this item. And then he realizes how important it is to the city of Long Beach. Most people know that the Moreno sisters own this business for 21 years, and most importantly, they're the fabric part of the fabric of the East Long Beach community, employing 23 people. These are 23 people who are Long Beach residents and or have students that attend Long Beach Unified School District. Again, they support this. They encourage all the council members to vote yes. And they want to also let the public know that the fees that most of these restaurants pay are related to pool tables, jukeboxes and live entertainment , which has not been able to occur since the Safer at home order was established by the city of Long Beach on March 16th, 2020. Thank you very much again, council people and I really encourage you to vote yes. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speaker is Syrian. Go. Your time starts now. Speaker 3: I council members vice mayor mayor here on I'm a partner owner at the main restaurant over at Long Beach Exchange and Stacey's district. First of all, most first council meeting have been on over three and a half hours. I think all you guys deserve a medal for what you go through every couple of weeks. But back to our restaurant. I mean, I think one of the challenges for us is when we have to close in the middle of March, is the loss of inventory that we have to endure, the perishable goods that we had on their shelves that we basically have to discard. In our case, it was over $10,000 in perishable inventory. We end up giving it to our employees because there was 48 of them that we had to let go. So we thought the best thing to do was to share that product and give it to them and their families so they could feed their families. We're not having much luck with our landlord. They want a different which puts us in a place where we're only incurring more debt even for the time that we were closed. So we're still having that negotiation, but that's not going that well. A lot of our fixed costs are still the same even when we came back and were able to do to go sale. That's not our model. It's not most restaurant sit down restaurant models, so that's not really working. Then being able to reopen and doing it at 60% capacity, there was a lot of expenditure in PPE and are changing up some of the things that we need just to be able to open to 60%. And then that obviously went to dining on patios only. So currently we went from 30%, 40%. We're doing about 50% of sales. That's not enough to keep our. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speaker is Christine Boss. Your time starts now. Speaker 2: Could you be mayor and city council? My name is Christine Bath and I'm calling on behalf of the Long Beach Area Chamber of Commerce. We support this recommendation and appreciate the city council bringing forward. COVID 19 has impacted our local businesses, and the restaurant industry is no exception. And the temporary suspension of these would provide support and flexibility at the local level. Our restaurants work to support our community and we must support them in return. Their success means employment for many individuals and employment at an all time high, giving financial stability to their families and our community in general. So we support this recommendation. And again, thank you for bringing it forward. Thank. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speaker is John Edmund. Your time starts now. Speaker 3: I'm a vice mayor, a city council, city manager and staff. I'm a long time listener and a first time caller. Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures, and this agenda item is a small step towards economic recovery. And as we need a giant leap and a stronger sense of urgency to get in front of the economic recession that is here and now, we to get aggressive, regulate and incentivize the stabilization and local economy. When we think back to 2008, it was very painfully slow and in hindsight, more could have been done. Neighborhood restaurants are the lifeblood of our communities. They're where we come together to make lifelong memories. Right now, they're facing extinction. COVID 19 crisis threatens to close 85% of independent restaurants in America. 16 million people risk losing their jobs, disproportionately impacting minorities and single mothers. There are neighbors, our friends, our farmers, our bartenders, our family. One in four people who lost their job during the pandemic were restaurant workers. Without your help, our favorite places to eat and enjoy life with our friends will be gone. Thank you. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speaker is Michael Denny. Speaker 3: Honorable vibes. Good evening, honorable vice mayor and city council members. My name is Michael Beam and I own Michael's Restaurant Group, which includes Michael's Pizzeria, Michael's downtown Giannina, and Michael's on Naples. I employ over 200 employees that are permanent, full time employees as well as part time employees. Tonight. I'm asking on behalf of my restaurant and all the other full-service restaurants that operate in the city of Long Beach that will you guys will approve through the city manager, a pause in our annual fees and charges payable to the city this year and for for whatever time this debilitating pandemic continues to exist. Full service industry has taken a major hit. Operating at sometimes 20 and 30% capacity cannot meet the overhead costs, and it reduces our ability to stay alive. I project that 40 to 50% of the restaurants are going to close up and close up forever. If we don't find some relief, we have been forced to close down a number of times and each time we did close down and open up, we lost and we went through hardships and we lost our perishables and spoilage. And as you heard. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speaker is Mike Murchison. Your time starts now. Speaker 3: Good evening, Vice Mayor and council members. My name is Mike Murchison. These full service restaurants that we all have enjoyed over the years, their owners, their managers, their employees, the people that are in the community have been the backbone of what we're all about here in Long Beach for years. They shop in our community. They provide sales tax, the general fund. We need the city to support them during this financial pandemic crisis. Your support on this item starts tonight to send the right message by suspending or waiving all annual permit fees. We need you on board tonight. Not a delay, not a study. Tonight, we need you. Thank you. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speaker is Rod Farentino. Speaker 3: Hello. Vice Mayor. Council on City Staff. My name's Rod Tarantino. I'm a resident homeowner. Homeowner in the third district. I'm also a managing member of three restaurants in the city of Long Beach that employ over 150 employees that are spread over all nine districts of this city. And. This pandemic, as you heard from other speakers, has caused us a huge amount of financial hardship. As a lot of you know, the federal government came up with programs like the PGP and the EDL loan programs to hopefully keep the restaurant businesses from going out of business during this pandemic so that they could stay open or reopen and continue to generate the amount of sales tax revenue they do that helps fund police and fire. And a lot of the things that have been on this agenda tonight that we've heard earlier in this meeting. And so I just hope that you guys would take serious consideration regarding agenda item 25. It is very important to our industry. Thank you for your time. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speaker is Ryan Hoover. Your time, sir. Speaker 3: Good evening, Mayor. Vice Mayor, City Council. My name's Ryan Hoover. I own and operate Beacon Branigan's Irish Restaurant Pub employing 30 plus people. I'd like to thank you for your time. I will also try to be brief. I'd like to thank you for the PARKLET program, which is a true lifeline to the restaurant Tears of Long Beach , and we're able to get them. With that being said, without some help from the city waiving the fees for city permits to restaurants during the time of pandemic, I feel your gesture of good faith with the Parklet program to keep businesses going may be in vain. You must see our limited capacity due to the restrictions imposed on us by the state, county and city are an astronomical hurdle to overcome. Some of those fees are directly based on occupancy rate which have been reduced. I think and hope that in your wisdom you can see it will be near impossible to maintain a proper business and sustain our employees during this time without you waiving the fees for the city. I'd like to thank you again for my time and being able to voice my opinion as a member of the community. Thank you. Speaker 4: Thank you. That concludes public comment for this item. Speaker 0: Thank you. I like Detroit craftsmanship. Thank you, Rosemary Andrews. And thanks to all the speakers for for waiting and and sharing your thoughts. Just a couple of points I'd like to make, and that is specifically with the information we got on possible legal issues. So just going back to the exact language of of the item, a couple of words there. Implementing a temporary suspension, I think the word temporary was burned, but other items is specifically tied to to COVID 19 and the stay at home orders and our safer at home orders and whatnot. Also, just just the term of what we do with the licensing renewal fees, whether we use the word suspension. Whatever word that our city attorney needs to use here, we're open to that. Also, I want to mention that many restaurants have already paid fees or for those who have paid in the past or some type of. But we need to look at some type of relief program, both looking back and moving forward and how do we handle that. That process would be part of what we'd like to bring forward. Finally, I anticipate some friendly amendments on this, and I'll be open to those, including other businesses, with one caveat The restaurant industry is very unique, and that was explained by the speakers, I think, where they have a perishable stock. Many have encountered additional costs with the outdoor dining options, whether they be parklets or dining in parking lots or even pre existing patio dining just and then also as mentioned was PPE and other requirements they now have. So I would just like staff to fast track the restaurant portion. So we get that going right away. If there are other businesses to look at, I wouldn't want to encumber the restaurant piece here with a study of all businesses in general. So that would be the one caveat I would I would require. So with that, look forward to the comments from my colleagues. Thank you. Consequence Rupert Murdoch on price. Speaker 2: Thank you, Mr. Vice Mayor. Can you hear me okay? Hello? Speaker 0: Yes. Speaker 2: Okay. Thank you very much. So I want to thank Councilman Supernova for bringing this item forward. And I want to thank the speakers for coming forward. I've talked with many of them off line prior to this item being brought forth. And I understand wholeheartedly the the economic pressures and the impact that they have had to endure as a result of the closures. I do believe that this is an item that should apply to all businesses. So as a friendly, I would request that the feasibility study, when it comes back, it evaluates the feasibility of having some relief in place for all businesses. I understand that all of our restaurants are operating at less than full capacity and they're all doing their very best to try to make it right now. But I will say that the majority of businesses that still stay closed. Several categories of beauty nail massage gyms. There's a whole movie theaters, a whole category of industry. That was while movie theaters weren't even allowed to open at all. But several of those categories that were allowed to open for two weeks before they were shut down. And in preparation for their opening and in conformity with the governor and the local health orders, they invested in PPE, Plexiglass, all manner of infrastructure to allow them to safely reopen. And then they were abruptly shut down. And they really don't have a meaningful operation model right now because a lot of those services can't be performed outside . So I think it's important for us to take a look at how we're helping all of the businesses. And I don't want to take away from the speed at which we implement these relief measures for restaurants. So I certainly don't want my friendly to slow things down for restaurants. But I do believe that all businesses that have been impacted as a result of COVID 19 should be afforded some relief. They should not have to pay fees and taxes when they can't operate their business. It's frankly, it would be theft for the government to take something away from them when they're not getting the benefit of the bargain from the government in terms of what they're supposed to get from the services they're paying for. So I feel very strongly that when businesses can't operate and can't even open their doors, the city should not be sending them a bill for services that the city can't even provide for them because they're closed. So I would hope that my friendly would be that the feasibility study include what relief options we can provide either on pro rating license fees. Speaker 1: Pro rating fees. Speaker 2: Or any other burdens that we as a city place on businesses based on COVID impacts. And perhaps they have to provide proof that they weren't able to operate or that they were operating at less than capacity. That all is factors that could be taken into consideration. So Councilman Super. Now would you accept that? Speaker 0: Yes, I do. And totally concur that all businesses need to be considered. And my point was just that if if that involves a feasibility study or or a case by case study of each business, I would just like to get the restaurants on board immediately. And then we can look at all these other businesses that are very worthy of help. Speaker 2: Thank you. And with that, I do have a clarifying question on this item. I understand that the item asked for a feasibility report. But are. Speaker 1: These businesses. Speaker 2: The restaurants specifically going to be charged any fees while we're waiting for the feasibility report to come back? Speaker 1: Is that city manager's understanding? Because if that's the case, I would request. Speaker 2: That any fees or assessments be told them until the feasibility study comes back. Speaker 5: So that actually already is the case. So you as a council put some language in place early on that fees and late fees and all those things are not due until the end of the fiscal year. And so some bills did go out or the restaurant bills did go out from the health department. We are not expecting any more bills. If there are, we'll put a pause on those and they there won't be need for payment under the existing city programs until, I believe, September 30th. I'm looking at. I'm sorry. August 30th. So and we can extend that if we need to. Given the the item. So I will either have the item back or will extend the tolling period. Speaker 2: Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Vice Mayor. I have nothing further. Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Consequently, I start Councilwoman saying that. Speaker 2: It's Mayor. And thank you, Councilmember. Super. Not for letting me sign on to this very important item. Eight. It's a very difficult time and we know that it is. You know, I know that also going through with this process will put a big burden on our city as well. But we really have to look out for businesses. I am particularly worried about our restaurants and that is because they are they are the what is holding us together right now. Like, if we if we can't go to to go to the store or something easily, like for myself personally, I usually order. And so if we it's kind of like they have to stay open to be able to service people that need food and that otherwise wouldn't be able to to go to the store and stuff like that. Like people with disabilities and seniors. And so I, you know, I'm bringing that perspective up as well as I do understand that a lot of our restaurants and I'm getting calls not only from our first District residents, resident and owners of businesses, but also from all over the city, that they're experiencing the same thing and just a little bit like like letting them , you know, not pay their licenses, fees as far as, like health goes and fire. I think that to them it shows what a great commitment we have to them and their their survival in our community. They're also all of the you know, one thing I love about the owners of our Long Beach restaurants is that they're very involved in our community. They're very, very eager to help out our nonprofit organizations year round, you know, so they they're trying to do their best. And and when things are good, they do that. They you know, they've had some help so many organizations throughout the years. And so now is a good time for us to to actually help them a little bit back. And I know that it's going to be hard on us. Yes, it's going to be hard on, you know, because we count on those funds to help us fund other things through the city. But I'm hopeful that, you know, that together we can find something that will help all of us in the long run. One of the things that I wanted to see, I know that it's you know, we're asking for a feasibility report, but I'd really like to try to get this in as soon as possible. So and that would be my friendly to try to get this back to us as soon as possible is accepted by councilmember super not. Speaker 0: Absolutely. That is the intent. And along those lines, I don't have a calendar in front of me, but is the last meeting in August the 18th or that would be the 18th or the 25th? I'm not sure. Speaker 5: Right now it's the 18th. We may need to have a special meeting at the end of August, just depending on the schedule. So we we might have another meeting at the end of August. So those would be the two dates. So we'll get you an estimate pretty soon about how fast we can come back. And if we need to extend some of the, you know, the August 30th deadline for payments, we can look at that as well so that but we understand would come back quickly. Speaker 0: Okay. So I could possibly agenda is an extension item for the 18th then to to look at at that time would that be feasible to get the information back to us by the 18th? Speaker 5: And I don't know yet exactly how long it'll take us to do it. That seems a little quick, but we will be back very, very soon. Speaker 0: Okay. And thank you for the friendly and then. Yeah. Just just the same that we would like to whatever information we get on the restaurant, we'd like to get that going right away. Speaker 2: Thank you, Councilmember, for accepting that. I also agree with Councilmember Price that was going to be one of my other friendlies, was that maybe we can also include those small businesses that have 50 or less employees. But I think that's covered by the friendly that Councilmember Price did earlier. And maybe in this in this one, we can also include some kind of tax rebate that we might be able to do, if that's okay. As well as a friendly. Just to look into the possibilities, if there are even any, that we could do as far as tax rebates. Speaker 0: It's accepted as a friendly. And I guess that would be up to our city attorney. Speaker 2: Great. Thanks. Thank you very much. And that's all for my comments. Speaker 0: Thank you. Councilman's in Venice, Councilwoman. Good. Grace Pierce, please. Speaker 2: Thank you. Yeah, I. I support this item. I did think that we already did this. Whenever we began with COVID. We had asked after to look into business licenses. So I thought that was something that we already had staff working on, stuff done. And you work on this? Yes. Speaker 5: Yes. So I that was what we were talking about earlier. The council has already put in place a deferral starting back probably in March of those business license fees and anything that we were able to defer, you don't have to pay it until August 30th so that we weren't charging any late fees. We've waived all of those. And so I think this is building on kind of the the current extension that is already there. And also looking at some other things such as, you know, forgiveness or additional payment plans or additional ways to stretch out that temporary suspension. So we would be coming back with more information. Speaker 2: Great. Thanks. And I wanted to ask a clarifying question. I know that the city collects fees, but then some of these businesses also pay in fees or settlements. And I wanted to make sure that this doesn't include that. Speaker 5: So I think we'd have to ask for the motion. I mean, we understand that you're asking the financial impact of that, and we can separate that out. But we do collect if you're in a bid in your restaurant, you pay a certain amount to the city. You also pay it to the bid. So we could give you both of that and you could decide as a policy how you if you wanted them to pay the bid but not the city, that would be something that you could look at. Speaker 2: Okay. Yeah, I guess, you know, understanding. I have two kids in my district that operate very differently and their income is very different and. Knowing that we obviously as the city have a role to play, but not wanting to manage too much of that relationship. And so it's looking at those things separately, I think would be helpful. Thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you very much, Councilmember Councilwoman Mango Beach. Speaker 2: Thank you. I want to first thank the community members and the Restaurant Association members who called in to discuss this very important item. I do want to kind of lay a groundwork. Mr. MODICA When we passed the CARES Act funding, I asked for an amendment to the funding specifically related to restaurants and rent reimbursement and or other liability pay offs. Could you remind me how much money was set into that business category? Speaker 3: But at one point. Speaker 5: I believe it was about it was about 4 million, right, Grant. And for John is told me it's about 4 million in grants and you did out in that part of those dollars and reallocate those could go to help offset certain expenses such as this. Speaker 2: Okay. One of the things I'd like to add to that consideration and or part of the study is that we really need to look at not not all of the restaurants are created equal. Not all of the businesses are created equal. We may want to consider and I know this is something that we kind of talked about that night at the dais. I kind of recommended a couple of options to consider, and I would be interested in knowing where we are. On the consideration of receiving applications for that $4 million of funding, prioritizing restaurants who have had, or other businesses that have had the largest year over year reduction in revenue but maintained employees, especially priority given to employees who work in or live in the city of Long Beach. Further, we did the deferral of fees and the late fee cancelation. Those are both helpful, but I think we need to take it a step further. I recognize and understand that with when I was elected in 2014, we talked about a business license holiday. I worked extensively alongside John GROSS of our financial management department, where we kind of went through some of the legal issues and liabilities. And what we came up with was an opportunity to apply for funding reimbursement of your fees two years after any certain conditions were met. Perhaps we could use that same model. It was a one page document that you filled out and then you could easily receive a quote unquote grant of the exact same amount that your business license fees were. And so I think that that was a great option that really met the legal key, but the mission of refunding those funds. And then I think the other component is health fees for restaurants or a cost reimbursement model. We take the total cost of inspecting restaurants and then the total number of restaurants. And then we kind of divide that out because of the cost investment model. It's not a model where the city makes money and uses it on other programs. In this particular case, those health inspectors have been deferred and are working on COVID related inspections, and therefore their cost really should be burdened by the funding that came to the city from the governor's office for COVID. And therefore, the fees to restaurants, I hope, could be at least pro-rated for the closure. So. Restaurants are open, let's say 365 days a year typically. So 300 lobsters just get 350 to make it easy. And if they're closed for 100, that would be 2/7 of the year. If they were closed for 100 days, they wouldn't have been able to get to be open. So therefore, 2/7 of their fee should be canceled. So just kind of talking through some options on ways to meet the legal requirements of some of the warnings that the city attorney has given us on past fee waivers and abatements that we've discussed that could still either refund or give, quote, unquote, grants to these businesses. If waiving fees is still not a viable option. And then the proration is another option. So a couple of those. And I just want to say thank you so much for everyone to come together on this very important item. Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilman Morgan. Councilman Richardson. Thanks, Vice Mayor. Just a couple of questions. First of all, thanks to an offer for commerce and to the restaurants as a chance to meet with some of them a few weeks ago. And I think it's important it's important to lift them up and really hone in their issues. A couple of questions and some parts. So, one, I got a little confused about, we were talking just about the unique issues of restaurants. There's a feasibility study. I'll talk a little bit more about that. I want to hear just about restaurants. Mr. Modica, is it possible to just get us, you know, whether it's we're able to adjust the healthy, the fire fee and the business license and what that would cost? A long would it take to just cost that up? Speaker 5: We think that probably wouldn't take too long. We've done some peaking. It's probably about $3 million, $2.7 million in that range. We can get you a better estimate. And that's just how there's probably fire and some others that are on top of that. So we can probably get that in in a week or so. Speaker 0: Okay. I just love a two from four. I mean, keep doing the study or whatever it is. I love that as soon as possible. The fire fee, the healthy I know the business license fee has some different legal parameters, but the cost is what we need to know. Secondly, I like what Councilman Mungle was talking about. I imagine that the cost of this to the city should be reimbursable by the structures we have for COVID 19 response. Is there a way to structure it or design whatever the program is that to benefit from some reimbursement funds become available? Speaker 5: No, the reimbursement is only for direct service that we're providing and only for things like overtime costs and not your normal services. So that's really the CARES Act, the $40 million the council did set aside $4 million to be able to offset costs like these for other agencies. And so that's what we're distributing hopefully pretty soon. Speaker 0: Okay, great. No, I say I'm in terms of the comprehensive study, I'm less interested in that being driven right here at account because we've actually brought different iterations of this forward. What I like to do is hear from from Mr. Keisler, where we've been talking about. And since we did the initial relief motion at the Economic Development Committee and the commission, we've been talking about structuring this, whereas relief and transition and recovery. How does this. Mr.. Keisler Through there, how could this fit into. I think we need to think more comprehensively. How could this fit into our strategy? What would I because what I like to think about is from a data standpoint, if we know you're projecting that 50% of us restaurants will fail, I want to know the strategy is rather than just just governing by agenda item, what is the strategy to make sure that 50% projection is not a reality for Long Beach? Is there a strategy to target the most vulnerable? Is there a way to maybe have some baseline support, lifeline support for everyone, and then do some really strategic work to make sure the 50% goes up to 60%, 70%. It really put our industry in general in a better position. But can you speak to that for a moment? Mr.. Speaker 6: KEISLER Yeah, certainly. Council Member So, so the conversation that, that, that we're having in the the investigation of of these issues that that are impacting the different classifications of business restaurants being the one tonight is that they're all facing different levels of of of operation right now because of the public health emergency. So the constraints of the health orders obviously allow certain businesses to operate at a limited basis. And for some restaurants, depending on whether they're fast food, they're sit down, they involve maybe entertainment, other things. They have different levels of of of, I guess, freedom to operate. And so that impacts revenues. That impacts, of course, their fixed costs that they have to cover, whether it's that service based on their size or otherwise. So so the answer is that it's very nuanced depending on on what kind of business they are, what kind of restaurant they are, how big they are, and what their their customer base looks like. So the goal right now is that we were in a lockdown phase for the last four and a half months. We call that the economic relief period because very few businesses were able to operate. Then we entered a partial reopening as we saw health health indicators improve. We've pulled back some from that. But but that was a partially reopened phase in more businesses. More restaurants in particular were able to open even expand into the open space to to expand their their capacity. So we consider what we're in right now to be the economic transition period, because there's tremendous uncertainty based on what happens with public health and businesses like restaurants especially sit down, dine in restaurants, have a really, really hard time projecting what the next few months will look like. And they have tremendous fixed costs, but they also have operating costs that have to do with staffing inventory. Whenever they try to ramp up to reopen, they have perishable goods that can cost as much as $10,000 a business every time they try to to re-up their inventory to to reopen. So this is the transition. It's filled with uncertainty. And we we can't call this a recovery. We don't think that'll happen until the the there's more certainty in the in the public health realm. And they're allowed to open back to 100%. And even then in the recovery, we're projecting that consumer behavior will be different than it was prior to the COVID 19 emergency. So if you imagine we're trying to get these businesses through the end of the year, and we think that based on what we're hearing about public health, that it will hopefully get better toward the end of the year, early 21. And so our goal from an economic development perspective to be strategic is to look at this transition period, to try to help businesses survive, keep as many storefronts open, and then ultimately really invest in the recovery once they can open and have more certainty to make decisions about their business. So I'll stop right there. But you're right. Relief, transition and recovery is our approach. Speaker 0: Thank you. I'll wrap up with that. I'll just say I think we should be aligning with that model transition. The end of the year. We start looking toward recovery, invest in front of mind for economic commission, commission and committee, and then let's get those numbers. It's going to be. That's a lot. Thank you. Councilman Richardson. Councilman Orson. Possible answer. Speaker 3: Yes. I was muted, unfortunately. Yes. Again, I want to just be sure that I support this item 100%. I think it's fair for us to to find support for an economic relief for our restaurant industry, also support the Assembly amendment to look at all businesses, because other businesses have also been deeply impacted by this crisis. Keep in mind that many of our service related businesses are not even open today and not having an impact on bottom lines, their ability to pay their leases and and employees. And so I do think that we have with this council week after week has also invested in itself. And we've been thoughtful and worked very diligently council staff to provide relief to our businesses throughout the city, including restaurants. We know the work that we do. We passed just a few weeks ago the the CARES Act in the allocation of funds there. The, the work to look at open streets was specific to the restaurants so that we can look at outdoor seating to keep them afloat. Understanding the impact of this on this pandemic this virus is having on those businesses. And so I think we need to continue to do that. And this item brought by Councilman Supernormal and other colleagues certainly can do that. And so obviously is based in the eighth District, is home to many sit out restaurants. And so this will benefit them. But I also want to just point out also that we have a number of new businesses and new restaurants opening up. I know in my district we have outdoor four that have opened or will open within the next couple of weeks. And these are very tough times to make that kind of investment. And so this is a message to them that the city, as it is, is helpful and looking to help. And so, again, thank you for bringing that item. I appreciate all the comments and on the for the support this I think. Speaker 0: Thank you. Got to know. And also want to learn. Go. Speaker 2: Thank you. I really appreciate everyone that spoke, I guess. Mr. Chrysler kind of gave us an update on the $4 million of funding. But I guess the biggest question that I would have if I was a small business is when do we expect that applications will be available and when do we expect that funding to be processed Speaker 6: ? Yeah. Council Member So, so we have incorporated the feedback that you just gave a good recap from the July 14th meeting. We took that list. We built that criteria into our our online application platform. So that's that's for the most part ready to go. We are now just going through the review process. We have to check it against some of the federal requirements, do the legal reviews. But we expected in a matter of days that we will be able to get the green light to open that up. So it is it is. Pardon me. So we're very excited to be able to offer this in the in just the next few weeks, we'll have businesses that have submitted and start receiving payments. So it's here and now. Speaker 2: And would you say that, um, we as council members have all the information necessary to help promote that program and ensure that we know and understand the parameters and that we I mean, I guess are we expecting a two from four or when the program launches, is there going to be a single sheet? What will we have available to us from a communications standpoint? Speaker 6: Yeah, of course. That's a great, great point. So so we have actually started putting that we have that that draft proposal with all those criteria and everything else. But we do need to put that into a format that we can release publicly. We have many of those materials in process. And in fact, we've started with our regular briefings of council officers just giving the verbal update of of of how we will engage with your office to promote these programs to businesses within the district. So yeah, we will absolutely have those written updates and a marketing and promotion campaign that we'll work on with your office, your staff, so that we can reach your businesses. Speaker 2: And that would be a communication campaign that would be in alignment with the communication framework and strategic plan and strategic strategies that came forth as a unanimous vote from this Council that took two years to develop. In terms of what that looks like, I know that we're in a pandemic and there's a lot of rush and there's a lot of priorities. But we put together a framework for communication and inclusion, and I think that it's critical that we continue to refer back to it on every single matter. And so I just wanted to just a friendly reminder about that document and that it is a living document, and I know that I'd like to have an update on it, so I'll schedule my meeting with a city manager's office. But just a reminder that we are here to advocate and share that information and we're some of the best conduits to do that. And so we need to make sure we have that information. Thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilman. Mongo got to the Superdome. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I just wanted to conclude and bring everything back into focus on this specific agenda item. So I believe we are fast tracking a restaurant policy now and then to follow up the study on all businesses. Everyone is covered by the current policy of a waiver or suspension of fees until it sunsets at the end of August. And. If it's required. Council can come together in a couple of weeks and extend that. Is that the understanding of the motion to city manager? Absolutely. Yes. Okay. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Congressman Stabenow. You know, I would like to close by thanking Councilman Superman for bringing this item forward. I think the restaurants, like many business, are struggling. And we have a duty to help these local businesses create jobs for our communities and bring in tax revenues to the city. We want them to be successful. But one of my biggest words is that these business won't be in business during the city's transition. I hope that we can get this figured out by the end of the month. These businesses need relief now to make it to make it to recovery. So I wholeheartedly support this item. Thank you again. Now, can we please call for the vote? It's in my. Children are 74 and 65 seven. We police cars for the moment. Speaker 1: District one. Speaker 2: I'M. Speaker 1: District two. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District three. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District four. Speaker 0: I. Speaker 1: District five. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District six. Speaker 0: All right. Speaker 1: District seven. By District eight. District nine. Speaker 3: All right.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to request City Manager to work with all other appropriate departments, to evaluate the feasibility of implementing a temporary suspension of the health, fire and business licensing renewal fees for restaurants impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

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Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Okay. Item 26. Clark, would you please me the item? Speaker 1: Communication from City Auditor Recommendation to amend contract with KPMG for specialized services in connection with annual financial audits to increase the contract in an amount not to exceed 922,895 citywide. Speaker 0: All right. And do we have a motion on this, please? Could we get a second? Speaker 2: In. Speaker 0: We have Mango and Roberto. No. Excuse me. Do you have any problem coming in this? Speaker 1: There is no public comment on this item. Speaker 0: But I am thinking. Good for the. Speaker 1: Vice Mayor, can you repeat the mover and the seconder? Speaker 0: But. Speaker 1: I'm sorry. I didn't catch that. Can you please repeat the move for a second or vice mayor Roberto? Elanga and the second. Speaker 0: In the second the basement area. Speaker 2: Now it's me and the maker and the building. That is the second. Speaker 1: Okay. Thank you very much. District one. I District two. I agree. I district for. Speaker 0: My. Speaker 1: District five. Speaker 2: District by. Speaker 1: District by. Speaker 0: High. Speaker 1: District seven. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District eight. District nine. District nine. I know she cares.

Contract

Recommendation to authorize City Manager, or designee, to execute all documents necessary to amend Contract No. 33203 with KPMG LLP, a Delaware limited liability partnership, of Irvine, CA, for specialized services in connection with annual financial audits, to increase the contract in an amount not to exceed $922,895, for a revised total contract amount of $7,056,834, and extend the contract to June 30, 2021. (Citywide)

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Speaker 1: District eight. District nine. District nine. I know she cares. Speaker 0: Thank you. Now we'll go to item 27. Quote, could you please with the audit. Speaker 1: Report from economic development recommendation to augment the small business restart grant program to fund to provide more direct grants to eligible Long Beach small businesses that were impacted by damages, theft and or vandalism related to the events on May 31st, 2020 and wide. No problem. Speaker 3: Item. Speaker 0: Please get a brief report on this item. Speaker 6: Yeah. Good evening. Council members. So on on May 31st, we had approximately 289 businesses that reported damages from either vandalism, theft, looting, and they experienced a range of financial hardships associated with with that damage. The council approved a program that included up to $250,000 from some council one time funds, as well as some CDBG funds in the amount of $250,000. About a month ago. And those have provided small $2,000 grants to businesses that were either in the eligible areas or qualified for CDBG funding. There are many more businesses, though. Of that 289 that were not eligible to receive funding from those those grant funded sources. And so this item proposes to provide a fund up to $1 million that will be used to help offset the costs that were incurred in the losses of businesses on that that evening. Now, this will not cover the entire reported damages or losses that we have been receiving, what we call the damage assessment forms. Those range in the millions and millions of dollars. Some of that loss is offset by insurance. So this will just cover a portion of the losses from the businesses who were damaged on that evening and ultimately provide some relief to every single one of the businesses that apply. So that ends my report and I'm happy to answer any questions. Speaker 0: Thank you very much. We do not have any public comments. No one is cued up, so we have a first by price and the second by our broker. We please call for the vote. Speaker 1: District one. District one. I district to high. District three, I. District four. Speaker 0: All right. Speaker 1: District five. District six. Speaker 0: All right. Speaker 1: District seven. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District eight. District nine. I motion carries. Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Now we'll go to item 29. Could you please read the.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to authorize City Manager, or designee, to augment the Small Business Restart Grant Program fund to provide more direct grants to eligible Long Beach small businesses that were impacted by damages, theft, and/or vandalism related to the events on May 31, 2020; Increase appropriations in the General Fund Group in the Economic Development Department by $1,000,000, offset by a transfer from the Employee Benefits Fund; and Increase appropriations in the Employee Benefits Fund Group in the Citywide Activities Department by $1,000,000 to the transfer to the General Fund Group, offset by a release funds from the Unfunded Liability Reserve. (Citywide)

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Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Now we'll go to item 29. Could you please read the. Speaker 1: Report from Financial Management? A recommendation to receive and file a report on the financial assistance accepted by the city as of June 30th, 2020, to respond to the proclaimed emergency due to the COVID 19 pandemic citywide. Speaker 0: Yes. Could we have a brief financial footing on this? Speaker 5: Yes. John GROSS will get a brief report. Speaker 0: Thank you. Speaker 7: Good evening. Council the city has been active in getting grants for COVID and has been very aggressive in doing that. As part of that, the City Council authorized the city manager to approve grants without going to city council when necessary. But we had to report back. This is a report of eight grants that were received through June of 2020 that were not directly approved by council when we're here by reporting them to you. They totaled to about $40 million and they're listed in the fiscal impact discussion. In September, we will bring you a new report for any grants received after June 30th. That does not include a lot of other grants that have already gone to council. Big example is the CARES Act, which went to council separately. That concludes my report. Speaker 0: Thank you very much. I didn't have any problem coming in this item. Speaker 1: Yes, there's public comment on this item. Speaker 4: Our first speaker is Jeffrey Roe. Your time starts now. Speaker 3: Yeah. Hi, my name is Jeff Brown, and I'm the owner of the Hideaway restaurant Pontiac Cocina and rounding third sports bar in Long Beach. I've been I've been a resident here for. Over 20 years in a business owner for eight and am responsible for 100 over 100 employees here in Long Beach. They are my friends. They are my family and our industry, as you've heard in the news throughout the night, is in trouble as well as everybody else's. So I'm asking that we are hoping to allocate. Speaker 2: More. Speaker 3: Than a general share to full service restaurant of the CARES Act money based on whatever formula they want to, whether it's sales tax or sales or loss of sales. You know, any any help is greatly appreciated. But we need. We need help. I thank you for your time. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speaker is John Edmund. Your time starts now. Speaker 3: Hi. Ah, well, vice mayor of City Council has stepped outside of large, large purchases like cars. TV's full service restaurants really provided much needed sales tax revenue. And as we know, and I think several council members pointed out in movie theaters, bars and retail are equally sort of being disproportionately impacted versus grocery stores and fast casual restaurants that have drive thrus and so forth. Although drive thru restaurants are probably impacted not to the greatest extent as full service restaurants. So all that we ask is that you allow staff the discretion to, of course, view these funds for small businesses through an equity lens because they think that's, of course, very important, but also allow them to wait it based on a needs assessment of those who are disproportionately impacted by COVID of opening and closing and opening again, and more specifically, create a backstop for those sales tax revenue businesses that are going to be able to assist the city as we grow out of this crisis into fulfillment. I think everybody thinks the first quarter of next year we're looking at a sort of a W recovery and we just got to get these guys and gals through the finish line into the first quarter and everything you can do to greatly appreciate it. Thank you for your time and have a great night. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speaker is Karen. Go. Starts now. Speaker 3: Yeah. Hi, Kiran. No, no, wait. Restaurant at Long Beach Exchange District. I want to take the record that John Keisler stole most of my talking points. I'm 25, is an informed fellow. But, you know, what we're asking for is really for the city to take a look at the COVID funds that have come in, how many are allotted to small businesses, and on the assumption that not all small businesses are struggling the same way. So in this example, it's really about quick service restaurants, fast food restaurants doing pretty decent, but full sit down restaurants really struggling through this pandemic. So if you look at the numbers, you know, most restaurants only make 6% and profitability is on average. That means $0.94 goes back into the economy and every dollar is coming in. So I think from a city perspective, investing in restaurants is a smart thing to do, knowing that the amount of people that we employ and also the sales tax that we generate. Appreciate your time. Thank you very much. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speaker is Michael Dean. Your time starts now. Michael Dean. Michael Dean, your time starts now. Our next speaker is Mike Merchant's in your time starts now. Speaker 3: Good evening, Vice Mayor and city council members. I know we spoke and I am 25. I'm 29. As John GROSS pointed out, is about 40 million from the CARES Act. Funding of that 4.1 million was for small business and the restaurant industry. Specifically, the full service restaurant industry is in that 4.1 million. What I'm asking for you to do is give the discretion to city staff to identify any and all funding that is out there, because that 4.1 million, when you look at what it impacts, was with restaurants, with salons, with retail and all that. There is no way that there's going to be any strong dollar amount coming out of that per grant. So I'm asking for you to work with John Keiser. And his team was terrific, by the way, to see what kind of grants or loans to me coming up with to help out these full service industries who need the funding right now. They can't wait for a second or third round. They need it right now. Thank you very much. Speaker 4: Thank you. Mike Newfield, your time starts now. Speaker 3: Thank you. Good evening, Vice Mayor and council members, this is Mike Neufeld. I own the Gaslamp Restaurant over in the third district. And so many of my colleagues tonight have already spoken and spoken well to all the issues that face us, as well as a number of the council members. I can't emphasize enough just a little bit of color here. The fact that we really have have endured massive losses going into our six months of doing so here into the month of August. And the vast majority of us are individual owners of full service restaurants here and really key to any kind of economic transition or recovery that that the council members and John Koestler speak of and speak to in terms of the goals of the city. And number one in that we think is jobs. Our ability to stay in business really lends itself to keeping thousands of employees employed in the city of Long Beach. It's as simple as that. And we're running out of gas. We're running out of money, and we're holding on and fighting the good fight. We need whatever support for the city that the city can give us and echo my colleagues and my fellow restaurant owners and our request to really look at those funds, dig deep and get creative and really look at our industry as one that contributes greatly to the city of Long Beach. Thank you. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speaker is Rod Frontenac. Your time starts now. Speaker 3: Hello, Vice Mayor Council and city staff Rod Tarantino, resident homeowner in the third district, also managing member and operator of three restaurants here in Long Beach that employs over 150 people that are spread all across all nine districts of the city of Long Beach. And I'm just I spoke earlier a little bit about item number 25, but this somewhat relates item 29 here. As far as the grants, you know, I believe that the grants, as it relates to our industry is all in an effort to allow these businesses us to stay in business and be of service to the community, pay our sales tax, payroll tax, keep people employed and keep the sense of community going throughout this entire city. I think most people know we do play a vital part, not only in the sense of community throughout the city, but more importantly, we really do have an impact on the our guests and our employees and the city financially . Once again, a major contributor with sales tax revenue that funds police, fire and a lot of important services that the city needs through this tough time. So I appreciate your efforts and looking into this. Thank you. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our last speaker is Dave Shukla. Your time starts now. Speaker 3: Hello. Um, so I just want to be really clear that, uh, we should be supporting our, our local business and our local restaurants. You know, the issues and these and disproportionate impact are serious or real. They unexpected. As many other speakers have previously just noted, um, a lot of dynamics couldn't have been planned for. And these are, you know, the philosophy that's important. And I would hope that if we're going to be investing in restaurant that these investment be in local businesses of buy for from Long Beach resident and not chain stores or drive thru. Um no you know it's just like I hope it's just my thoughts on item 28. I'm not trying to firm up any particular or or quite the contrary. I, I appreciated everything that was said about each other and appreciate everything that's been said about the restaurant. And I want to insist. From the city council that when the issue of black owned businesses or black workers ended in areas where it's clearly need, it comes up that we have the same kind of support. John Coates were you have a smile, sir, that could turn the devil himself. I am very jealous. Speaker 4: Thank you. And that concludes public comment for this item. Speaker 0: Thank you. We have to continue to ask you that council on yours and Councilman Richardson. Speaker 2: Uh, thanks. I'll try to be brief. I just want to say that I. I definitely recognize the struggles that, you know, our businesses of all sizes have and support the idea, obviously, of staff working to identify as many grants as possible. Also recognizing that it's businesses are very small businesses to some of these restaurants that might have more than 100 employees that really power our economy. It's not these big corporations. And so making sure that the smallest businesses supported it, particularly because they might have been left out from dollars previously, but also that we're working alongside these businesses to identify new funds. And I know that the owner of Plant spoke, and I know there are some areas, not particularly in my district, but that other space could be used for other events like drive ins and things like that. And so I would also hope that staff is working with them to make sure that we're being creative, to help them stay open in a safe manner. So thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you. Thank you very much, Councilor. Thanks, Vice Mayor. I just a couple of things. So thanks to staff and everyone, the job is to bring in additional resources. I know that this item looks like it's the complete picture, but it's not the complete and total picture. I know that there are additional loans and additional funding that comes in that may have different parameters and allows us to be so. I know the CARES Act funding is on and on and I understand the argument that one of the speakers made about how there's so much demand it may not make an impact. So I want to just ask a question of Mr. Keisler. Are there. With respect to the issue raised about restaurant, is there potentially a loan fund or something available that could structure larger amounts but perhaps as loans and we can shop in the way that we did emergency relief loans in that or perhaps it could either not be collect, not be collected, or have very reduced or relaxed collection standards or or even forgivable the ability to be forgiven at that point. So is there is there some long bond or some solutions on, you know, on hand that you could maybe think about or speak to, rather? Speaker 6: Councilmember Yeah, absolutely. So the city council actually has taken some really creative action on restructuring our what we call revolving loan funds. We received a grant from the Economic Development Administration, the federal government, to establish a revolving loan fund. And we actually will be able to receive those funds of about $2.4 million, which we'll be able to loan under very favorable terms. And those loans can range from about $10,000. And we've done loans as high as $95,000, and they are loans. But because the interest rate is is is prime, it's very affordable. We can stretch those out over seven years and we can delay the repayment until 2021 to get through this rough patch. So, yes, we are we are now working on a what we call an equitable administration plan for that loan fund. We're going to be bringing that back to council in September. And our goal is to provide larger amounts. While these grant programs may be very small for these larger businesses that employ many people but need to get through three or four months until Q1 of 2021, we would like to sit down with every one of these businesses and build a loan that works for them and that ultimately will help them survive until they're able to reopen fully and start generating revenue. One last piece on that. We can stretch out those repayments, make them smaller, so that they can afford to begin the repayment at a later time. So thanks for that question. And yes, we are working on something for the council in September that. Speaker 0: That it, Councilman Richardson? That's nice, man. Thank you so much, Councilwoman Amanda. Speaker 2: Thank you, Vice Mayor. Well, I appreciate loans. I think that one of the things that's really key to some of the speakers said tonight is the restaurants. Two or three decades ago, we're operating on double digit margins and now restaurants are operating on single digit margins and employing large numbers of people. So I definitely hear the point that if the amount given is insignificant, the business could still not make it. And so I want those amounts to be significant. I know there were some numbers I was going over with the city manager's office earlier today, whether it's 400 restaurant licenses and then how that divides out. But I'd like to see a program where we're making significant investments in multiple businesses, because on a on a 4 to 6% margin, the ability to repay a lot of these debts is going to be insurmountable. And then we will lose hundreds of jobs. And if we want to talk about equity for a lot of the people in different industries are disproportionately from certain ethnic groups. And so I think that the restaurant industry and that needs to be looked at as well, specifically because we will lose jobs in a certain category. So if 50 to 85% of our restaurants fold, while those that remain standing may have additional customer base and they they still might not have the capacity. Outdoor seating is great now, but come winter it will not be as viable. And furthermore, to make up those kind of numbers is just difficult. So I really want us to focus and I know that on the CARES Act funding, well, $4 million was allocated to this fund and we did add a clause at the end, or at least I made a recommendation and I believe it was accepted to state that if any of the funds are underperforming, that we have applications at the ready to take on and absorb some of those funds because they are use it or lose it. And I just want to advocate again that this fund specifically is a priority, that while the amount of money available initially recommended by staff was $4 million for PPE, as we've seen, some of these businesses are not reopening. And so PPE is not the thing that has the need. We really need to focus on large amounts of funding that help these businesses get over the gap and are able to really look to the future with promise to be able to continue to employ our Long Beach residents. And if there is a way to prioritize those that have larger quantities of rehire, especially be hires that are Long Beach residents, I think that that's something that's that's pretty powerful. So thank you very much to everyone who spoke today. Thank you to the city staff who continue to work on this important project. I've been thinking of the Economic Development Office who is answering so many questions and pulling numbers from an Albany antiquated system. I know we're all looking forward to the new system that the city's implementing and to have gone through a crisis. Running numbers out of the old system. I really just thank you all for your patience and persistence and making sure that we have the information that we need as councilmembers to make good policy. Thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilman Mundo. Councilwoman Pryce. Speaker 2: Q Mr. Vice Mayor, I think one of the most important things and council member just pointed out is that a lot of our businesses are really not in a position to take on additional loans, even at low interest rates. They already had small business loans before COVID, and now they're going to have to take on yet another loan, which isn't that either or. This is really an unprecedented situation. And just figure out and I know our economic development worked hard on this, but any and all grant opportunities that are available for businesses. And while I would love to be able to give significant money to certain businesses, the reality is that we just don't have enough money to be able to do that and yet be able to help small business owners. Or in the city of one of the business owners in my district, Belmont Shore shared that a $2,000 grant from the city would allow her, like a person, one of her appointees, bring them back for anywhere between 120 to 150 hours. And the rate of pay that that it would be getting that would give that person additional 100, 2050 hours of work that they might not otherwise have. A business owner doesn't have that much. So while some of these amounts significant for some businesses, small amounts could be significant for businesses that are literally holding on to their little cash, hoping that they'll be allowed to reopen so that they can make it without grants and loans. So I don't know if that's going to happen. I don't know when a lot of these business sectors are going to open. But I can tell you that a lot of these businesses are operating with maybe 10,000, $15,000 cash on hand, waiting for the business to open back up so that they can start working revenue to be able to start paying the bills. So $2,000, though, that seems significant for something still a long way for them. So I'm all in favor of our economic development, having discretion and giving priorities about where that money best goes. But I think the solution that we need in order to take care of everyone is somewhere close to $20 million for really take care of our business. We don't have that. So we need to be creative. I do have a question for Mr. Keisler, and that is, are the applications for this grant available yet for businesses? Speaker 6: Council member. So we actually are finalizing the the application portal, which will be an online application. We will that that's just in the next few days. And in August, we're hoping to get that application portal up and going for for everyone as well as, as I was sharing with the council member earlier and be able to brief your office as well as provide you with not only the process but the criteria and the marketing and promotion plan. So yes, it's just a matter of days. We'll be meeting with your offices and providing you with the information about how to roll this out and advertise the opportunity. Speaker 2: And then are we going to have one of the requirements or the criteria going to be some documentation of free COVID post-COVID revenues so that the city can assess the loss of determining what grant amounts would be appropriate for a particular business? Speaker 6: Yeah, that's correct. So as part of the grant businesses, the application itself being an online form is is fairly simple and easy to use, but they do have the option of uploading documents. And so unfortunately as part of this grant, we do have some federal grant reporting requirements as well. And we will be asking for some some tax records that will help us to to assess what those revenues were and that they were impacted. Remember, this Cares Act money was for COVID impacted businesses. And so we have to be able to prove that. Speaker 2: Okay. I appreciate that. I think that's very helpful to me and I look forward to the process. And I really, absolutely believe staff should have discretion to figure out how to make that $4.1 million go to the most effective place. So thank you very much. I have no further questions. Speaker 0: Thank you, Congressman Price. Do we have anyone else? Oh, I see. Councilwoman Mango. Speaker 2: Thank you. I had referenced the numbers that economic development has been able to provide, but I didn't actually say what they were. And I think that they're something for us to keep in mind. If you take all food and drinking facilities in the city of Long Beach, you're talking about nearly 22,000 jobs. And 1.7 billion in annual sales. And I know that for every $100 the city of Long Beach only gets $2 of the $10 that's generated in taxes. But it's still economically that 1.7 billion when restaurants are operating at 4 to 6%. You're really talking about. One point something billion of economic money being put into the hands of individuals who. If not for this income, could not pay their rent. If not for this income, they cannot put food on the table. If not for this income, they could not so many other things that are important to them in their family. So I just I think that scope is really important here. And 22,000 jobs is is critical in saying that. So thank you both, Mayor. I've been trying to keep it under 5 minutes and recue, and I hope that that worked out. But I think it's a great place to end the discussion because our unemployment rate is high. But if you were to even say that half of the jobs in this area have not come back yet, many of them are at zero catering and others are making an impact in restaurants could really jumpstart the economy. Thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you. Arts unions in the US. Speaker 2: Council. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I just wanted to agree with all of my colleagues on how important this is moving forward. Our businesses are really, really hurting right now. So I am fully in support of this item. Thank you. Speaker 3: Thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you. Guzman's desk prices include comfortable weeknights price. Price and Mrs. Mango second. Speaker 1: District one. I. District two. I. District three. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District four. Speaker 0: I. Speaker 1: District five. I. District six. Speaker 3: II. Speaker 1: District seven. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District eight. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District nine. I feel the motion carries. Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Now we're going to move to item. Could you please read the item?

Agenda Item

Recommendation to receive and file a report on the financial assistance accepted by the City of Long Beach, as of June 30, 2020, under Resolution No. RES-20-0049 to respond to the proclaimed emergency due to the COVID-19 pandemic; and Increase appropriations in several funds across several departments for various COVID-19-related grant opportunities. (Citywide)

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Speaker 1: Ocean carries. Speaker 0: Am item 31, please. Speaker 1: Item 31 Report from Financial Management. Recommendation to adopt a resolution authorizing city manager to execute a contract with National Auto Fleet Group or the purchase of 720, 20, 40 or 50 ambulances citywide. Speaker 0: Finally, we have a motion. Nothing has. Speaker 3: And so. Speaker 0: Can we get a second, please? Can we please get a second? Second baseman. Okay, Roberto. Chloe, could you please come? Laura? Speaker 1: District one. All right. District two. Speaker 2: By. Speaker 1: District three. By district or. Speaker 3: By. Speaker 1: District five. By District six. By District seven. District eight, art district nine. I motion carries.

Resolution

Recommendation to adopt resolution authorizing City Manager, or designee, to execute a contract, and any necessary amendments, with 72 Hour, LLC, dba National Auto Fleet Group, of Watsonville, CA, for the purchase of seven 2020 Ford E-450 ambulances, on the same terms and conditions afforded in the Sourcewell (formerly The National Joint Powers Alliance) contract, for a total contract amount not to exceed $2,168,951, inclusive of taxes and fees. (Citywide)

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Speaker 1: District nine. Ocean carries. Speaker 0: 1130 3:00 Could you please me? Speaker 1: The Item Report from Public Works Recommendation to award a contract to RJ Noble Company for Street Improvements on Temple Avenue between Obispo Avenue and Spring Street for a total contract amount not to exceed 1,402,364 District five. Speaker 0: Do you have any problem coming inside them? Speaker 4: Yes. Dave Shukla. Your time starts now. Speaker 3: Hello again, very briefly. I know it's late. This is a great example of a project that achieves multiple benefits working across more than one authority area. I really would like to see this city pursue active mobility project on not just road diets with the open free parklet, but but ones where I mean, I mean, ten years ago I spent all my research on trains. I mean, I would love to see light rail come back the Red Cross, but I mean, that may be aspirational, but something to get people safely biking, walking with the Vision Zero. So the other mobility elements that we have, I just think that, you know, getting outdoors now, especially for this year, next year, is just going to be really important for everyone in the inner city. Thank you for your time. Speaker 0: And I need a second place and. First. Speaker 2: The sun has set. Speaker 0: Thank you. Could we please come for the vote? Speaker 1: District one, District two, District three. Speaker 2: By. Speaker 1: District four. Speaker 2: By District five. Speaker 1: By District six. By seven. By District eight. Speaker 3: Nine by. Speaker 1: Motion carries.

Contract

Recommendation to adopt Plans and Specifications No. R-7042 and award a contract to R.J. Noble Company, of Orange, CA, for street improvements on Temple Avenue between Obispo Avenue and Spring Street, in the amount of $1,274,876, with a 10 percent contingency in the amount $127,488, for a total contract amount not to exceed $1,402,364; and, authorize City Manager, or designee, to execute all documents necessary to enter into the contract, including any necessary amendments; Authorize City Manager, or designee, to execute all documents necessary to enter into a Memorandum of Understanding, including any subsequent amendments, with the City of Signal Hill, for administration and cost-sharing of the street improvements on Temple Avenue between Obispo Avenue and Spring Street, contained within City of Signal Hill jurisdiction, in the amount of $399,000; Increase appropriations in the Capital Projects Fund Group in the Public Works Department by $399,000, offset by reimbursement funds from the City of Signal Hill; Increase appropriations in the Capital Projects Fund Group in t

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Speaker 0: Item number 34. Could you please begin? Speaker 1: Or from technology and innovation recommendation to execute the necessary documents with Dell utilizing the approved Dell Master Purchase Agreement. The purchase of personal computers in an amount not to exceed 1,200,000 citywide. Speaker 0: Okay. So you probably got. Speaker 4: Yes. We have Dave Shukla. Your time starts now. Speaker 3: Oh, boy. Last, I promise. Same considerations of those on many previous consent calendar items. We need an Office of Public Data Protection and Office of Public Data Control. Public Data Advocacy. Something we think. Speaker 0: Yes. Could I please get a second on this? I come from Iraq and that's moms and dads. She. First. Okay. Progress and and counting, Miranda. Speaker 1: District one. I District two. District two. District three. Speaker 2: By. Speaker 1: District four. Speaker 0: All right. Speaker 1: District five. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District six. Speaker 0: By. Speaker 1: District seven. Speaker 3: By 809. Speaker 1: That motion carries. Speaker 3: Thank you.

Contract

Recommendation to authorize City Manager, or designee, to execute the necessary documents with Dell Marketing, LP (Dell), utilizing the approved Dell Master Purchase Agreement No. 28280, for the purchase of personal computers, in an amount not to exceed $1,200,000; and Authorize City Manager, or designee, to execute a lease-purchase agreement, and related financing documents, with Banc of America Public Capital Corp, of San Francisco, CA, for the financing of personal computers, in an amount not to exceed $1,290,000 including escrow fees, principal, and interest, payable over a five-year period. (Citywide)

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Speaker 3: Thank you. Speaker 0: Item 35 Please. Speaker 1: Report from water. Recommendation to adopt a resolution which amends the resolution approving the compensation fixed by the Board of Water Commissioners of the City for officers and employees in the Water Department. Speaker 0: I do have any public comment on this item. Speaker 1: There's no public comment on this item. Speaker 0: Could I please get a second? Mrs.. And they she came in the first. I need a second. When you're Ranger. Would you please call for the vote? Speaker 1: District one I. Speaker 3: DISTRICT Mr.. Speaker 2: Hi. Speaker 1: District three. District three. I. District for. Speaker 0: High. Speaker 1: District five. District five. District six. Speaker 3: All right. District seven by district eight. Hi. Speaker 1: District nine. Speaker 3: I'm curious.

Resolution

Recommendation to adopt resolution which amends the resolution approving the compensation fixed by the Board of Water Commissioners of the City for Officers and Employees in the Water Department.

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Speaker 0: I'm 36. Would you please read the. Speaker 1: Communication from City Attorney Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code relating to the temporary prohibition of evictions due to COVID 19, declaring the urgency thereof and declaring that this ordinance shall take effect immediately read and adopted as read citywide. Speaker 0: During public comment on this item. Speaker 1: No public comment on this item. Speaker 0: Fine. We have a person in second by pierce ents and they asked. Speaker 3: Would you please consider the. Speaker 1: District one district too. Speaker 2: High? District three, I. Speaker 3: District four. Speaker 0: By. Speaker 1: District five. District six. I am District seven. District eight, US District nine. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 2: District five. Speaker 1: I thank you.

Emergency Ordinance

Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code by amending Subsection 8.100.030.A. and Section 8.100.040; each relating to the temporary prohibition of evictions due to COVID-19; declaring the urgency thereof; and declaring that this ordinance shall take effect immediately, read and adopted as read. (Citywide)

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Speaker 1: I thank you. Speaker 0: I am 37. Could you please be down? Speaker 1: Communication from Vice Mayor Andrew's recommendation to reallocate 30,000 from the fiscal year 2018 budget appropriations for beautification efforts along Willow Avenue Corridor and as needed locations in the sixth District. Speaker 0: Thank you. I would just like for my colleagues to support me in this item. The funds is there and it's not a new fund we actually get. We're essentially just expanding services to another needed corridor. So could I get any private company on the side? Speaker 1: There's no public comment on this item. Speaker 0: Okay. Could I please get a second? I have that by Mr. Austin and of course, by Mr. Andrews. Could you please read the item? Excuse me. Calls after the. Speaker 1: Vote. District one. Hi, district two. I District three. I district for. Speaker 0: All right. Speaker 1: District five. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District seven. I think eight District nine. Speaker 0: Is due to I. Speaker 1: Motion carries. Speaker 0: Fine. Now we're going to our second public comment period. Agenda item. Is there anyone signed up for it? Speaker 1: There is no second public comment. Speaker 0: I'll. Okay. This meeting is a term. Job, Vice Mayor. Yeah, sure. Now, great job, Vice Mayor Andrews.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to reallocate $30,000 from the Fiscal Year 2018 budget appropriations in the General Fund Group in the Economic Development Department from the original intent of using the funding for beautification efforts along the Pacific Avenue corridor and re-appropriate for beatification efforts along the Willow Avenue corridor and as-needed locations in the Sixth District.

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Speaker 4: Item 17. Please note would you please see that. Speaker 1: Report from City Manager Recommendation to amend agreement with the Long Beach Area Convention and Visitors Bureau to provide a one time increase in funding in the amount of 300,000 for fiscal year 2020 citywide. Speaker 4: Is there any public comment on this item? Speaker 1: There's no public comment on this item. Speaker 4: Hmm. Okay. Look at the office. Speaker 1: Their emotions are in a second around this item. Speaker 2: Then they have succulents. I'm okay. Thank you. I took a number of peers. I sent in my motion earlier. I'll withdraw my motion so it'll be Pearson's and De has. Speaker 4: All I have to put in my second. Okay. We have a person, the second federal police. Speaker 1: District one. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District to. Speaker 2: I am. Thank you, Susie. District three I. Speaker 1: District for. Speaker 3: My. Speaker 1: District five. I. District six. Speaker 4: All right. Speaker 1: District seven. District eight. Speaker 0: All right. Speaker 1: District nine. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 1: Motion carries. Speaker 4: All right. Thank you. Item 18, please. And, clerk, would you please read that. Speaker 1: Report from City Manager Recommendation to review a report on the CARES Act funding and potential uses. Speaker 4: It gives me great cause. Could we please do item 21? I'm sorry.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to authorize City Manager, or designee, to execute all documents necessary to amend Agreement No. 28164 with the Long Beach Area Convention and Visitors Bureau, Inc., to provide a one-time increase in funding in the amount of $300,000, for a revised amount of $5,358,676 for Fiscal year 2020; and Increase appropriations in the Special Advertising and Promotions Fund Group in the City Manager Department by $300,000, offset by funds available. (Citywide)

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Speaker 4: It gives me great cause. Could we please do item 21? I'm sorry. Speaker 2: Absolutely. Speaker 4: We're going to look at 21. Speaker 1: Item 21 Report from Economic Development and Fire. Recommendation to execute a lease with JCC, Long Beach and the City of Long Beach for the use of the premises at 2019 East Wardlow Road for the temporary location of Fire Station nine. Speaker 4: District five and any further comments in the statement? Speaker 5: Vice Mayor. We do have a presentation on this item. A short presentation? Speaker 4: Fine, thank you. Can we please hear? Speaker 5: Right. So economic development will be given a presentation on this. This is a wonderful item on our new temporary location for Fire Station nine. The team has worked really hard to find a new place to have our temporary headquarters, which also helps reduce response times. So with that, I will turn it over to Sergio Ramirez, who will give the report. Speaker 4: Thank you, Tom. Good evening, Vice Mayor and council members. As you know, Fire Station nine had located at 3917. Long Beach Boulevard had a was forced to close in 2019 due to environmental and health concerns that forced us to relocate the crew, equipment and apparatus. The staff and the apparatus had to be relocated to two nearby fire stations in the area fire station 16 and 13. Accommodations for staffing include temporary trailers that are not considered sufficient for long term habitation and compliance with health and safety and operation requirements. A permanent site development is likely to take place for another 2 to 3 years. Is that that. No, no, I'm sorry. I have a little bit more. We're having technical difficulties. Okay, but go ahead. Speaker 5: If if we have the item to display for the public, we would like to get that. Sure. Speaker 4: We have identified a temporary location at the former Boeing. Speaker 5: Fitness facility, which is located at 2019. Speaker 4: East Wardlow Road. As you recall, the Boeing sold the property, the former C-17. Speaker 5: Site, which included the Boeing. Speaker 4: Fitness facility to Goodman last year. The building is approximately 16,500 square feet and can accommodate the of the the temporary fire station. This will help reduce response time by about to approximate 2 minutes. In regards to proposed lease terms, we're going to be the city will be paying approximately $10,000 per month for about a three year period . This will allow this lease will allow us to activate the building. Speaker 5: For during the temporary. Speaker 4: Period while the Permian location is identified and secured. Speaker 3: And built. Speaker 4: As part of the lease, the city will pay the maintenance and improvements of the building. The total fiscal impact as mentioned for the for the the lease based on the 10,000 roughly $10,000 a month will translate to about $123,000. Utilities are anticipated. Speaker 3: About. Speaker 4: $43,000 per year. And we are anticipating a one time capital tenant improvement cost of about $200,000. Funding sources for this project will. Speaker 3: Be a mixture of measure. Speaker 4: Refunds, as well as the admission or temporary savings from the elimination of the trailers and some general fund. Annual operation. Budget savings. If approved this evening, we will immediately execute the temporary lease and move forward with tenant improvements over the next couple of months and target a moving date of October 1st. And with that now I complete my presentation. Thank you. Speaker 5: Thank you, Sergio. I did want to add one thing. Actually, our response times are looking at about a minute and a half for the engine in terms of an improvement to the response time and up to two and a half minutes for the rescue. And with that, we are available to answer questions. Speaker 4: Fine. Is there any public comment available? There is no public comment for this item. Speaker 0: Any comment about an error? I can go ahead and just I'll go. I know we had Councilman Austin and Councilmember Ringo that did the first and the second. Councilmember Austin, did you have any additional comments? Speaker 4: Yes. This is actually welcome news. To our community. I want to thank all of our staff for the focus, the commitment from Tom, the entire team, economic development, obviously our fire department, public works, everyone who had anything to do with moving us to this position. Obviously, this is not the optimal solution. We would love to be able to say that we have a permanent fire station, a fire station nine secured. That is still underway. We also have the money from air fly 20 to help us achieve that. I did have a couple of questions just to get some clarification and. I guess this is for the city manager. How soon will the tenant improvements be able to be completed and that this location can be opened? We have an estimated date. Speaker 5: Yes. So with there, with your approval, we would sign this lease agreement in July. We would do the tenant improvements immediately and have Goodman do those. And they're going to do those very quickly in August and September with a target moving date of October 1st. Speaker 4: Okay. That's very encouraging. So little over two months. And so I've also heard from several residents, and I just want to put it out there who would love to see Fire Station nine? Current Fire Station nine preserved and adaptively reuse. I know there's some current. There's apparently a drought. The air that we're currently studying in the former site along the boulevard probably. Speaker 2: And take your time. Speaker 4: By the council approved in the lease for Fire Station nine. Does that help to fill the temporary station? Does that help take off some of the urgency of having to take action at the former site? Speaker 5: Yes. So we had originally when we started this about a year ago, we were looking for a the fastest temporary site available. So that looked to be station nine at the time. We got, however, deeper into it and discovered we needed to do a full year. That air is just about done and ready to be released. However, we do expect that our common period to take some additional time. We know there's a high level of interest in the community and so this was a quicker building for us to be able to get into. We still want to finalize that air process, but and then the council will be able to make some decisions on what to do with that city asset. Speaker 4: I appreciate that. And and I think it's important to mention that this is not negotiations for a permanent site is is the search in negotiations for a permanent site is still ongoing. And then one final question time. I would just say, with the air still moving forward, is it correct that ultimately it will be up to the city council? What happens with the former fire station site? Speaker 5: Yes, that's correct. It will be a city asset and we'll have a lot of information from the air on the status of it, including also some of the challenges that that building has in terms of, you know, the damage in the mold. But it would be up to the city council, first in closed session and then an open session on how to what to do with that facility going forward. Speaker 4: Okay. Well, thank you for for clarifying that. Again, I want to thank the entire team, city team for all their work to do to help address our public safety response system. This temporary site, I believe, will help do that. Again, I want to thank Chief Espinal, especially for his dedication to help make this happen as well. And with that, I would just ask for my colleagues to support this. Thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you, customary, Ringo. Speaker 4: Thank you, Mary. And I want to thank Cosmo Rossett for his comments on this question. He addressed basically everything that I had in mind, especially when it came to pay life. And I'm very happy to see that there will be a continuation of service in that area, very much needed. And hopefully that the time, the response rates will stay as low as possible. Thank you very much. Speaker 0: Thank you Councilmember I'm seeing nobody else queued up customers and day house I know you had try to second the motion or did you have a comment. Speaker 2: Good. Thank you, Mayor. Speaker 0: Great. I just want to I just want to add I want to just concur with the council members. This is such an important project and just so important to have for the community. And I'm just really want to thank first both Councilmember Offset and Councilman Ranga. They've both been working on this issue incredibly hard and in the community. So I just want to thank them both for this and also the staff and the fire department. We want to make sure that obviously fire service all across the city, but also in this part of town, that people are well served and the people feel good about their access to the department. So just thank you for all the work. And with that, we do a roll call vote. Speaker 1: District one. I district to. On District three. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District four. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District five. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District six. I just put seven. Speaker 4: I. Speaker 1: District eight. Speaker 4: Hi. Speaker 1: District nine. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 1: Motion carries. Speaker 0: Right. Thank you. We are now moving on to the next item, which is going to be item number 18.

Contract

Recommendation to authorize City Manager, or designee, to execute any and all documents necessary for a Lease with GCC LONG BEACH, LLC (Landlord), and the City of Long Beach (Tenant), for the use of the premises at 2019 East Wardlow Road for the temporary location of Fire Station 9, for a period of three years; Increase appropriations in the General Fund Group in the Fire Department by $246,400; and Decrease appropriations in the Capital Project Fund Group in the Public Works Department by $246,400, to offset the transfer to the General Fund Group. (District 5)

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Speaker 1: Motion carries. Speaker 0: Thank you. Item 19, please. Speaker 1: Report from Development Services recommendation to find that the project is within the scope of the previously certified program, Environmental Impact Report and request City Attorney to prepare an ordinance amending Title 21 of the Long Beach Municipal Code to adopt a new citywide mandatory incentive based inclusionary housing program citywide. Speaker 2: It evening Mayor and Council. Speaker 0: Stated I'm going to make some just some generic comments and I'll turn over to you really quick. I just want to I want to open this up. This is a policy, obviously, that the staff and working on now for for many years with the community, actually this started with a lot of discussions from within members across the city about how to ensure that we continue affordable housing production in the city. There are a lot of challenges right now, we know, with folks needing access to affordable homes and and we have additional challenges with COVID that are causing new challenges around housing construction, how we get folks back to work, but also in at home, that same problem that I expect there's going to be a lot of discussion tonight about, about the policy. And certainly I think we're all open to seeing what's presented. Staff has put together, I think, a really great policy and starting point. And I think at the end of this, we're going to end up with with a great inclusionary housing policy for the city moving forward. I just want to thank staff for their work. And it's really it's it's really time for this policy to be in place. And with that, Miss Tatum, I'll turn over to you. Speaker 2: Thank you, Mayor. We appreciate that, that background. And I'd like to introduce our director of development services, Oscar Orsi, who will present the the team that will be making the presentation for tonight. Speaker 6: Thank you, Mayor. Members of the city council. I'm very delighted to bring this matter in front of you. As the mayor just indicated, we've been working many years to put this program together. This program began as a recommendation for the mayor's 29 recommendations. And with that, I want to introduce the team Patrick here and Christopher Koontz. Both will be presenting tonight's item. Thank you. Patrick. Speaker 8: Thank you, Oscar. An honorable mayor and city council. Tonight, we're here to present a proposed framework for an inclusionary housing policy and to seek approval to prepare an inclusionary housing ordinance. I wanted to point out that we have Cathy Head, managing principal of Kaiser Marston and Associates, here with us tonight to help answer questions. The zoning code includes an existing voluntary inclusionary housing program to create affordable housing. The program offers a density bonus to encourage participation and an option to pay in and Luthi in place of providing the affordable housing units. The program has never been used. The City Council has directed staff to develop an inclusionary housing policy, and staff recommends replacing the existing voluntary program with a new inclusionary housing program. We engage Lazard Development Consultants and Kiser Marston Associates to assist with this effort. The preparation of an economic analysis is a key component of the development of an inclusionary housing policy. Kaiser Marston prepared an economic analysis to analyze the feasibility of an inclusionary housing policy. It assesses the impacts on development created by the imposition of inclusionary housing requirements, determines the feasibility of a program in the Long Beach housing market and estimates supportable in Lucy amounts. The analysis also provides information on other programs in California, reviews relevant state law and discusses state density bonus incentives to present recommendations for a policy. Over 170 jurisdictions in California have an inclusionary housing program. Recent state law has enabled cities to adopt inclusionary housing policies, provided that they do not act as a constraint to development or deprive a property owner of a fair and reasonable return. And inclusionary housing program must balance the interests of property owners and developers against the public benefit created by the production of affordable housing units. We included here a 2020 income chart for your information, so that you will know what what the incomes equate to when we're talking about incomes. The economic analysis determined the maximum supportable inclusionary percentages for single and mixed income alternatives shown here. The inclusionary percentages presented percentages for rental. Single income alternatives are 11% for 100%. Very low income. 12% for 100% low income. And 19% for 100% moderate income only the moderate income alternative was tested for ownership housing. The maximum supportable in lieu fee is calculated in the economic analysis are shown here. They range from 223000 to 383000 per unit for rental units and 270,400 for ownership units. State housing element law requires adequately zoned land to accommodate a share of the region's projected housing needs, or what we call arena for the planning period. The arena is divided by income category. The top chart shows the city's current allocation and production progress through 2019. As you can see, very few moderate income units have been produced. The 28 that were produced were negotiated through the sale of successor agency owned sites, and the bottom chart shows the expected range of over 26,000 units for the next planning period. And we're working on the housing element for that planning period now. The the housing elements renamed requirements will increase the city's production requirements substantially, as you saw from that last chart of 26 over 26,000 units. In terms of meeting current Rina goals, staff expects the city to do well in the above moderate category and fairly well in the very low income category. But we will fall short in the moderate income and low income categories. And inclusionary policy is critical to addressing the next housing element requirements. There are currently five subsidized, affordable housing projects under construction or recently completed. Those are shown here. These projects all contain a combination of federal, state and county funding, and these funding programs heavily target the inclusion of extremely low and very low income units. As a result, 295 or more than two thirds of these 439 affordable units are set aside for very low and extremely low income households. There is no funding for moderate income units. And I'm going to hand it over to Christopher at this point. Thank you. Speaker 9: Thank you, Patrick. So with that background, I'm going to go over the detailed proposal that was first developed by staff. And then our planning commission spent a good amount of time at multiple meetings to refine that policy based on public input. It's based on submarket designations. So that's really where is development occurring and not occurring today. A differentiation between mandatory and triggered requirements, legally required alternative means of compliance and then the general program requirements. This map is a map of two different sub areas that have two different requirements. So inclusionary does or will exist and be required in both locations, but there's different triggers. So area one, which is broken down as one and one B could be called downtown and midtown, but it could also be described as those areas where development is occurring today. The vast majority, over 90% of all the units built in the city over the last ten years are in this area. One area two has a different trigger related to legislative action, such as zone changes and general plan amendments that would trigger the inclusionary requirements. So I just talked about the downtown plan area and Midtown Plan area. Those requirements would be triggered on all projects over ten units. Some have asked why the other requirement does not apply to less than ten units. There's two critical reasons those very small projects, one through nine units, have much higher fixed cost and in a nutshell are less profitable, particularly on a per unit basis. If we were to include those types of projects in our analysis, they are high cost of those projects would drag down the total amount of inclusionary that we're able to impose. Also, those projects serve an important purpose but are extremely rare in terms of the type of projects produce. All of these requirements will take effect on January 1st of next calendar year. I think there's one inconsistency in your written packet that references October, but we would synchronize all the requirements to trigger on January 1st. Area. Two is the remainder of the city. It will be triggered on applications for zone changes, plan amendments and exceptions. It would also take effect on January 1st. We are working on a separate but parallel track on an enhanced density bonus program, which is going to be delighted for the first time at our Planning Commission on Thursday . All of those efforts will come together on January 1st. So this gives you an idea of where staff started and we presented Ops and A, B and C to the Planning Commission and they made changes to that which are on the next slide. What was adopted by the Planning Commission, based on their analysis and the public testimony, was a inclusionary requirement that 12% of units in any project would be affordable, and within that subset of affordable units, 25% would be very low, 25% will be low and 50% would be moderate. The Planning Commission made these changes in specific response to testimony and their own analysis for the need to address all three income levels in the adopted policy. Which brings us to today. What in your report is referenced as option B? Which staffs the recommended option is what was approved by the Planning Commission. We have also presented other options. If the Council wish to go in a different policy direction, that may emphasize different income levels differently. There is a different amount of subsidy required for a very low income unit versus a low income unit versus a moderate income unit. And if you think the sum of all of that subsidy, we can't exceed that sweet spot or that bubble because that would make development not feasible at all. And any percentage of zero is zero, as we all remember, from high school math. So what we're trying to do is keep the development and investment in the city going, but to have a public benefit of creating those affordable units. So again, this is just a staff recommendation which says that 12% of rental housing units would be affordable and that would be split among the three income levels at a 25, 2550 split and ownership because of the nuance of ownership projects. That would be a 10% requirement and that would be at the moderate level. Faison is an important component of any inclusionary policy. So while Inclusionary has been a discussion in the city since at least 2012, we're going from having no inclusionary policy at all to a fairly robust one which has presented to you today. That requires the market time to adjust. That adjustment happens both in the product that they are delivering, their expectation of cost and profits, as well as changes that will occur in land values as land is bought and sold. For that reason, there's a five year phase in recommended for you, and we would highly recommend that you stick to the phased in schedule. There are a number of alternative means of compliance. I'm not going to spend time on this other than to tell you that these are legally required but not anticipated to be used. And our focus is on having the housing built and included within the projects that come forward, and that is the goal. We heard loud and clear from our partners in the development community as well as from the public, and an earful from our planning commission that they inclusionary policy is the stick, but we also need carrots. So we are looking at a number of incentives that would go along with this policy. So that includes existing fee exemptions for for low income units in terms of their impact fees. It includes providing priority plan services without any expediting cost. And providing projects that have robust affordability levels would be given priority entitlement processing. And on a separate but parallel path, we are updating the city's density bonus ordinance and that would all come together on January 1st, as we discussed. This is a situation that has not occurred, but we have thought out all of the possibilities. So in terms of condominium conversions there, that is dealt with in this ordinance and we can go into detail later if there's a council question on that. Density bonus law does apply to all projects in California, so that would include projects that are built pursuant to this ordinance. So in addition to requiring the affordable units, the developer, if they include enough affordable units, would be eligible for incentives under state law. And as I mentioned previously, the city recognizes the need to update our local ordinance, and that effort is ongoing. In case you're wondering, the logistics of how this works, a project will come along. Let's say it's a 100 unit project. 12 of those units would be required to be affordable at various different rates. They would record a covenant against the title. Their covenant would run for 55 years for rental units, for ownership units. It would run for 45 years. This is consistent with best practices up and down the state. We do monitor each and every covenant in the city. They pay a small fee to cover that monitoring and any fees that we're paid, either because the project was small enough to pay fees or because of a fractional unit would be accumulated in the inclusionary housing fund , which would be used in concert with other funds to fund 100% affordable projects through a competitive process. As currently drafted, this program will be reviewed in year three and presented to the Planning Commission, and then the entire program will be reevaluated at year five and presented to this Council. We will be adopting a number of administrative procedures that will exist within Emanuel because they're not required to exist in the municipal code itself. This gives you just the recent history. This project has included community engagement and that took part between December of 2018 and our Planning Commission hearing in February of 2020. So I just want to provide counsel some closing comments and then we are glad to answer your questions and within reason make any adjustments to the program. We really do need your clear direction tonight so that we can go back and be doing the work with legal counsel to do the drafting of the ordinance itself. That all occur over the next two months while you're in your budget deliberations. And once you've adopted a budget, we would come back with the ordinance itself for first and second reading. We believe this policy has broad support from housing advocacy groups and residents who have encouraged the city to require onsite production, which is what this ordinance does. There has been a desire for this policy to go further, for this policy to have higher percentages or to apply more broadly within the city. That's certainly an opportunity for the city over time, but we feel that it strikes the correct balance based on that economic analysis for this moment in time for the city's first inclusionary policy. If we strike a policy that is too aggressive, will actually end up with less development, including fewer affordable units. The development community expressed a desire for a flexible, voluntary approach. So in the end, whether you were a housing advocacy organization or representing developers, you'd not get everything you wanted in this policy. But what this policy does reflect is everyone's input and a sweet spot between those extremes that is workable for the city. This project's not subject to secure. The development that will occur is consistent with the land use element that was adopted by the city. And with that, we're excited to answer your questions. And again, what we're here for today, the recommendation is to give staff and the city attorneys specific direction about what should go in this ordinance that we would return to with those amendments to the municipal code. Speaker 0: Great. Thank you very much, Mr. Koontz, and thank you to the staff for all the work on this. We have a motion by Councilmember Pierson, a second by customers and day house customer piercing is going to make some some comments but then wants to go to public comment first. Customer Pierce. Speaker 2: Thank you here. Thank you, staff. I wanted to make some brief comments before the community has an opportunity to speak and then bring it back so that we can ask some questions of staff. You know, the staff just mentioned this would be our very first inclusionary policy, which I think we long many of us have long waited for. In 2009, we advocated for an inclusionary policy in our downtown plan. We know that cities like Irvine, Los Angeles, Seattle's and other have an inclusionary policy that allow for our communities to be diverse and to thrive alongside each other. We're in a moment when we've spent months talking about how black lives matter and the fact continues to be repeated. The 63% of black women are rent burdened. We have a new study that came out from USC that expects our homeless numbers to rise, and this COVID situation has continuing to get worse. We know that there's fear from many of a recession, and we also know that there's fear of many of homelessness. And so I wanted to make comments tonight. I know that this is a citywide policy. I know there's impacts directly for the downtown and surrounding areas, but really a comment of inclusion and dialog. I hope that we can work together as a council to meet the needs of our entire city. I know that my district is 70 80% area too, even though I do have the downtown. And so I definitely want to work together to get to an agreement that brings all of our residents to a place where they can have affordable and safe housing. So with that, I'd also like to just say that we received several letters from the Dolby Iam, CMA and others asking for us to be thoughtful about how we're including those at the bottom end of the income bracket. So with that, I look forward to hearing from community members and then bringing about. Thank you. Speaker 0: Madam Clerk, why don't we go ahead and do the public comment then? Speaker 4: First we have Elsa tongue. Your state. Your time starts now. Speaker 2: Let's try to start my time now. Thank you. Good evening, Mayor and council members. My name is Ailsa Chang from Long Beach Forward. And I'd like to start by asking you all, what kind of city do you want? Do we want for the future? Do we want integration or segregation? Inclusion or exclusion? Homes or homelessness? In this moment of racial reconciliation and housing catastrophe, I hope we all share the same vision. What that means in terms of tonight's item is that council must adopt a citywide mandatory inclusionary policy with the same triggers that require new development in every corner of the city to build or contribute to the supply of affordable housing. The map and attachment e is redlining 2.0. That not only does not help to desegregate housing, but also exempts the vast majority of the city because the policy triggers are vastly unequal to ensure no displacement. The policy must institute a no net loss requirements for each and every project, which means that new developments must replace on a 1 to 1 basis existing units that are affordable to lower income folks. So if you have a 100 unit building and all 100 units are occupied by lower income folks, do you want to redevelop this building? You have to preserve 100 units of affordability, not just the 11 or 12 units under the inclusionary requirement. Finally, 100% very low income targeting. The fact of the matter is very low income folks have three times. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speaker is Jan Victor Anderson. Speaker 3: Your time starts now. Speaker 4: Honorable council member is my name is Jan Victor, an organizer with East Yard. I work with residents across the nine districts and an overwhelming majority of our residents are renters. I stand with the Housing Justice Coalition letter submitted and would like to highlight these three points. We need to adopt a citywide mandatory inclusionary housing to require affordable housing and new developments. As someone who immigrated to the United States and first settled in Long Beach 27 years ago, we need to give opportunities for long time residents and new residents who want to call this city home, not just in the downtown and midtown area , too. We need to ensure no more displacement with a no net loss requirement for each project. And three, the city needs to target all rental inclusionary units to very low income families. My aunt, her partner and son have lived in Long Beach for 30 plus years. She's a renter and has never been able to buy a home. The rent for the small apartment that is one bedroom is 1150 with her Social Security income. They are barely able to make rent. She's one of many Filipinos and other black PRC residents that can barely make income to support the multiple people in their household rent to the huge burden. Owning a home doesn't seem like a possibility. If you're going to make an inclusionary housing policy for residents that are committed to living in this great city, for people, whether they are born in the US or integrated like me, who want to call this city home, a better inclusionary housing policy needs to be made. Please make the changes articulated in the Housing Justice Coalition letter. Don't move forward with a policy that falls short by thousands of residents that want to continue to be part of the community. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Next, we have Susan Brown. Speaker 2: Good evening. My name is Suzanne Brown and I'm a senior attorney with the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles in our Long Beach office. In light of covid's disproportionate impact on black residents and the city's reconciliation process, equity should be at the forefront of inclusionary housing policy decisions being made this evening. The city should target 11% of new rental units to very low income households who earn $56,000 a year. These are Long Beach working families who are struggling in our rental market. This also aligns with arena numbers, which state that we need over 7100 very low income units to meet our existing housing needs. This is almost double the amount of our low and moderate income Rita numbers, which are at 4000. Anything less than 11%, very low income rentals is not an equitable policy to address the housing needs of moderate income households. The city should target 10% of new ownership projects to moderate income families earning up to $93,000 a year. This approach is a fair compromise and equitable because it addresses both the needs of residents struggling in our rental market, as well as residents struggling to purchase a home. Thank you for your consideration of our comments. Speaker 3: Thank you. Your next speaker is Victor Sanchez. Your time starts now. Speaker 4: Honorable Mayor and City Council. My name is Victor Sanchez, the director of the Long Beach Coalition for Good Jobs in a Healthy Community. I'm asking that you think about the laid off workers tonight with respect to this item. The one to financial security have been destroyed by this pandemic, the ones who have to rebuild their livelihoods and only hope to be able to afford to stay in the city they have called home for generations. These are your hotel, retail and other critical service sector jobs that have made Long Beach what it is. They need an inclusionary housing policy not just because it's the right thing to do, but because they should be able to afford rebuilding their livelihoods in the city they call home. That's only possible if we center the challenges of the most vulnerable in this item. Think about the very low income working families and consider these amendments. Once the inclusionary requirement for rental units should be 11% and 10% for ownership units. This was recommended as part of the original study and is not only reasonable but balanced to include no net loss and net gain requirements for all development in all submarkets. We want addition, not subtraction, especially given Long Beach's greener goals. Three. Remove the phased in approach. Exempt projects that have entitlements at the onset of this policy. But don't press pause unilaterally when the need to build as many affordable units is too great. And lastly, make this a citywide policy to directly combat the legacy of redlining in this city. New development across the city must be required to build or add to the supply of affordable housing so we don't repeat our history of mistakes. Remember the workers and please meet this moment by passing this policy with the aforementioned amendments. Thank you. Next we have Dave Shukla. Your time starts now. Hello. Dave Chappelle, third district. I'd like to speak now in support of the item, but in support of the Housing Justice Coalition letter. Three points. We've already heard about them. But very quickly, we definitely need income for local residents at 11% and 10% to moderate income families. Second point. But we definitely need a no net loss requirement to replace affordable housing 1 to 1 or every project. And then third, remove the phased in approach, make it apply to the whole city and in specific to my case. I grew up in the third in a really nice neighborhood. My parents, after renting for more than ten years, grateful to buy a house that we've lived in for the past 20 years. That was only possible because Margaret Brown, the first black college counselor in the city at me City College in the late fifties and early sixties, fought the FHA redlining in our neighborhood across the street from Cal State, Long Beach and nice neighborhood. And for years paid our mortgage and five vicious covenant. Racially restrictive language and culture. And I would like to see a fourth option at it to remove these absolutely unenforceable legal restrictions. Racial restrictions on who can live where. Because that didn't work for my family. I turned out fine. I went to the best schools. I'm here helping out my town, like should work for everyone. Our goal should be to keep people here. That should be our goal. First and foremost. Those most fun. Thank you. Our next speaker is Jordan Win. Your time starts now. Hi there. Jordan Winn, second district. I would like to cover all of the points that everybody has previously addressed. First and foremost, we don't need a phase timeline. We've been working on this in 2012, as was remarked, to waste another five years until this action take full effect is absurd. We need to make sure that in lieu fees match dollar for dollar the actual market cost of the units that are being sacrificed on the ground so that we are not losing out on the money that we need to actually create affordable housing. We need to make sure that this inclusionary housing policy, the 12%, applies citywide. And more importantly than that, we need to make sure that our focus on these rental units, on these affordable developments, is deeply affordable for very low and extremely low income earners. When we're talking about moderate income, we're talking about families that earn at least $90,000 a year in the median. That kind of income should be focused towards ownership. We should be trying to move families that are earning that much towards home ownership, towards building wealth, instead of focusing our efforts on creating more rental units for them to waste their money on landlords, especially corporate landlords, are likely going to be affected by the policy. We need to bring these people into homes that they own. And save the rental units for those who are struggling in our city right now. There are over 60,000 individuals who are paying 90% of their rent to their housing right now. And that number is going to go up way more after COVID 19 is over. It's going up right now as we as we sit here. So we need to make sure that our units are dedicated to very low and extremely low. Speaker 3: Thank you. The next speaker is and Cantrell. Your time starts now. Speaker 2: Hello. Hello. Can you hear me? Speaker 4: Yes. Hello. Your time started. Speaker 2: I'm sorry. I'm concerned about the recommendation that this project is within the scope of the previously certified E.R.. Speaker 4: I do. Speaker 2: Not think that that is the. Speaker 4: Case. Speaker 2: Low cost housing. Speaker 4: Has very. Speaker 2: Different height requirements than those in the elderly. A document in the staff report indicates that to be economically feasible for a developer, it will be necessary to build a 185 units per acre. What height building does this require? And what about added traffic to residential neighborhoods with the added number of people? Air quality schools. Not only an amended E.R., but more public. Speaker 4: Outreach is needed. Before you approve these changes. Speaker 2: I'm not opposed to low income housing being a part of my neighborhood. Speaker 4: If there are few. Speaker 2: Units in a building and the building locations are spread out, the building is. Speaker 4: Constructed in. Speaker 2: Accordance with the height and density that were defined in the Louis. Speaker 4: Environmental reviews are conducted. Speaker 2: And the public has an. Speaker 4: Opportunity to comment in the. Speaker 2: Planning phase. Staff indicates there was a notice of this hearing published in the DG in May and written notices were sent to all city libraries. May I remind you that many libraries, many citizens do not read the press telegram and that libraries. Speaker 4: Have been closed since March. Thank you. Our next speaker is Robert Fox. Your time starts now. Hello? Can you hear me? Hello? Yes, we can hear you. Oh, good. Thank you. That's a little confusing here. My first time. I have to echo a lot of what people have talked about. I totally support the no net loss issue here. I've been doing the math and the section one A and one B. These are the areas where we have already the most affordable housing in Long Beach. So I'm concerned about the new fees and other projects like Park Improvement, etc., that they can developer can use in order not to provide the low income housing. Low income housing is 5050 $6,000 a year. Very, very low income is $34,000 a year. If you're talking moderate income housing, that's about 85 to $90000 a year. And you could buy a $500,000 condo with that kind of a salary. So I'm concerned here about displacement more than anything else. If we're going to build 180 units, they'll take a block normally on a block in midtown. You have over 150 people living in moderate to low income housing. So where can they get rid of 180 people? And we're going to produce 22 units inclusive of moderate income. Out of those 22 units, only five are very, very low income and five are low income. So there is going to be an exodus of people who are already suffering now having no place to go. I don't like that. And the and the cost factoring on this is pretty disturbing. Thank you. Our next speaker is Benita Shah Malone. Your time starts now. Speaker 2: Thank you. It is my understanding. Thank you, first of all, for hearing from us at District four. We want to thank Mayor Garcia and our wonderful councilman, Darrell Supernova. We are concerned that under item 19 would allow developers to get density bonuses to build low income housing in our city, including areas regarded largely residential. The density bonuses could increase height with more smaller units. No parking guarantee. And I have to echoed the sentiments of our earlier caller that shared that our neighborhood is extremely. Speaker 4: Concerned that there was really no public. Speaker 2: Input. We as a community would like to have. Speaker 4: Public. Speaker 2: Input on this matter because we are concerned. We are concerned about the traffic, the density. We all agree that we definitely do need more low income and low, low income and moderate income housing in Long Beach. But where and how is the question? And so we would like to be included in on that discussion. Because of the pandemic and many places being closed, we have not had the opportunity to have input and we would like to ask that this item be put off until there is more community input. Thank you. Speaker 4: Our next speaker is Clark carelessly. Your time starts now. Speaker 2: Hi. This is calling. Speaker 4: Leave this district. Speaker 2: Although I do not object to adding low income housing in our city or in my neighborhood. I do urge you to vote no on this because of how it is structured and also because there are changes to definitions under. Speaker 4: Agenda. Speaker 2: Item. I think it's 26 that affect the land use plan and will greatly change. Speaker 4: All the plans. Speaker 2: My objections are as follows. Zone one and Zone two idea should be removed. It contradicts the Everyone Home policy. Speaker 4: That. Speaker 2: Says that homeless facilities. Speaker 4: Should be built. Speaker 2: Across the. Speaker 4: City. Speaker 2: Your document excludes downtown and midtown from low income housing installations going forward. Downtown has been this has already displaced the low income population and has installed high end luxury housing. It is considered to be gentrified. We would be rewarding bad behavior by excluding the downtown area from an issue that requires our united efforts. If the term is inclusion, let's include downtown and let's look back at no net loss. We have lost a lot of our low income housing through what downtown has been up to. Do's and don'ts. There are laws such as AB 1763 that encourage large development by providing height and density bonuses if a developer will commit to 100% affordable housing. As I understand it, large tracts like the Kmart area in the South could obtain a density bonus and have three stories to become a five story or more facility. Speaker 5: Thank you. Our last speaker is Mike Merchant. In your time starts now. Speaker 4: Good evening, mayor and council members. As you all know, I've represented multiple developers over the past ten years and Long Beach. I've only seen two market rate projects outside of districts one, two and six, and that was in five and eight over the past, probably about past five, five or ten years. The reason why developers are not building in those districts three, four or five and the east side of Long Beach is because the cost of the land, the cost of construction, the fees associated with it makes it extremely difficult to do market rate housing and pretty much impossible to do. Low income and moderate moderate housing. So the council's looking for more low income, moderate income housing. They need to take that into account. The cost of the land. The developers have to focus on that. The developers focus currently today on districts one, two and six due to the old housing stock in our city, and that will continue . So I just want to let you know that my clients support staff's recommendations. Thank you for your time. Thank you. That concludes. We'll be coming. Speaker 0: Back. We're going to go back to the council and I'm going to start with make of the motion councilor of yours. Speaker 2: Thank you, Mayor, and thank you to all the community members that spoke today and sent us public comments as well. In 1/2. I think as I as I mentioned, I have some questions for staff. I asked for the PowerPoint to be sent, but I haven't seen it yet. So I'm going to ask that staff go back to the slide that had the amendments. Speaker 4: Yeah. Speaker 9: We could have the PowerPoint back. We'll do that. Speaker 2: You know. And while we get that up, I think, you know, I definitely agree with a lot of the comments that I that I heard tonight recognize that we've done a lot in the downtown because we did maybe our housing stock is different. The property values are different. And whatever we can do to make sure that. That this policy is a policy that affects us citywide, even considering that there are different triggers. So I know that there was two different numbers that were out that I've seen. So I have in front of me a very low income army of 56,000. But what you have here. So we do have the same numbers. 56. Very low. 67. Sorry. Low income, 67. Very low of 56. So the. I know Christopher the. That we had a little bit of conversation about this. So you're confirming that the low income is not 90,000, that it's 67,000. Speaker 9: Correct. So low income in this report was defined as 60% of AM I. It is described different ways and different reporting, including up to 80% of AMI. But AMI is about $77,000. So whether it's at 60% or 80%, it's going to be less than that. And my own number of 77. So in our use of 60% in a four person household, low income is an income of 67,560. There's an HD publication on the Internet floating around that has a typo of the hundreds of statistics in the chart. The one that is incorrect is the four person low income in Los Angeles County. I wish that were not true because that number seems to have been repeated in a number of documents that are available online. But these are the accurate numbers at this point in time, and they were the basis of our study. But these numbers change every year. We get them from a CD. And they would be adjusted in the program on an annual basis. Speaker 2: Okay. So one more question about data, and I wouldn't so hard about these numbers, but if we're going to be all of us tonight that are looking at how to adjust, the percentage needs to all be based on the same information. So the list that I have and possibly it's from the data that you're talking about, has that very low income bracket as 31 to 50% of am I. And that low income is 51 to 80%. And so that 90,000 is the 80%, not 60%. It's the high end. Speaker 9: But but again, it's still an incorrect number because area median income in Los Angeles County is about 77 to $77000. So 80% of 77,000 would have to be less than 77,000. So obviously, it's not going to be 90,000 number. And we use the midpoint and I'm going to ask Kathy from KMA to explain why we use the midpoint rather than the range. Speaker 2: And the midpoint on all of the brackets. Right. I mean. Speaker 9: That's that's correct. So if we could have just one moment. Kathy heard from Kaiser Marson, our consultant is going to provide you some additional information. Speaker 2: Good evening, council members and Mayor. I'm not going to belabor this point, but it is a very strange circumstance that HK actually ends up with a low income that is higher than the median. This is this started in 2002. And what it relates to is if you look at the chart, if you look at the OECD chart online, you'll see the very low income line. If you take that and multiply. Speaker 1: It by two. Speaker 2: Then you'll get what. Speaker 1: They call for the. Speaker 2: Purposes of then calculating low income. They call that the median, and then they take 80% of that. The problem is, is that the low income, which is actually numbers produced by HUD, very low and lower, produced by had because of situations having to do with Section two, Section eight program. It is now actually 112% of the median. So what the city has done here on the chart and in their policy is they've actually used a mathematical number of what the actual median is. And then and then 60% of that, that's absolutely appropriate. And in in fact, it's the way affordable housing cost is calculated. And so it's very confusing. I can spend a long time on it if you want. But the numbers for how you would calculate rent are the numbers that they have on the chart here. Okay. That is helpful. And I needed to show that we are clear on that because I wonder if we thought there was a difference of 2000 and between low income and moderate that would change what our conversation was moving forward. So I appreciate that clarity. Let me go back to my questions. And so understanding the AMA numbers that we have, looking at the sky numbers that are current, I show that are skog numbers, very low income is 7000, roughly low income 4000 low and moderate 4000 is that. What you reported on. Speaker 9: So that's for our next round of arena. But that does sound roughly correct from a percentage standpoint. If we exclude the market rate units and are looking just at the income restricted units, it's 47%, very low, 26% low and 27% moderate. Speaker 2: Thank you for that. And looking at the numbers that we've developed over time, I see the difference in those and in appreciate that you brought up the five projects and that we've got a 144 loan developed and 129 very low developed. When we talk about the percentages, your report shows that we could go as high as 11% for very low income households and submarket. One being able to do that is something that I personally would would love to be able to get to. It is my goal to get as close to 11 or 12% in very low income as possible. And that reason is for the reasons I mentioned above previously, which is that we have a homeless crisis that's already here and on the cusp of getting worse. We know that we have a great need for this population and that there needs to be additional resources for this. And so when we're looking at the percentages, if we wanted to get to 10% of very low income, but I understand there might be other conversations about moderate, what is your recommendation staff to be able to get to as opposed to 10% very low income. Speaker 9: So the the policy consideration about that mix is for council to decide. You know, we have provided some options and the planning commission considered this and has provided their input to you. If you're solving specifically for maximizing very low income units, there is a scenario by which we have a 12% inclusionary requirement that is made up of 80% of those units being very low income and 20% of those units being moderate income. So that's one option that's available to the council, among others, in addition to the options that are outlined in your staff report. Speaker 2: So I know some of our my constituents have asked this question. When you say 12%, you're really talking about 10%, very low and 2% moderate of the whole process. Speaker 9: Sort of it gets tricky because of the size of the denominator, but we start with the whole project. So a project has 100 units if there's a 12% inclusionary requirement. 12 of those units are going to be affordable. And then we get into what level of affordability among those 12 units, and 80% of them would be very low and 20% of them would be moderate. So because of the different denominators, I think it actually comes out to 9.6% and 2.4%. But if around then your number of 10% is correct. Speaker 2: Yeah. Just try to make sure it's easy for for easy as possible for everyday folks to do. Think about what this looks like in real time. I would like to ask about a no net loft policy. It was brought up by several people. It's something that I fully support. Is that something that we could include alongside passing this tonight, or is that something we should include in the actual inclusionary policy? Speaker 9: So council member from the stop table. The city is already subject to knowing that loss. If it's the desire of the Council to enumerate or elicit that in our municipal code, we'd be glad to do that. We'd work with Mike and Charlie to make that happen from the legal side. It wouldn't necessarily go in the exact same section of the municipal code as this policy, because it would apply to the development of projects, sort of with or without this inclusionary policy. So I think it's going to go in different sections of the code. But if if that's a part of the council's motion tonight, we'd be glad to work with city attorney to make sure it's included. Speaker 2: Great. Thank you for that. And I saw that when we talk about the in lieu fees that we talk about an in loofah account or fund. Is there a reason why we're not putting that into the housing trust fund? Or can you legally talk about the difference between those funds and where those funds will be used? Councilman, this is Linda Tatum. And essentially the funds that are generated by this program would be established in a separate account. However, both of the current housing fund and this fund, would you be used fundamentally for the exact same purpose, which is leveraging any other outside funding sources for the purpose of constructing affordable units? So we say creating a fund, but it would be used in the same way that the city's current affordable housing funds are used. Okay. There's not a reason for just making it. Putting it into that background and not really. I mean, it's it's it can be done either way. Okay. I'm not particular. I just I know we've talked for ten years plus about having a housing trust fund with no money in it. And wouldn't it be great to stop talking about that and put money into it? Okay, I'll continue on my mind. I'm almost done, guys. I really appreciate everybody's patience with me today. For Area two, as I mentioned earlier, the city of my district is an area to when we did the land use element. It was critical for me to be able to increase density on areas like Sylvan Street so that we would be able to have an inclusionary policy that would really address that corridor's dire needs right now. I do have two developments on the street currently that people are looking at that aren't. I think one of them's entitled and one of them isn't. Can you walk through how this policy, if past as it is today, would affect my seventh and Redondo corridor? Speaker 9: Sure. Councilmember So in both of those scenarios that you're talking about and within Area two, those projects require zone changes. So the requirements of the inclusionary that is in front of you would apply to those projects. So there's two different scenarios that are important to understanding Area two. The most common is the land use element has changed, but the city has not changed the underlying zoning. So that's going to be the case on your seventh street property for something on Redondo. They need a legislative action from the city and that legislative action would trigger the inclusionary requirements at the same rates and same requirements that apply within Area one. There's a more narrow circumstance where the city has changed the zoning and the general plan amendment and all that project applicant needs is to obtain what's called their site plan review and build their project. Under that more narrow circumstance, the requirement would not apply for inclusionary at this time. This will be evaluated annually and at such a point as there are sufficient activity outside of downtown, the policy can be updated to eliminate the difference between Area one and Area two. But to go back to sort of the zoomed outlook, the whole reason that we have an area one in an area two is because there is a statistically insignificant, very little development in area two and we have to make a finding and present what the impact of this policy would be on development. If there's not development to speak up to start with, it's very hard, actually impossible to show that the inclusionary policy would not further diminish that development. I think we've worked cooperatively with this council to pass the land use element to do a good amount of planning, and I think we have some exciting projects coming up in actually Council District eight, which I know it's not your district, but I think over the coming year, two years, we will see a good increase in the activity in what's known as Area two and that would provide a future council the flexibility to revisit the differentiation between the two. Speaker 2: Okay. And I think that I hear I hear that comment, and I also recognize that we've done a lot of work to get development in downtown, and that's why we have such changes there. You mentioned in the plan and you mentioned in your presentation the density bonus conversation that's going to be coming up our. On Thursday can if the density conversation happens, what are some like for Seventh Street for the ones that don't have entitlements yet or might not need to do a zone change or density bonus would still pertain to them because it's citywide outside of the inclusionary policy. That's correct. Speaker 9: Correct. So there's a state density bonus law that applies in all of Long Beach and in all of every city and county in California. Those bonuses allow for up to 35% additional density and allow a developer to request up to three incentives. An incentive could be a slightly reduced setback in some circumstances additional height. It could be an adjustment to a minimum balcony size. But it's it's fairly narrow. But it is the incentive program that exists. It's not being used to the degree that we would like it to be used. Today, in the 29 recommendations, mayors 29 recommendations, there was discussion of increasing the utilization of density, bonus and marketing. That program to that end were updating the city's own ordinance and it will have additional incentive. So you would have to put in more affordable housing, but you also would be eligible to get more than a 35% bonus . You'd be eligible to get more than three incentives. We have to work through all of those details with the Planning Commission before we bring that back to this city council in the fall, other cities such as Los Angeles and Oakland, you may be familiar with Los Angeles. A program called Tier C or Transit Oriented Communities, has been extremely successful in expanding development, including in areas where they weren't seeing development and producing a large number of affordable units as a result. So we have similar aims and that work is ongoing on a on a separate parallel path. Speaker 2: Thank you for that. And my my last question is about the phase in I know that some people on council, it might be their end all die on a situation. Others might want it to happen right away. I think I recognize that in the next year we probably are not going to see a lot of development, but that I also recognize we're going to have a lot of need. And so I appreciate the way that this inclusionary would help clear the path to make sure that permits are going faster, that we can fast track this without additional costs. What would happen if we. If we if we shorten the timeline from what do you have now five years. Speaker 9: It's a four year phase and as per year. Speaker 2: For your two or three year. Speaker 9: All right. It's it's hard to evaluate exactly what a change from 4 to 3 would do. It would increase the amount of what we call market shock, which is during the first year after the policy. That's just projects can't happen. Transactions can't happen because the market has not been given enough time to adjust. I can tell you in the extreme, if we had no transition whatsoever, so if we went from zero inclusionary requirement overnight to a 12% requirement, what happens in that scenario is that you have some period of time where you have no development because existing property owners have certain expectations for either the development of that property or the sale of that property. And all of those expectations change with the inclusionary policy. And it takes sellers time to make peace with the reduced potential sales price of their property. And actually, development can't happen until the transaction occurs because you have to, in a way, reset the underlying land cost so we can go into more detail if if the full council would like to. It's hard for me to say that exactly what would happen in that three years instead of four years. But it is highly critical that there be a transition. We felt that four years was appropriate. The Planning Commission thought that it was appropriate. But it's up to it's up to the council to make that final decision. Speaker 2: Understood. Okay. I think that that is the majority of my questions. I, you know, closing remarks before I make my motion. I, I do think that the downtown and midtown, which covers the first district, the second District, the sixth District, and a sliver of the seventh could burden a lot more of the lower income housing. I don't think that it's redlining, but I think that it could definitely exasperate some situations and understanding that if we have lower density buildings in other areas, maybe it's a four story building that has inclusionary, but that's still a lot of great opportunity. And so I'm going to make my motion, but I really want to make it so that we can have a point of conversation for the entire council. I look forward to hearing from my council colleagues. I hope that they take this comment with genuine partnership, and so I move to amend the stock recommendations as follows. Target inclusionary rental units at 11% of very low income and submarket one. Add no net loss requirement just so that developers must replace any units that are occupied by affordable or lower income households. I'm okay with that being along the same track. However, staff sees that that should be done and I'm open to other council conversations on that. Apply the inclusionary housing requirement. Actually, I'm not going to. Not going to do that once based on staff reports and increase the in lieu fees so that they are set at the economic equivalent of providing affordable units on site. This is extremely important. I want to make sure that we are not incentivizing people paying a fee instead of developing the units that they need to develop. Remove offsite compliance is a mean of providing units. Require affordability covenants for both rental and ownership units to be set at 55 years or the life of the project, whichever is longer. And. That is my my current motion. I leave the rest to hear from my my council colleagues as it pertains to the rest of area too. And I might have some additional changes as we go on. So I look forward to the dialog. Speaker 0: Hours in day out of the second. Speaker 2: You, Mayor, and thank you very much, Councilwoman Pierce. And it has been a long time in coming, so thank you. First of all, I would just like to also thank the staff who have been working for a very, very long time and have been trying to bring something to us to the council. I know that inclusionary housing was a topic of conversation for a very, very long time. So I'm happy to be able to be here at this moment and be able to participate in in the decision making of inclusionary housing. I also have been hearing a lot from residents in my district that this is a big issue in my neighborhoods that we face every day. Right now we are facing a crisis. And I firmly believe that we we must address this crisis with all the tools that we have and use this inclusionary housing policy to bring to bring forward some. You know, change in the positive way and relief for all of our all of our neighbors. Based on the key findings about the the needs in housing, we can all see that a very, very low income is needed very much, twice as much as others. So I think that's very important. I believe that in order for a policy to be successful, we we can we can. We must actually we must need to devote a lot of time and effort into providing and bringing forward an inclusionary housing policy. With that said, I support Council Woman Pearce's motion of 11% for very, very low income. And I also would like to hear from the rest of the council, our colleagues on this and may have more thoughts later. Thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you. Customers in Dallas. I do have some customers of queued up. I'm going to go ahead and jump in. Obviously, this has been a policy that a lot of folks have worked on, including, obviously, the staff and a lot of the council members. So I want to thank Council Member Pearce and customers in Dallas for their comments. I want to just I want to make sure also that I heard the motion, but I want to make sure that I'm also clear on exactly what the motion was as being presented. I think staff may have had like staff to respond to them just to make sure that there weren't. I thought there might be a legal issue I had understood with staff earlier in the day, but maybe staff can clarify that. Maybe they've clarified that already. Can we maybe Mr. City Attorney, can you reread the motion or staff? And then I'd like to have Christopher kind of go through each one of those and then I have some comment as well. Speaker 2: Mr. something and Mayor Garcia, it's Mike Mays. As I understood. Speaker 4: Councilwoman Pierce's motion, it would be to. Speaker 2: Include an area one. Speaker 4: 11%, very low income, a requirement of no net loss. Number two, eight, number three, an increase. Speaker 2: In the in lieu fee. Speaker 4: To be equivalent of the construction costs for actually building the units on site. Number five, there would not be an ability to do offsite. Speaker 2: Construction as an in new. Speaker 4: Measure. Speaker 2: And number six. Speaker 4: The the. Speaker 2: Properties. Speaker 4: That qualify would be restricted for 55 years. Speaker 2: Or the life of the project. Speaker 4: Whichever is longer. That's what I got. Speaker 0: And Mr. Mayor can have. Thank you very much for that. Can we can I start asking just I know we had some discussion on the offsite issue. Can we get some legal clarification on that? Because I thought I thought that I had heard that that was not possible. Speaker 9: So if I can start from from south and then we can help from the attorneys to things, just so we have clarification on the the motion that the fees actually relates to the net value of the unit and we understand the instruction to maximize those fees in terms of the offsite, that's an option that's available to smaller projects. On a 10 to 20 unit range, we are required to provide alternative means of compliance. And this was an alternative means of compliance. We have written the policy to comply with that state law and at the same time provide every incentive to provide the units on site and every disincentive to providing them offsite. In order to provide the units offsite, the developer would first have to entitle their affordable project and begin construction on their affordable project and then obtain the permits for their market rate project. We don't believe that any developer will do that, but our hands are somewhat constrained in our ability to remove that provision. We do understand and share the desire to have the units located within the project and we think that our policy goes as far as possible on that. The 55 year, the 55 years comes from state law. That's not to say that we can't do something different, but we would end up with a policy where these mixed income projects would have a longer affordability range than our 100% affordable projects. I think we need to do some work with the attorneys to think about whether that's defensible. And then we also would be creating an obligation which doesn't exist in other projects throughout the state. And we have to think about whether our construction lenders and permanent financing would be available to builders in that unique circumstance. So we would not recommend that, but it's up to the council and and we may not have all of those answers at this time. And the other part about the motion is we understand the 11%, if the council went with that, it would apply to both area one in area two, because we're trying to not have a difference between the two. Speaker 2: Thank you. And I'm fine. Speaker 0: I'm sorry. I think it's might. Yeah. Thank you. So. So I want to go. Just continue so I know. Okay. So that clarifies my questions on what I thought were some of the legal challenges on on those issues. And if the attorney can clarify those, that would be great. Just moving on from those issues, the increase to two in lieu of just 2 to 4 for parity, I think that's a that's a good idea. I think that's that's something that if there is not concern to establish concerns from staff, I'd like to hear from I haven't heard any concerns on that issue. We obviously want as much we want people to get to build affordable housing. I certainly like what was said around a housing trust fund. And Councilman Pearce, I want to thank you for or for the comments on that issue. Mr. Koonce, did you what did you on the no net loss policy, can you explain how that would how that would the relationship between a policy like that and the one we have in front of? And would they be separate. Speaker 9: So they would fall within separate sections of the municipal code. But it's perfectly staff can certainly work with legal on that and we believe that under state law we're already subject to knowing that loss. But if there's a desire by the Council to also adopt that as a local ordinance, we'd be glad to work with Mike on on doing that. We were just disclosing that it won't be in the exact same architecture or part of the code as the inclusionary policies because it would apply and it already applies to any project sort of regardless of if inclusionary applies. So for example, inclusionary is not going to apply to a unit projects, but no net loss applies to eight unit projects. If someone proposes to demolish an eight unit building that has six affordable units in it, the new project must have at least six affordable units in it and must have at least eight total units in it . So that's the concept of no net loss. The concept has existed for a long time and density bonus, but it was applied more generally to all projects, beginning with changes in state law that took effect this year. Speaker 0: Thank you. And that was my question. I was under the impression that we were already working with some type of no net loss. Rule step by step by step. I wasn't sure if it was statewide or if it was a federal HUD related issue, but obviously if we want to have our own no loss policy to kind of mirror what's already state law, you know, I think that that's fine, obviously. And I think that just kind of reinforces what the what the policy I believe already already is. And so I thank you. Thank you for that. I'm just to other broad comments and of course, I want to hear from, from, from everybody else as well. Uh, I want to, I know that staff on the using in and that's been, I've heard from you Mr. Koonce multiple occasions in this Tatum on how important that is from a perspective of easing in the market. Obviously we want to get housing created quickly, but I know that that's been something that as far as when I asked when I asked all of you what was the most important feature of, uh, of the report in your best opinion, um, as staff you are, can you at least came back to me and said it was the phasing in? Is that correct, Mr. Koontz. Speaker 9: That's correct. And if the goal is to create affordable units, we have to have the phase in. So I understand the immediacy of the issue and the need for housing is is huge in our city. But if we don't do the phasing correctly, we end up with what's called a market shock, which would be no development, which would be a failure in terms of the immediacy need for housing. Speaker 0: And then lastly, and I think I'm obviously open and I think for the councilors as well, I think Councilman Pearce brought up shifting the percentages as presented by staff and moving those around. So I look, I'm looking forward to seeing what the council has to say. I just want to make sure that I certainly would support what would. I'm just curious if we were just to use like the Reenen numbers as a guide, what would be kind of percentages be as they relate to the staff proposal? Sure. Have you met Mira at all or. No. Speaker 9: That is an option that's available to council. We there's many options and we just need a clear direction on what we're doing. So if we were to go with Rina, it would be 47%, very low income, 26% low income and 27% moderate. Speaker 0: Okay. So okay, that's that's the overall. And when you say 27, what I mean is within the bucket percentage that staff is proposing. Speaker 4: So yeah. Speaker 9: So it would we have not run that exact scenario, but I can tell you would be between 12 and 14% would be the overall inclusionary requirement. And of those affordable units, 47% would be very low, 26% would be low and 27% would be moderate. Speaker 0: Okay. So okay, that's that's helpful. I appreciate that as well. We'll get it. And I'm open to that discussion. Just do what the council's got to say there, too. So why don't I just keep going? I'll have I might have more at the end, but I have a long list. Let me get to the list of folks and I'll start with Councilmember Richardson. Speaker 3: Thank you. Thanks, Mr. Mayor. I'm going to if a few comments may come back and make more later on after reading from our comic colleagues. So let's start off with. So I feel like we got some clarity. But Mr. Collins, if you could just clarify what is. I know there was again that this discrepancy that these numbers in 90,000 was low income. What is the low income number? Speaker 9: So the low income number for this program and for all statistical purposes, for a family of four, the low income number would be $67,560. Speaker 3: Okay. So for very low income, that's a family of four making 56,300 and below and a family of four under low income is 67,063 or 67, would you say? Speaker 9: So I'm going to just go through all three numbers so I'm less confused, at least the for a four person household. Very low income would be $56,300. Low income would be $67,560. And moderate income would be $92,700 for the full household. Speaker 3: Right. Okay. So the next thing, I'm just going to keep going here. So I heard the proposal come in lieu fee. I think making that consistent with what the market rate of the on site affordable rate is, I think that makes sense. So there's no gaming of the system. So support for that recommendation is on the discussion on the covenants. Why did staff recommend 45 separately from the motion on the floor, which is 55? Speaker 9: That's what's recommended under state law. But that's up to the council to make a final determination on. Speaker 3: Okay. So there's no economic impact on that. Speaker 9: The longer the affordability covenant, the greater the theoretical cost to the holder of the property. But the asset is largely depreciated at year 45, so I don't know that the difference in those ten years is significant. But we did not do that analysis. Speaker 3: Okay. Let. I agree that, you know, it's probably negligible the difference in if it adds ten more years to where the city is, in fact, those units, I think we should certainly stick with 55. I'm not supportive of the phased in timeline with the motion. With the motion, the four years of was it to go down to three years on the phasing? Speaker 9: There wasn't anything in the motion regarding the change to the phasing. Speaker 3: Okay. Well, just to be clear, you know, I think a phrase phased in is important. But I think given all that's happening, we're going to be reviewing this ultimately anyway. I'm okay with going to three years on phasing, but sort of maintaining the reporting that's that's proposed here. I know it has a three year check in to come to the Planning Commission. I'd love if the motion were to reflect the checking that comes to the full council and maybe some annual two from for a report on how we're doing. I feel like the reporting there's there's some work that needs to be done there. But you know, if there's interest in making it three or four phased in in front of sort of four, I'm okay with that. I think a phasing makes sense. We don't want to shock the market, but I think three years is enough time for us to sort of evaluate and if we make changes, we can onward to know net loss. I'm supportive of the discussion that we've heard on the net loss, whether it's connected this policy or separately. I'd love to hear back on that, but I'm supportive of no net loss. I have some discussion on Area two. I love that. I'm glad to hear that the council districts and Area one of District two, industry one we've heard from already. But my district and sirene area two. Now the idea that inclusionary would trigger a certain set of triggers that wouldn't trigger inclusionary. I know that every housing development that's taking place, whether it was rehabs or new development, it's in my district. It's taking some sort of incentive from a city, whether it was a redevelopment property where we have leveraged land, revetment land to make it happen or if it's an incentive. For example, the Ramona Senior Apartments, I think we gave a $1,314 million loan to help make that project happen. We haven't had any any development that's just simply been driven by the market. So I understand I understand and support the the idea of making it a trigger. If there are incentives, then it triggers the inclusionary requirement. However, one of the biggest triggers is to be able to take advantage of the density, and the land use element would require a zoning change. While in uptown we're going through the up planning process and that means it's going to be an entirely new set of zoning documents that developers and everyone can benefit from and modernize some of the very outdated zoning the north lobby. What that means is that trigger would essentially be eliminated. So if you're already guaranteed those benefits through the land use element and the planning process, there is no trigger to trigger inclusionary. And I'd like to see inclusionary, especially if there are specific, you know, specific plans that allow benefits, you know, incentives. We should tie those to some some level of inclusionary housing. Now, I also know that not every area in Zone two has specific plans. I know there's work being done down on Anaheim and Pacific Highway and up North Long Beach. Have some. Is there a way, Mr. Coombs, for us to look at Area two and figure out a way or the specific plans in Area two to address inclusionary housing so that they don't just eliminate the trigger? It's it's, in fact, calculated and factored into whatever specific plans we do. And then conversely, make sure that there is some reference to specific plan areas in the area to inclusionary plan, include what that's going to draft. How would you approach this issue? Speaker 9: So, Councilman, I don't think we can do a theoretical analysis on every neighborhood of Area two as part of this process. But let me tell you what I think we can do. Area two today does not support viable development, at least in numbers that that we can analyze. But you are correct that the city is making a number of zoning changes to increase development capacity. And it's also looking at our incentive structure, including density bonus. So specific to the zone changes that are occurring in your district and Councilman Austin's district that comes back to council in September. And I'd be glad to work with a consultant team to do a specific analysis of what, if any, inclusionary requirement could be placed on those specific properties. It's going to be different on a project and Councilman Andrew's district, it's going to be different on the other different project. And Councilman super nice district. So certainly the ordinance that we bring back to you could say that. Area two is triggered by a zone change, central plan amendment or other triggers as specified in specific area plans or zone changes so that you have an opening. But I just want to be careful not to prescribe what might be right for your district, may well not be right for a different district. And we don't have the logistical ability or the finances to do those theoretical pro forma as on every unique neighborhood in Area two. But I do have the capacity to address it for the instant projects in your district and to provide some greater flexibility in the program per area, too. When we come back with the ordinance. Speaker 3: And I think the right way to go about it, if we have an opening created in this ordinance and then the economic analysis is done on a neighborhood level. Sure. That those neighborhoods go through a specific planning process like what we're doing in uptown. That way we can sort of tailor what inclusionary housing looks like based on those market conditions in those areas. I can tell you that the dynamics in North Long Beach are going to be, you know, in a project that say uptown comments going to be very different than a second. PCH is going to be very different, but they're both in area two, I think. I think we need to be intentional about making sure we address the connection between our specific plans and those our specific plans and the inclusionary. How important is supportive of that approach? I think want to hear more from the council about about what the levels are. I think there's I think there's certainly. I certainly want to see an increase in very low income. I think that's important. I want to also make sure that we we address low income as well. I know that our arenas, we have arena requirements that I'm supportive of that sort of trigger that sort of stagger it across different levels. And I know that very likable, very low income is hard to approach, hard for us to build. I know that that's what represents a lot of our essential workers, our home care workers. A lot of our frontline workers are very low income. I also know that, you know, the those the numbers that we're just provided in terms of $67,000 for a family of four is still also low income. And that that could be a teacher. That can be, you know, a lot of many of our city employees, you know, and acknowledge that know that our city employees, our nurses , our teachers wrote a letter actually advocating for very low and low income targeting in this policy. I want to acknowledge that that the workforce and working families are speaking up and telling us what they need. I think it's important that we're responsive to that. I think it's important that we sort of we listen to the four council members that represent those four districts, just the way that I would expect people to listen to me if we're talking about the ninth District, North Long Beach. So I want to hear a bit more from the council, but those are my comments for now. Thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilmember. Next up is Councilwoman Mongo. Speaker 2: Thank you. I want to thank the city staff for their work on this. Councilmember Richardson took the words out of my mouth that the letter was excellent and our teachers with a stay at home parent could be in this low income category. So I just really appreciate the work. I've talked to a lot of residents about it and it is frustrating when I hear certain individuals, whether it's at a community meeting, which I went to one last night and it was socially distanced and outside or whether they're calling in for public comment, but stating things that are factually incorrect or fearmongering. And so I want to make sure that when I go to a meeting that people are getting good information. So I think it's important to kind of highlight that. No projects are yet starting and that this is a step in the right direction for us to address some of some of our issues. The median rental price in Long Beach is low because there are so many individuals who are in buildings or units that have not had rent increases in a very long time. But individuals who are trying to get a rental unit often do face a harder, more challenging processes and competition. And so we do need to make additional housing. And $60,000 per employee isn't what people typically think of as low income, especially with the number of families that are fortunate enough to have a stay at home parent with their young children. This is is the right thing to do. So thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilwoman Councilmember Price. Speaker 2: Thank you, Mr. Mayor, and thank you, staff, for the discussion and for the briefing that I'm sure we all got before council meeting tonight on this topic. I know this is something we've been talking about for a very long time, and I appreciate the council comments on it, especially the council members who whose districts will be most affected positively, hopefully, as a result of this policy. I do have a question for staff. Is there anything regarding the motion on the floor that's concerning at all about realistic implementation? Because I know that when we look at these policies in other jurisdictions, there are some who have been very successful and other cities that were very, you know, had high aspirations but were not very successful. And I just want to make sure that we're we're not being too aspirational with our motion tonight. Speaker 9: Thank you for the question. Council Member I think we already discussed with the Mayor that the offsite has to stay in the ordinance for legal reasons. The change from 45 to 55 years. I totally understand that the desire to have longer periods of affordability that will have some dampening effect to make the construction of ownership projects less desirable to potential developers. But we cannot quantify that. So we certainly can implement it and and would be glad to do that whatever the Council's final instruction is in terms of the motion on the floor. It is a different affordability mix than than what the Planning Commission and staff recommended, but we would have no logistical or legal problems implementing it if that was the desire of the whole of the Council. Speaker 2: Okay. And then what about the three year phase in. Speaker 9: I. We think a four year phase end would be better. But if the the whole of the council would like to do a three year phase, then we can make that work. Speaker 2: Okay. So it's not impossible for staff. We're not setting you up to achieve goals that are not possible with the motion. Councilwoman Pryce, this is Linda Tatum. I just wanted to weigh in a little bit further regarding the 45 versus the 55 year period. I know we often talk about the the ownership mix here in the city. And one of the other frameworks, frameworks for that policy, aside from the financial implications, is that it's that's also an incentive for ownership. I think, you know, in the most recent years, we have not had a lot of ownership projects built. So in a sense that that lower number of 45 for ownership projects is by policy, a way of incentivizing ownership projects. And we think that that's a good thing. So staff still firmly supports maintaining the 45 year period for ownership units because we think it'll help incentivize the option for or the opportunity for additional ownership units in the city. We just don't get a lot of those. So every opportunity we have to to push that, we think it makes sense as a city policy. Okay. All right. Thank you. I appreciate that. And then I think I spoke with Mr. Koonce about this earlier yesterday. I think I want to talk a little bit more about Area two. I know that when we talked outside of council meeting, but as you were educating me on the topic and I think you've alluded to it tonight, there is the reason we have to approach different areas differently is because of really a lack of data. And I think what you've kind of described as really you have to have a different approach for each area based on the circumstances and the factors. So can you speak to that a little bit more in terms of why we can't have general policies that would go to all areas in the city? Speaker 9: So there's a requirement under state law that while you can adopt an inclusionary requirement, it cannot be burdensome to development. So I'm going to invite Cathy back up to the microphone to talk about how we did the analysis. And in my late summary or in my summary, because we don't have data from area two, it's it's very hard to draw conclusions. Speaker 2: Good evening. Speaker 1: Again. I'm Cathy Head. Speaker 2: I'll just amplify what Mr. Quinn said is it's not only a lack of data, the reason there's a lack of data is because there hasn't been development. And a key component of inclusionary ordinances from the state's perspective is that you not create a constraint to development. And so if you're already not seeing any development and then you add another set of restrictions that in a way act as another impediment to development because they add to the cost without adding to the value. Then there's a very strong argument that you're constraining development. The other issue is the way we do the economic analysis is we look at what's actually being developed in a community. So in each community, I do this and we look at the actual types of projects being developed so that we can assess what the impacts are of imposing an affordability restriction. Well, when you don't have any development to assess, then you don't have any way to figure out the impact. And so the only way around it in a community where really through multiple real estate cycles there hasn't been development, is to try to do exactly what the staff recommendation is, which is to say we're going to try to create a carrot to incentivize development in these areas. And then as part of that, we're going to impose affordability restrictions. And then to then added codicil to that even is we're going to stay vigilant on that to then figure out if development starts happening in a part of areas of area two, then we're going to be able to jump in and modify the ordinance accordingly. So I think some of the comments that were have been made by the council people have been really excellent, including the notion of, you know, what do you do if you've changed planning requirements, etc., is to then be sure to look at what those impacts are at the time . But really, as we sat and I looked at all over all over the city when I did the analysis and as I believe was mentioned earlier, there's just been such a negligible amount of development that you can't reasonably impose another restriction on it until development starts occurring. It makes a lot of sense. I appreciate that and I look forward to hopefully having more developments in different parts of the city that would warrant and welcome some of the housing that we talked about tonight, specifically in regards to workforce housing. So thank you very much. And I have no additional questions. Speaker 0: Thank you, Vice Mayor Andrews. Speaker 4: And yeah, thank you. Thank you very much. I want to thank everyone for this. You know that conversation all the time to people and it's, you know, a community environment with Liam thankful that we have having this conversation. The camp is not your idea. This is a conversation that is long overdue. I'm disappointed again. The fact is that in midtown and downtown, we talk about equity and everyone's taking responsibilities to help with the housing crisis. Yet we make no effort to expand policies across the board. I think you do need to have a second look at. I want to be supportive of a policy that adds housing units, but those that is most need but also for our working class families along with worldwide cardboard as a prime example of the need the workforce housing for our nurses. I think there's a cost and metro drivers. We do not know how fast we're going to come back from the economic downturn. The Corvette is taking a center, but I want to be supportive of a policy that would be clear and conducive for when times are appropriate to build again. We need a policy that is fair and does not allow the bills to pay their way out of accommodating low income residents. Because I can remember the years when I wasn't allowed to afford to buy a house and it lets me know and I am looking forward to hearing from all of my colleagues. And thank you very much. Speaker 0: Thank you. Councilor Marie Ringa. Speaker 4: Thank you, Mayor. And I want to thank my colleagues for the great, great discussion. I think that we worked through everything that I had in mind and guides to even the phasing worked out. At least three year plan is workable and if concerns happen and I'm glad to see that staff is agreeable to that as it is with a lot of things that we're recommending tonight. In terms of the the some of the amendments that were made to the set of recommendations, I think that the staff has been very flexible and workable with with everything that's been presented so far. And I can certainly support all the items that are being put forward right now. But just to be clear out, when we're talking about low income member, very low income, what are those those figures yet? Low income and very low. Are we talking about 57,000 or $86 million figure? Speaker 8: Councilmember for very low income. A four person household income is 56,300. A low income household with four persons is 67,560, and a moderate income household is 92,700. Speaker 4: Okay. Well, I would like to see if we can increase the very low income. I know when you talk about a family of four, it might seem like a lot, but it's not. I mean, those are when I look at my district, I have a very robust. Working Families district in West Palm Beach. And I and I think that we need to have a little bit more of a flexibility on that. I know there are some housing projects that may be coming up in my district that I think would be benefit from. From a very low income recommendation there. So I think I will push that a little further in terms of the very low income. And in regards to the. The Area eight, area 11b, I have a very small sliver of that. But it's still important, obviously, for residents in the district because it does touch it. And I hope that we can work with that as well. But the majority of my of yes, both of us, it's an area, too. And I'm hoping that as projects come forward that we still have some flexibility with, especially in zone changes and those that require zone changes. So we could incorporate a lot of these these recommendations into those new projects as well. So I'm very supportive of the motion on the floor and looking forward to what. Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilmember. Let me bring this back. Councilmember Pearce, so maybe we can make some clarifications on the motion as well. So just to clarify what I think what we have so far on the floor is the no net loss policy or kind of adjacent type of policy to kind of reinforce what the state has in place . And we have that on the floor. We have the in lieu increase to kind of raise that so that it's more more equitable. We also have let me just get to really briefly, customer appears on the on the 55 year question that is in front of us. What where are we at with that issue? Speaker 2: You're asking me or you're asking stuff. Speaker 0: I was asking you. Speaker 2: It seemed like Linda spoke to wanting it to be lower because of home ownership. I mean, I'm good with 50 years. I think while State allows us to go to 55, I recognize the home ownership part, but it sounded like 55 have support. So unless there's a motion to reduce that, I'll go with 55. Speaker 0: Okay. And then the the the offsite issue, the just legal concerns. Can we just I think we need to get some clarification on that piece. Speaker 2: If we could get clarification on that when this comes back, that would be great. Speaker 0: Okay. And then let's go back to, I think, the meat of of the proposal. I think you proposed I think your motion was 11%, a very low income period. No low income and no moderate on the rental. Is that was that your proposal? Speaker 2: That was my proposal, yes. Speaker 0: Okay. And so then on the home ownership, the mix. So the just as I'm quoting, I think staff had proposed 12% affordable. So you're going down to 11%, but making it all very low income and not going to 12%. Correct. Speaker 2: So the staff's recommendation was 12, but it included 50% of that was moderate. I could do 12, Mayor, if I'll even know the even though it's the council. And even though I have a large push for 11%, what I could do is do 12%. Very low. I'm sorry. You 12% with 80% of that very low and 20% of that low. And that way we would get that next income bracket. We know that that nurses might start off at very low, but then they move up as their income changes. So I don't necessarily want to make everybody go through another round of changes unless there's another substitute motion on that. Speaker 0: Okay. No, but we're not I'm not just I'm just just more question. So we're not doing so that the proposal is to do very low income, but no low income. Speaker 2: But also on the floor right now. Mm hmm. Speaker 0: Okay. All right. Let me keep going through that, through the council. I just wanted to just clarify what's on the floor, I think. Speaker 4: Mayor. Yes? It's Mike Mayes. Well, I just heard Councilwoman Pierce say is that she would be willing to go with 12%, 80% of which would be very. Speaker 2: Low and 20%. Speaker 4: Of which would be low. Is that correct? Speaker 0: Percent would be would be the workforce, moderate housing or whatever that category is. Speaker 2: Yeah, I would be good with that if there's a second motion to that. But if folks, you know, I recognize there's been some conversation, but even though there hasn't been public conversation about it. Speaker 0: So. Well, let's let's let's just hear what people folks have to say. Okay. I try to make sure we're clear on what the motion in front of us. Yeah. So, yeah. Yes. Speaker 2: There's one other. Speaker 4: Issue that wasn't raised and that is the phase. And we talked about a three year phased in or a four year phased in. And I want to be clear that I think Janine's motion is to include a three year phased in. Speaker 2: I'll accept Rex's suggestion for a three year. So, yes, we include that. Speaker 0: Yeah. I think that I think that was understood. Let me let me just keep going down and then we'll go from we'll go from there. Councilmember Richardson. Speaker 3: Thanks, Mr. Mayor. And I was just chiming in. I heard Councilwoman mention either 11% at very low or increase the percentage, the increase in the low. I like that approach of getting more of the project protected and offering more units of affordable housing. And, you know, I'm not going to fight between low and very low. I acknowledge this incredible need at very low. I was that also know that 67,000 a year for a family of four is not a lot of money. Those are three months kids we're talking about, and they need housing, too. And so, you know, I'm okay with seeing some portion of this split go to low income housing. I think that's fine for me. I would ask that. Do those numbers reconcile 80 and 20 or what reconciles what rank and file? Yes, like a big percentage of the you know, you know, higher than 11%, you know, with that split, get us closer to 12 or 13% of a project. Speaker 9: Okay, Councilman, there were as a compound question, but I'm going to do my best to answer it. So at 11%, you would do only very low income. And then there was a discussion of 12%. The way to make 12% work would be 80%, very low and 20% moderate. And then I also heard if you wanted to hit all three categories. So, for example, at 14%, you could do one third very low, one third low and one third moderate. So there are a number of different scenarios. I also did hear in the discussion the idea of at 12% doing 80%, very low and 20% low. That scenario does not work. That would result in a cost that is burdensome. So at that 12%, if you were doing 80%, very low, the 20% would be in the moderate category, not the low category. Speaker 3: So I think I'm one of them. I think what I'm interested in is some split between the like a majority on a very low three in the number show that that's where, you know, probably two thirds of our need is but I'm okay with including some as as low. So did I hear a number that increases 11% to 13 by having a portion it because I know low income before income is a bit more affordable for a developer to bear. So he keeps at the same economic threshold by perhaps getting us a different additional percentage or two, it costs the developer the same. So is there a way to grow it from 10% to 12 or 13 by including a percentage toward a. Speaker 9: So the the difference in subsidy is similar but is not the same between very low and low. So. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 9: There's a million different permutations, but what we would recommend is if you want to do 12% and you're trying to maximize the very low you would do of that 12%. 80% would be very low and 20% would be moderate. That would get you the 12%. If you're trying to get a higher total number of affordable units, the amount of very low would have to come down. So that's where we have the 14% and that would be split. A third, a third, a third. But what I'm hearing from. Speaker 3: Like the 12% and this small percentage. Okay, I would I would recommend that to council and the peers. I don't want a split between, you know, whose poverty is worst poverty. I think folks are in poverty in the free lunch kids. These are working families, I think carving out a portion of this 20% for low income and 80%, which is significantly higher. What is that recommendation was I think is gives us a bit of a spectrum here. But you know, I'm not going to do a subset motion, so I'll just offer that, which is something you brought up from years 18 to 20. So, Councilman Pearce, what do you think about that? Speaker 2: Well, I brought up 8020 whenever I mentioned 80%, very low, 20% low. And stop is saying we can't do that. Speaker 3: No, that's what just that we can do. Speaker 9: No, no. Council councilmembers Pierson Richardson at 12%. If you do 80%, very low, you're pushing the limit of what the development can bear. So that 20% would need to be at a moderate level. I believe, based on the comments we heard from all the council members, that the idea was to maximize the very low units, but a get above 11%. So to get to the 12%, that 20% of units would be at the moderate level. And just as a reminder, a moderate unit, a moderate, moderate income family is $92,700, which may be a lot for an individual's income, but that's an income for a family of four, you know, so conceivably of raising children and paying for a two or three bedroom apartment. They're significantly rent burdened even at that income level today. Speaker 3: Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Christopher. If it you know, 1% doesn't make much of a difference. I'd rather just keep it clean. And our ordinance, you know, it supports it creates very low income housing, which is the gap. We've built a lot of low. A lot of the incentives and subsidies around low. And the we're targeting the ownership around moderate. I've talked about homeownership. We need to add more incentives, down payment assistance. I'm okay with where we are. 11%, very low. So I'm supportive of the motion. Speaker 0: Okay. So just to clarify that, the motion on the floor is 80% very low, 20% moderate income. It's a three year phased in. There is a no net loss provision. There's a new increase. We're at 50 years and the offsite issue will come back for a legal analysis. Mr. City Attorney, did I get that all correct? Speaker 4: I think so, Mayor, although I'm not. Speaker 2: I'm still not sure about the split between the 80 very low and the 20. Speaker 4: But I'm not sure. Speaker 0: The staff has the staff has that breakdown, though, that can get you the exact. Speaker 5: Mr. Mayor, can I have Christopher respond to that a little bit? I think we've got a little variation in the motion. Speaker 9: Christopher Well, first of all, what we heard in the audio here was Councilman Richardson say, no, I'm okay with the original motion. So we believe that the discussion on the floor has to do with the 11% very low. That said, we did discuss a different scenario, which was 12%, which was 80%, very low and 20% moderate. But what we just heard was Councilman Richardson say to Councilmember Pearce, no, I think we'll keep it with the 11%. There's a need at very low. So we do need clarity from the staff table about that. And there has been much discussion about that three years versus four years. But in the original motion, there was no mention of that three years versus four years. So we from staff need clarity on that. And the motion was 55 years, so not 50. Speaker 0: You know, and I get the 55 years wrong. So we have 55 years. Well, let me get Councilmember Pierce. Are we a 55 or 50? Speaker 2: We talked about 50, but we're 55. And so I do want to clarify that emotion, right, myself. Everything you said is correct, except we're at 55 and we're still at 11%. I think that some people might be getting confused because we had a lot of dialog about it, but the motion on the floor is 11% with 55 years and everything else that you mentioned. Okay, we're good. Speaker 0: Okay. So so just to clarify, then, we're 11%. That's very low. No net loss in lieu 55 and the offsite legal analysis. Is that correct, Mr. City Attorney. Gotcha. Is that correct? Speaker 4: We. We. As the phase in. Is there. Speaker 2: Anything in the motion about the phase in three or. Speaker 4: Four years after recommendation? Speaker 0: The phase in is at three years. I think the correct answer appears yes. Okay. Speaker 4: Okay. Speaker 0: All right. So I think we got I just want to make sure that staff attorney do have all of the the bullet points. Yes. Okay, great. Okay. Thank you. With that, we're going to go ahead and go to a vote. That's the motion. There's a motion to second on the floor. Madam Clerk, please do a roll call vote. Speaker 1: District one. Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker 1: District two. Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker 1: District three. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District four. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 1: District five. Speaker 4: I. Speaker 1: District six. Speaker 4: I. Speaker 1: District seven. I am district eight. I call District nine. Speaker 4: I. Okay. Thank. Thank you. Now we'll go to item. Speaker 0: Wait, hold on 1/2. Did we get the whole. Did you get the whole roll call? Yeah. Speaker 1: This. Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you. And. Okay, great. Thank you. Thank you all. The vice mayor is going to go ahead and take over here some of the next items. So, Mr. Vice Mayor, thank you. Speaker 4: Yeah, thank you very much. Now, item 20 plate. Could you please me? That is.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to find that the project is within the scope of the previously certified Program Environmental Impact Report prepared for the General Plan Land Use Element update EIR 03-16, SCH NO. 2015051054, that no further environmental analysis is needed, and that the project is categorically exempt pursuant to Section 15061(b)(3) of the State CEQA Guidelines; and Request City Attorney to prepare an ordinance amending Title 21 of the Long Beach Municipal Code (Zoning Ordinance) to: (1) repeal Title 21.60, Division IV - Voluntary Incentive Program to Create Housing for Very Low- and Low-Income Households, and (2) Adopt a new Citywide mandatory incentive-based Inclusionary Housing program based on policy components recommended by staff, as modified by the Planning Commission. (Citywide)

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Speaker 4: Yeah, thank you very much. Now, item 20 plate. Could you please me? That is. Speaker 1: Item 22 Report from Development Services. Recommendation to adopt a resolution authorizing the submission of an Apple App. Application to the Transit Oriented Development Housing Program and authorize City Manager to apply for, apply for and utilize these funds for the construction of the Affordable Senior Housing Project proposed for development at 9013945. Especificos Highway District six. Speaker 4: Fine. Thank you. I'd like to make a motion. Could I get a second, please? Speaker 2: Create a second price. Speaker 4: I'd like to say a few words before we start here. First of all, I'd like to congratulate McCormick and congratulations to the Mercy Housing. This project has been in the works for quite some time and I am excited to see additional housing units being built for our senior population who are struggling, especially during these times. Last year when housing count was released, we saw the number of homeless seniors skyrocketed. But from a previous year and this kind of development is going to be a part of helping address our housing shortage and our homeless count. Thank you to Long Beach Community Investment Company for their efforts on this. Well done. And I'm looking forward to a socially distanced ribbon cutting ceremony. Thank you very much. Any any public comments on this? There we have it. But yes, we have Dave Shukla online. Dave, your time. Thank you. Hello, this is Dave Shukla, third district. I would just like to congratulate Murphy Housing. This site is across the street from my high school. I think you're the right developer for this project. We just heard a long, lengthy discussion about affordable housing. We're going to hopefully hear the presentation about transit oriented development and how that can help a lot of the housing burden that a lot of our residents are struggling to stay in place in the town right now. Thank you very much for your support on this. Thank you very much. Thank you, Dave. I think it's costume with my eyes glued also. Many more people coming. No. Speaker 1: There's no more public comment. Speaker 4: Okay, fine. Can we have a roll call, please? Speaker 1: District one. Speaker 2: I. I. Speaker 1: District two. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District three. I district for. By District. Speaker 2: Five II. Speaker 1: District six. Speaker 0: I. Speaker 1: District seven. District eight. Speaker 4: II. Speaker 1: District nine. I motion carries. Speaker 4: Thank you. Thank you very much. Now I'm going to pop item 28 and I'm going to have to get off and take over a plate. Thank you very much.

Resolution

Recommendation to adopt resolution authorizing the submission of an application to the California State Department of Housing and Community Development for up to $13,350,000 in loan and grant funds available through the Transit-Oriented Development Housing Program; and Authorize City Manager, or designee, to execute all documents and agreements necessary to apply for and utilize these funds for the construction of the affordable senior housing project proposed for development at 901-945 East Pacific Coast Highway, and related public infrastructure improvements. (District 6)

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Speaker 4: Thank you. Thank you very much. Now I'm going to pop item 28 and I'm going to have to get off and take over a plate. Thank you very much. Speaker 1: Item 28 Communication from Councilwoman Zendejas Councilmember Pearce, Vice Mayor Andrews Councilmember Arango. Recommendation to request city attorney to report back in 90 days with options for an increase in the overall amount. Speaker 2: Of. Speaker 1: Individual courts storing, transporting or deploying. Speaker 2: Illegal fireworks. Speaker 1: Haze one cited within the city of Long Beach. Speaker 2: Thank you, Madam Clerk. Is it possible to see if we have public comment on this and if we could hear them first? Speaker 1: There is public comment on this item. Speaker 4: First up, we have Adriana Langston for item 28. Speaker 3: Your time starts now. Speaker 2: Okay. I first want to thank the council for hearing me and here are my comments. Speaker 4: No. Are those your comments? Clark, is there any other public comment? Yes. Next we have. Chris Cooper, your time starts now. I'm ready. Aloha. I'm over. Fireworks and no one helping. Thousand dollar fines. Cops looking away on camera, officials feeling our pain is not okay. Make the fines hurt and help the city, please. Or maybe the answer is legislation making local government liable to private property owners if officials deliberately withhold police protection. 13 citations is not okay and we will not forget minority homeowners in the ninth minority business in the eighth. Aren't cops and officials supposed to help us? My newly blind dog is terrified by every explosion. No safe spaces. Eight straight hours of mortars almost caught my yard house and neighbors car on fire on the fourth and tormented her for months. It correlates to all crimes. As a recent robbery victim, this was my brain after calling 911 wife and her staff. Okay. Kolb It almost took it also as our business destroyed. Panic, anger. Fear. Robbery is a joke in Long Beach, so a cops even come had to fend for ourselves during looting and on the fourth. And that's why I didn't know if help would show on the sixth. My wife is still mad and definitely dumb luck, but I cleared all 11 rooms alone. Cops did show up and clear with guns later. I like Tony and I'm grateful to the police for the help I've gotten. But 18 months of fighting for RV change. Show me. We need our officials to step up or it's hopeless. Put real policies in place to stop the bombs. Yes, this year was worse, but I've been calling on the same people for three years. My blind girl deserves change now. Mahalo for your help. Thanks, Mary. Thank you. Next, we have Jamie Dimon. Speaker 3: Lawson. Starts now. Jamie. Speaker 2: Sir. Yes. Thank you for taking our comments regarding fines. I'm going to echo the person before me. They need to be set at a deterrent price that makes people think twice about their actions. As someone who personally confronts people in the neighborhood who set off fireworks, they are not fazed by the current parameters at all. Fines should be increased in general, and then even further on holidays, for example, if the fines are $3,000 year round. On a holiday like July 4th, double the fine. Much like construction and school dance. Lastly, and most importantly, none of our efforts matter if the citations are not actually given out. 13 citations handed out on July 4th is not meeting the demand. We need to change the submissive approach to enforcing laws on the July 4th holiday. Right now I'm hearing, well, it's the actual day and people are going to set off fireworks. What can we do? Imagine if elected officials and law enforcement said, well, it's New Year's Eve. People are going to get drunk and drive. Speaker 4: What can we. Speaker 2: Do? It's clearly got to be zero tolerance. If the citations are not increased and actually handed out, nothing will change. Thank you for your time. Speaker 3: Thank you. Next, we have Dan Tatum. Your time starts now. Speaker 4: Hi. Thank you. My name is Dante Mack, Attention District and creator of the Long Beach Against Illegal Fireworks Facebook group. Last year was my first experience with fireworks in Long Beach, and I couldn't believe the city and police department would allow its residents to be exposed to such dangerous, harmful and illegal activity and not do anything about it. It was so bad that for the first time in my life I had to leave my home because of an issue a city has chosen to ignore. Thank you to Councilwoman. Then they have to put the issue on the agenda this week. And to those councilmembers and prosecutor Cobert, who continue to be active and vocal on this issue, we are tired of and frankly appalled at being told that simply speaking with our neighbors will solve the fireworks issue. The Council needs to create effective legislation, stiffer penalties, actual enforcement and stopping explosives from entering our city. We also need to explore beyond our borders for changes to state and federal legislation and policies to the members of the Council who haven't already seen in the Facebook group the severe distress that normalizing illegal fireworks has had on the community. I highly encourage you to take a look at what you're subjecting the community to if you choose not to solve this issue. By the time that it is passed, we look forward to seeing solutions to increasing the fines associated with fireworks, such as administrative and disposal fines on top of the 1000 misdemeanor fine. Please keep in mind this is only part of the overall solution. Thank you. Speaker 3: Thank you. Next, we have Leslie Davis. Your time starts now. Speaker 2: Hi. Thank you. I'm a 15 year resident in Long Beach, a business owner. And my name is Leslie Davis. I'm in District. Speaker 4: Two. Speaker 2: The explosives being detonated on our streets is out of control. These are not illegal fireworks and can be prosecuted as a felony in California with fines up to $10,000 and a maximum three year. Speaker 4: Prison. Speaker 2: Term. Handling this as a misdemeanor has not solved the problem. This is what I propose for your consideration. Use the Long Beach City Alert System to announce the city's zero tolerance on explosives and that it will be prosecuted as a felony. Redirect the nightly calls on this issue to an outside phone number. The people doing this monitor and scanners. Speaker 4: And this. Speaker 2: Is why they evade arrest. Three You use data analytics to consolidate the data that you already. Speaker 4: Have on this issue. Speaker 2: And use it for. Speaker 4: Investigative. Speaker 2: Investigation research. And four, set up a task force devoted to this problem comprised of talent from within various departments that have the right skill set and have them on their calls, arrest and find everyone at the scene. You know, let's get at. Speaker 4: This and. Speaker 2: Make Long Beach a model. Speaker 4: For. Speaker 2: Solving this problem. Speaker 4: And. Speaker 2: Help other cities do it then. Thank you for listening. Speaker 4: Thank you. Next, we have Sasha Rosenthal. Your time starts now. Speaker 2: Hi. My name is Sasha Rosenthal, and I'm a resident of District three. First, I'd like to thank council members and the House for getting this item on the agenda today and being so involved in this issue, along with the city prosecutor at the District nine town hall. On June 29th, I ask Commander Lopez and Mr. Hauber whether fingerprints could be collected from empty fireworks boxes and remnants, which we find all over the streets to assist in citations. Commander Lopez confirmed that although it's not a current practice, it's a feasible strategy. And the city prosecutor confirmed that fingerprints are useful evidence for him to bring in court, likely in conjunction with other evidence. So how can we ensure that this is followed through on? I'd like to see this become a more regular practice as a way of sighting people after the fact. Since we all understand that it's extremely difficult for the police to catch the perpetrators in the act of possession. I'd also like to see new legislation allowing for vehicle impoundment and fireworks cases so that fines can be enforced and collected more easily, as is already done in Pasadena and South Gate. Thank you. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our next speaker is Taqwa. Speaker 3: Julian, your time starts now. Speaker 2: Hi. This is Stockwell Gilani and I live in District four. I would definitely like to see us as a hub for having this on the agenda today. So on Saturday afternoon, we were just chilling in our backyard when a super loud firework went off. My heart jumped out of my chest. My dogs ran in and went into hiding. This has literally been our lives for over two months now. We don't feel safe. We can't relax in the comfort of our own home. Every night after dark. Our dogs hibernate and don't even go out to pee. They panic and pace around the house. Their little hearts beat so fast that no supplement or medication makes a difference. Hiding in closets and under our bed every night for three months is no way to live. My husband and I both have serious and successful careers, and I'm not exaggerating when I say the sleepless nights filled with anxiety hindered our productivity massively. We reported the fireworks coming from the same location and same people multiple times, along with proof, but nothing has changed. The low number of citations that you asked indicate how the issue is not being addressed like it should be. Every year we travel out of state for a few weeks in June and July, and this year, due to COVID, we were stuck in Long Beach. And I have to say that the impact of illegal explosive fireworks was so immense that we're seriously considering selling our house and leaving Long Beach unless we see some drastic steps being taken by our city officials. Thank you. Speaker 3: Thank you. Next, we have Sheryl Simmons. Your time starts now. Speaker 2: Mayor Garcia and city council members. I'm here once again to make a plea for tougher laws for those in possession of illegal explosives. What the residents of this city went through on the 4th of July and ten days later is not acceptable. And I am ashamed that we only had 13 arrests over with over 800. Speaker 4: Calls. Speaker 2: The night of the fourth. As a taxpaying homeowner of this city, we deserve better than what we experienced that night and can continue to experience on a routine basis. I was one of many who called in to the Long Beach P.D. on July 3rd because we asked neighbors to stop shooting off explosives, and we were confronted by an angry. Speaker 4: Mob of them. Speaker 2: Upon calling 911. It took 30 minutes for the police officers to get there. They were very nice, but told us that the video evidence of explosives being detonated was not enough for them to issue a citation. This is contrary to what we were told during town hall meetings about illegal fireworks and what we needed to do to report the individual. I am asking the city council members. Speaker 4: Not to brush this problem under. Speaker 2: The carpet, but to start a campaign now to combat the influx of explosives that will start coming into our city just in time for the fall and winter holidays. Beginning in October, we will start to experience the nightly terror position of our neighborhoods, similar to what we have been experiencing since early May. I urge you, in addition to approving this agenda item, please consider forming a task force made up of. Speaker 3: Thank you. Our next speaker is Seagrams. Your time starts now. Speaker 2: Okay. First of all, I'm not going to think anyone of you council members, because you're doing the very basic minimum of what we're asking you to do. Maybe not people on this call, but people in the city, on the streets protesting. The majority of people are saying defund the police. And here you are doing the exact opposite of that. You're further penalizing people. You're further jailing people for not having fireworks. People are complaining about their dogs. I understand that. I mean, I don't like living with fireworks all the time. But you know what? The police, LAPD or El Monte Police Department killed 30 plus people between 2010 and 2020. That's that's scary. And it was interesting to me that Janine Pearce, I believe it was, but the part that the police are stressed. How about the people? How about the people who are continually police? All I hear are helicopters above my house because of the Long Beach Police Department, continually just in their helicopters. But, you know, it's interesting. It's hard to defund the police when the mayor has received over $500,000 from the Long Beach Police Officers Association, his single largest donator donor. And this is public knowledge. This is not, you know, conspiracy. This is public knowledge. And this is in complete opposition of what your constituents are saying. But the whole country is saying defund the police. Speaker 3: Thank you. And that concludes public comment for this item. Speaker 2: Thank you to everyone who spoke tonight. As you can see, this has been an ongoing problem here in Long Beach. But I really want to thank the staff for coming forward and putting this item on the agenda for me and also my colleagues who have who are supporting this item. And again, thank you to all those who paired with us for public comment through the whole me being and were able to voice their their frustrations and their experience with us being a resident of the First District. I also had my share of frustrations during these past couple of months. And I think that I think that it's very important to to the community so that we can look into possibly having stricter laws and and adding fines to to anyone with possession of illegal fireworks. Reminder that all fireworks are illegal in Long Beach. I felt the frustration with some of my neighbors because I, too, was calling in. And I know that it was a crazy night that day. But I don't I don't want us to have to go through that again. Nobody nobody in our in our city should have to go through that. So I'm asking staff to please take this item back and come up with some solutions on how we can either increase. I know we can't increase the misdemeanor, but increase the fines that we can attach to that. I also am committed to working with our state legislators and also our federal ones to try to see if we can really, really enforce something that is going to be that is very problematic to our city right now. I know fireworks is that is very difficult for law enforcement to actually employ. So this is why I'm looking for other options, because we are putting so many of our residents at risk. We have to think about those who who suffer from PTSD, from being in the war. You know, we sometimes forget about those are the seniors that that are frightening that every little while it's not a little noise. Usually it's a big, big boom, you know, and the babies who are just scared, much less our our furry friends who are always, you know, scared and can't do anything about it. And I think that that's what a lot of our neighbors are very frustrated. One of the things that I also want to commend is the creators like Don K and and Charlotte or or bringing together a group of people in a in a Facebook group, which has grown in the past two months, has grown to over 1500 people in there that are against fireworks in our city. And that experience this that, you know, every night and still to this night, we we experience that. So I think that this is very important I to my also also don't want to forget to thank our city prosecutor, Doug Harper for for being so accessible to us and for launching his great, great program where people are actually able to submit their their evidence into this portal so that then he and his office can can further prosecute those offenders. So that huge thanks to him for being so open to the community, for being there and helping to find solutions. And I know that together we can do it. So I'm really counting on us bringing back some really good solutions that will hopefully help solve this this crisis that we have in our city right now. And I know that 4th of July is over, but this is the perfect time for us not to take our foot off the pedal. You know, I think that we must really move forward in this and make sure that this doesn't happen again. So now with that said, I'll open it up to my colleagues. Speaker 4: So we have a little situation here. I do not have the the the Rome or the text messaging. And so as an councilmember, vice mayor or mayor or no longer with us. So I will go and district order. We've heard from public comments district to comment on this. Speaker 2: Thank you, Councilmember Austin. I my comment is around the administrative fees. I guess I'm curious for staff. If we increase the fines, administrative fees, where are those fees going once they're collected? Speaker 5: We have not assessed that yet. So this was an item that was kind of first brought up by the council a couple of weeks ago to ask us to look more into this. And now this item further spotlights it. So we would bring that back. Normally, administrative fees of just in general go into the general fund. They don't go to specific programs. Most of our budgeting, everything goes in the general fund and then you allocate it once a year to the budget. Speaker 2: Okay. I guess I would ask when this item comes back, if it's okay with the original maker of the motion, the members in Davos, when it comes back, we can look at options one for putting it into the general fund and then two of the prosecutor has any options for diversion programs or how we do outreach with the community that tends to be consistently using these fireworks that we do something to halt the to continue to the world of my friends missing the word you know, to invest in the community so that we're deter I can't say the word keeping them away from doing it again. Thank you. Speaker 4: Thank you. Thank you, Councilmember. Councilmember Price. Speaker 2: Thank you. Thank you very much. Councilman Austin, I want to thank those who spoke out tonight at public comment. This is incredibly frustrating and I understand all of your frustrations. In 2017, I believe we started a third district fireworks advisory committee. This is a group of residents who spent over a hundred volunteer hours interviewing different cities, different departments throughout the city. They got data from emergency rooms. They got data for arrests in the city and citations. They just did a tremendous amount of work. They came back with a report that we presented to council. Actually, I can provide a copy of that if anybody wants to email my office, but they came back with a report on some best practices that they had seen in other cities. And we actually went to council and as a council action item, asked for specific things to be looked into, like administrative citations, increasing fines and fees. We really have really tried to talk about this issue for years. And it just this year, every year on July the fifth, I get tons of emails from people saying they've lived here their whole life and this year was the worst. I get it every year. But this year literally was worse, I think because it started earlier in terms of the number of days before 4th of July and also it started earlier in the day and it went much later into the night. And it was just a very painful thing to watch and listen to. And I know that in the past I have myself called and when I've gone out on the street, I've heard something and I've gone out and I've called. And by the time the police arrived, the individual that I didn't even see, I just heard the sound was nowhere to be found. So it's an incredibly difficult situation. It is really like a game of whack a mole for the police department. They go from one look at the fire department. They go from one location to the other. And I just don't know the answer. I think that the city prosecutor being proactive with having the homeowners have some liability of financial liability, I think that's going to make an impact. And I think that we need to make sure that our city prosecutor's office is staffed appropriately to be able to have a designated task force assigned to go after the violators that are having fireworks generated from the location of the residential home. If they don't have the resources to follow up on that, then it's not going to be a deterrent, which is where I think Councilmember Pearce was saying it's not going to be a deterrent if we can't actually follow through with the enforcement mechanism. So for me, I think this is a great item. I think there are some statutory limitations on how large the fee can be, but I don't know. I look forward to getting the report back. I think because it would be an infraction or a misdemeanor offense, there are some limits on how much can be charged as a fine, but I look forward to hearing the report and seeing what else we can do. But we can enact every law. We can enact every enforcement. I mean, we cannot live every law. We can have every deterrent measure in place. But if we don't have enforcement, if we don't have resources for enforcement, then nothing's going to change. So we need to make sure whether that task force comes out of fire, the task force comes out of PD or the task force comes out of the prosecutor's office. We need to be able to fund it appropriately in order to be able to follow through on the threat of punitive sanctions. If we're just putting out there punitive sanctions and we're actually not enforcing it, then no one's going to take it seriously. And that's the problem. I think we have to follow through with the punitive sanctions that we put out there and we advertise because otherwise it's not going to be a real threat to anyone. So I think this is a great item. I want to thank my council colleagues for bringing that forward. I think by now every single member of the council has at one point or another in my tenure, brought an issue about fireworks, which to me. Speaks to the solidarity we all have on this one issue. There are multiple issues where we don't see eye to eye, but I'm fireworks. I think the council is absolutely united. And so I think together we can try to figure out how to fund enforcement. Right. So that we can actually get a return on on the the threat of citations that we actually do something about that. So thank you. Speaker 4: Thank you, Councilmember. Councilmember. Super nor do you have anything to add. Speaker 3: Yeah. Thank you. Just a couple of quick comments. Thanks to all those who who called in and expressed their opinions. Uh uh uh uh uh. Councilman Price mentioned the third district task force, and I just want to give them credit. You know, and they certainly reached out to our staff and they're perfectly willing and do city wide efforts. Just regarding the issue with the city prosecutor. Um, you know, being able to enforce since just the first year on the portal, um, I would suggest are reaching out to the city prosecutor's office just to get the data, that is how many enforceable violations they receive. Just so we have some numbers to crunch on that. Um, I think that's all I have, so thank you. Speaker 4: Thank you. Councilmember Mongo. Speaker 2: Thank you. And I'd like to thank Councilman Van de Haas. I plan to continue to the city managers offer us on this. I've met with several individuals since. I joined the Facebook group and even since the 4th of July, and I have some ideas that they've brought to me that I think we kind of talked through and kind of came up with together. But I want to definitely give credit to some of these individuals and talk about some additional options. I've also talked to some police officers, not necessarily any that were actually featured in the videos on the page. But I think it's important also to hear from them on what we can do to help them and incentivize them to give out more tickets related to fireworks. So I know there are laws in the state of California. I know many people want either quotas or an incentive program for the police officers. And there are laws that I've talked about with individuals, but I know those individuals have talked to other individuals. So I just want to kind of talk through that. And then I hope the staff report will kind of outline the limitations that are in place related to those items. As a previous councilman there stated, we don't have the determination between a misdemeanor and a felony. However, what would be ideal is if we could really target your multi time offenders. And there are a very small group of individuals who are lighting up fireworks on a continual basis. And so if we could work hard with the enforcement team to ensure that multi time offenders are hit even harder, and so it doesn't even mean that they have to be a multi time offender in the same year. If they were lighting off excessive fireworks in 2018 and then 2019 and then 2020, and they should be coached on what those repercussions are. And since there are limitations to the financial fine that can be provided or enforced, I think that we need immediate assignment to community service. Literally, if you are lighting fireworks on June 1st, your community service needs to start immediately taking away the time you have available to light off additional fireworks. And we also need to look at. An education program. Perhaps if you receive a ticket, maybe you need to go to a class, an online class that shows bloody photos of individuals. I know two years ago we had an individual who we gave him a ticket at like, I don't know, two in the afternoon and by 9 p.m. the kid was and he's probably I remember seeing the photo, it was just horrific. He was in the hospital. He blown off his hand. And so they need to see the potential personal risk to them and increasing the fine from $1000 to $2000 and talking to community members. I feel that there's been a lot of pushback on the safe and sane firework fines system. A lot of the police officers and neighbors kind of said, you know, even seen fireworks that are legal in other cities aren't really our problem. We want 30 and $40,000 fines for individuals who are lighting off a large supply of the fireworks that are really being brought in from out of the area, that are very detrimental, that made them 100th all of those. And and the reason that the fines should be so high is because the cost of that inventory is high. And so what what I was hearing from one of the police officers was that he was like scoffed at when he gave $1,000 ticket a few years ago because the guy's like, Look , I brought in all this stuff. I've got $30,000 in inventory here. What am I going to do with it? It's dangerous to leave it in my garage. Of course, I was going to light off all of it tonight, and I'm just like. So hearing these stories firsthand really add some perspective. People are bringing in third. They're probably bringing in $100,000 in inventory that they pay $40,000 for. They plan to resell it on $100,000 range and then they didn't sell enough. And so then potentially, since COVID was so strict, they didn't have the sales they had. And so these individuals were just lighting off more and more. I don't know. Those are all anecdotal things that I've heard from community members, but I really feel strongly that the community is demanding community service and direct education for those who have . Been caught lighting off fireworks. And then if city staff could just answer to me because I'd have the same challenge as some of our community members and council members in terms of there was a question asked at a previous community meeting in talking to a police officer. He thinks that the answer was given based on the question being different. So I think we need some clarity. Can we talk a little bit about the fingerprinting issue or could that come back in the staff report? Because I think we're getting mixed messages on that. Speaker 5: This time. Yes. We need to come back in the staff report and we can answer questions about fingerprinting. I believe technically it can be done. It's just, you know, a matter of resources and and forensic staffing. Speaker 2: I mean, there are times where we have in home invasions and we aren't getting fingerprints. So I just think it's really important to add the perspective. Speaker 5: Yes, that's correct. Speaker 2: Okay. And then also, I know that I kind of talked about this a little bit with one of the individuals who even spoke tonight was in the fireworks group. And when you run fingerprints, I think it's important for the staff report to discuss whose fingerprints are even in the system that they have to have committed a crime and and how that works. So I think that people can understand and then what the turnaround time is and all of those kinds of things, because I think that those are some of our barriers. And then lastly, I want to thank Prosecutor Doug Halbert and the new program in policy that we rolled out related to holding homeowners responsible in some cases may have backfired. And I think we need to look at this. There may have been individuals who were reported as setting off fireworks, even though the reporter may have actually been the one diverting the the fine. And it was actually a neighborly dispute. And Doug was so kind as to take a personal call from a landlord. And the demographics of his building were just. So unlikely that the individuals who were very ill and elderly senior citizens could have been the individuals lighting off those fireworks on. They had mobility issues and other things that would have prevented them from running away from the lighting quickly. And we had had individuals in the area quickly after the lighting and so it wouldn't have been possible for the individual reported. So I think we just need to look at how to ensure the validity of a lot of these and then with the report could also include related to using video data to prosecute these individuals and hold them accountable. I'm really interested in that. I think that's the way forward. And if there is a significant fine structure, I'm supportive of maintaining a $1,000 fine for your safe and saying, but when you have individuals who you have a block party and we had one in the unincorporated area where all the neighbors in the unincorporated area adjacent to the fifth District have each agreed to pitch in $100 to pay for the fine. The fine is not enough. And on top of that, they all pitched in to pay for the fireworks. I mean, these are the anecdotal stories we're hearing from the neighbor who lives just adjacent. Her dog actually got out from being scared and was running through Hartwell Park. And it was really an unfortunate situation. But with that, I also want to thank Supervisor Janice Horn's office for all her help and the Lakewood Sheriff's Station for their help. But we we need to do more. So thank you. And I will continue these discussions over the next several weeks and look forward to working with staff. Speaker 4: Council member council member, Urunga. Because them I want to add my voice to the frustration that's being felt out there, not only with the citizens who have called in today, but also with our council members. I mean, we all face that. That frustration, especially, I guess more so us because, you know, we get people to come out to our doors and say, what are you going to do about it? Look at this. Hear this? You know, I have it. I have the same frustration in my area we call in. It takes a while for our PD to respond. And, you know, I'm the council member, so it affects us all. And we all feel the frustration. And this is hopefully a step in a process that will get people more serious about using fireworks. And they have an excuse because as we've as we all know, it's not only about pets and animals, it's about people. And people also suffer PTSD. They hear an explosion and they start getting nervous and edgy. And you don't even have to have that used to be out, you know, enjoying your TV program. And then you hear a very large explosion and then here go the cars. With your alarm going off and and they stay on for a while because people aren't paying attention to your car. You're not home. So it just don't keep pace, if you will. And we're going through it is is another step in that process. I really appreciate the cast member Mongeau for her ideas, being innovative and creative and and trying to see more what more we can do to ensure that fireworks get under control or rephrased. But we don't usually stop using fireworks as a whole in general. But again, if we have neighboring cities who are legally selling. Quote unquote, safe and sane fireworks. We're always have the same problem. But again, those are not the real issues. The big issues are the big explosive ones, which I call IEDs and improvised explosive devices. Those are the ones that really create the noise and the and the concerns on the community that those are the ones that really hurt people. So thank you so much. And that's for inviting me to join you on this item. I think it's important and looking forward to report when you come back in 90 days. Thank you. Thank you. And Councilmember Richardson. Speaker 3: Thank you, Councilmember just General Clark. I think we're all in alignment that we should. We should. This is an important issue for us to engage in. Personally, I'm less interested in quotas. I'm less interested in busywork. I'm more interested in outcomes and accountability as both for property owners as well as our own response. I think folks want to know that if they call the call the call center, someone's going to answer and respond. And if they respond, if they catch someone in the act, they're going to write a ticket. I think that's the most we can. I mean, we can commit to those things and make sure they actually happen and do our part. I'm interested in outreach to the property owners months in advance if we know that there are census tracts targeted. You know, residences have been called on in the past. We should reach out to them months in advance, let them know what the rules are. Let them know that they'll be held accountable once an event. I'm interested in targeted enforcement in those problem areas. We in the council agenda item that that came forward a few months ago, we talked about using data. Identify those problem areas. I think you should start now and start deconstructing the data we have from this year, Independence Day celebrations and see if we can make a difference in targeted area. I think the city has been it's going to be hard to make a big macro difference. And we have to target where we can make a difference, learn some best practices, test out some things, and if it works, then we scale it. I'm interested also in giving the community something to do. I know that we don't have a lot of I mean, we have the neighborhood fire roadshow, which is, you know, you can come out on your front porch and you just look at the fireworks from out there. But there isn't any any actual fireworks show anywhere close. We should think about. Think about doing those doing those things to see if it has an impact. We should test it. You know, I've gone down to the queen. I've gone to Big Bang on the bay. Great experiences. Let's give the American Biscuit something, something to do so they can maybe save a little bit money. And that's an official. So that safe home park, something like that and see if it has an impact. So I think we have to start thinking about doing things a bit differently and just focusing on outcomes and accountability. That's what I would say here in terms of increase the fine from 1000 to 2000. I'm open. I just I just think that that, again, is a is a is. Let me address. You know how we're going to hold folks accountable? I think it's not going to happen. You know, not not it may not have as much of an impact. It could. But I'm interested and I'm okay with this morning. Those are my comments. Thank you. Speaker 4: All right. Thank you. I have Councilmember Mongo. Then I have council members and they have screwed up. I want to just say a couple of words. Alison, we've heard from many residents over the last few weeks. This has been a. A very, very difficult few months. When it comes to explosions and living with explosions and in our neighborhoods to our city. And it was more than just the 4th of July. Obviously, it was a sustained period of time. So, so much so that I want to say over a month ago, a month ago or so, that I brought forth an item signed on, I cosigned by Councilmember Richardson, Councilmember Zane de Haas, Councilmember and Vice Mayor de Andrews to to ask staff to develop an action plan from that plan. We did we were able to get the city prosecutor to initiate an innovative portal and letters to to to to property or to residents that that were reported. That was a step in the right direction. Obviously, it felt well, we fell well short of what we needed to do to eliminate fireworks during the season. I will say that we fell short, but. The entire Southern California region fell short. I had to go and pick up my son from a from a 4th of July function in La Palma. It was really no different than Long Beach, Cerritos, Artesia, all up and down the 91 freeway. It was lit up fireworks, banks, explosions. And I'm not sure if those cities experienced it to the extent we did, but I can say that this year was different. There was a proliferation of fireworks that we haven't seen before. And I think as we look toward next year and moving forward, it's going to require some investigative work, is going to require some work beyond just what we can do as a city to eliminate the. The proliferation in the ports of entry, where are they coming from and how are they getting here in such large quantities to the fines? Again, I think we just recently raised our fines last year and I don't think that had much of a deterrent. I'm okay with stiffer penalties, but clearly people are spending a lot of money on fireworks as well. And so there's a lot of disposable income and this is a deterrent that we feel like we can that will make a difference. I'm supportive of it, but I'm also going to go live with my comments because as I mentioned, we brought an item about a month ago. We directed staff to get back to us on a number of items. I'm curious, Mr. City Manager, wouldn't you expect to have a report back? I know there's a lot going on right now, but what can we expect to report back on on the item that we passed just a few weeks ago regarding the fireworks action plan Speaker 5: ? I'm not sure what to call you, vice vice mayor or something. But, Mr. Austin, I don't have a date yet for that. I think we had looked at about a 90 day, if I remember the item, for the first kind of check in. This also calls for a 90 day. So we'll set our clock to that and get as much information as we can by that time. Speaker 4: Okay. So those are my comments. And we'll go back to Councilmember Mongo and then Councilmember and ask to close if there are no other comments. Speaker 2: I just really appreciate the comments made about using the data. I'm very supportive of some kind of a letter that is sent to residents who have been reported for fireworks addresses that have been reported for fireworks in the past, something that says, please be advised that all fireworks are legal in the city of Long Beach. Should you or a member of your household light off fireworks? You're going to be required to do 200 hours of community service or whatever we're going to be able to do. I really think that advance notice to them. I'd also like to find a way that anyone who is a spectator can somehow, if you can set up your chairs in a way to support an illegal fireworks show that goes off into the air, I really think we need to think about you're really contributing, right? So you talk about bullying and there's three different levels of bullying. But my and participating condone are part of the problems. We need to look at that, too. Thank you again to all who have participated in this and the several other agenda items related to reducing the firework issue in Long Beach. It is a regional problem, but let's be leaders in making it a quiet and peaceful place with high quality of life for our residents. Speaker 4: Q and council members in House. Speaker 2: Thank you. Thank you very much. Colleagues, this everyone has had some great ideas. And I think that's exactly what what this item was, why I wanted to present this item. And just to make a clarification, I don't think that we can actually raise the fees on a misdemeanor because that's not something that we can do. But but this motion is more for the staff to go and and look at other options that we can include on top of that misdemeanor. So, for example, you know, tagging on community service to that or another fine or violating another thing, you know, the annoyance ordinance or a health ordinance, some things like that. So all of everything that was talked about today is great. I know that within the community there's also been talk about maybe setting up a reward fund to be able to just you among the people that that turn in, people who are who are doing fireworks illegally. And I really also like the idea of, you know, the possibility of impounding a vehicle if you are caught with these illegal explosives in your car. I've also seen where, you know, during my research have also seen where cities have actually had checkpoints like we do for drunk driving. We had they've had checkpoints to to check the vehicles and make sure that they don't have these kind of explosives. So with that being said, I really look forward to working with staff on bringing forward, you know, a lot of options that we could use and question for staff. I know that the council member asked and also brought up a firework item, you know, the firework action plan. Is there a way to combine these so we can bring back information on this same time? Speaker 5: Certainly. So we can build on some of the research that we had done in the past as Councilmember Price mentioned. And we will combine these two together because they do speak to very similar items and bring those back. So we're we're hearing you there's a lot of questions that you have, and we want to do kind of a bigger comprehensive report of all the issues. Speaker 2: Yes, I think that that would be a great fit to bring what has come out of the research that has already been done and with creating more opportunities to be able to make a difference for next year and hopefully next year. We could say that this year was different because we didn't see fireworks in our city. So thank you again all for supporting this item and I look forward to working with staff on this. Speaker 4: Okay. Let's go to a vote here. Speaker 1: District one. I District two. I District. Speaker 2: Three. Speaker 1: I wasn't strict for. District five. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District six. District seven. Speaker 4: I. Speaker 1: District eight. District nine. Our motion carries. Speaker 4: Thank you. So the next item is item number 24. We'd like to take item working with item.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to request City Attorney to report back to City Council in 90 days with options for an increase in the overall amount an individual caught storing, transporting, or deploying illegal fireworks pays when cited within the City of Long Beach.

LongBeachCC

LongBeachCC_07142020_20-0665

Speaker 4: Thank you. So the next item is item number 24. We'd like to take item working with item. Speaker 1: Report from Public Works. Recommendation to receive and file a presentation regarding Long Beach Transit's relationship with the city and steps taken to address recent challenges citywide. Speaker 4: Okay. Thank you. I'm going to turn it over to city manager to introduce one of these transit. Speaker 5: Thank you very much. So this was an item that the council asked us to bring forward pretty quickly, to have a discussion about what language transit is doing for our city. They're a wonderful partner. Cannot get into the presentation, but they are actually a little different. Some people think of them as a department. They're actually a separate corporation that runs and does all of our transit work for us, and they do a very, very good job. So I do want to preface it by saying we did ask Long Beach Transit to come here pretty quickly in order to give this presentation in July , since our August is going to be very busy. So he's got a presentation and we'd be happy if you have additional questions that we don't have the answers to today to to follow up with those in writing. So with that, I will turn it over to the President and CEO Ken McDonnell. Speaker 4: Good afternoon. Good evening. Thank you, Tom. City manager, council members, city partners and all who assembled here today. I am Kenneth McDonald, president and CEO of Long Beach Transit. Thank you for the invitation to present an overview and status of Long Beach Transit to the City Council this evening. My presentation will include an overview of Long Beach Transit as well as a brief description of some of our services and programs. Then I will discuss the pandemic and its impact on LGBT, specifically the challenges we are facing as a result of the safer at home orders. And I will close with some highlights from BP's recently completed economic impact analysis. Next slide, please. Since the creation in 1963, Elbit has grown significantly to its present 100 plus square mile service area, serving the city of Long Beach and 14 surrounding cities. The agency is governed by a seven member board of directors. Our 800 employees assist in providing transit services to over 23 million customers each year. More than 800,000 people live within a quarter of a mile of a Long Beach bus stop. And we have 1905 bus stops, of which 1343 are in the city of Long Beach. On this slide, you see the red dots that indicate the location of Elvedi facility. Next slide, please. Now I would provide a quick overview of Long Beach Transit Services and a few of our programs. Next slide. Every year, 250 busses, of which 90% alternatively fueled. Our goal is to have 100% zero emission fleet by 2030. We provide curb to curb paratransit for persons with severe mobility impairment. This service began in the mid 1970s and is in addition to the federally, federally mandated ADA Paratransit Service for Los Angeles County known as Access Services. Long Beach Transit's Best Kept Secret is a water taxi service along the Long Beach coastline and within the harbor. Due due to the coronavirus. Water taxi services has been suspended until further notice. Next slide, please. Each year it would to conduct a customer and potential customer service to assess awareness and attitude about our meeting. We use the feedback to identify strengths and areas of opportunity to recruit, reclaim and retain customers. The slide before you contains demographic information about our customer base as well as the reason why they use our bus service. As you can see, the vast majority of our customers are between the ages of 18 to 44, and most of our customers are employed or in school. 80% of all of our customers trips to or from work or school. Next slide, please. Now I want to highlight one LAUSD high school program and one senior program. In the fall of 2019, AbbVie launched a pilot program at Milliken High School, which consisted of a 30 day student pass for $30, a reduction of $10 from the regular student discount price of $40. Milliken was chosen as it has the highest number of school of choice or commuter students. We distributed 1341 passes to students in grades nine through 12. Between August and December 2019, MILLIKAN students use the passes over 40,000 times. His goal is to have this program accessible to students within our service area. We were exploring options to expand the program to all students within the LGBT service area when COVID 19 hit and ceased activity. In regards to our seniors. I don't. Long Beach Transit Partners with senior organizations in every corner of Long Beach through the Connected Seniors Club. We coordinated at various organizations to train senior ambassadors. These ambassadors assist each seniors to plan trips, to ride the bus, and to become confident transit customers. Overall, the connected senior clubs is enhancing the quality of life for seniors as it provides them with a transportation option of which they may not have been familiar. The great part about this program is we are matching seniors with local services and helping them to navigate the public transportation system. Next slide, please. Three years ago, MVD began our transit ambassador program not to be confused with the Ambassador bus at all. That deployed on security personnel to assist in mitigating customer issues on the transit system. Elbit currently has four transit ambassadors that encourage best customer behavior and improve customer relations on our busses. We are planning to double the program in the next budget cycle. Next slide, please. In 2018, we completed a comprehensive operation and analysis of system wide transit analysis and reassessment, better known as the STAR Initiative. In the transit industry. A comprehensive operational analysis is typically conducted every 7 to 10 years. The objective of our staff initiative was threefold. One Evaluate Alberta's entire transit system on a road by road basis to acquire and assess customers needs. And three, develop short, medium and long term road maps for the next ten years using the recommendations. We began implementing adjustments to some community routes, a few crosstown routes, as well as implementing a commuter service from Long Beach to UCLA and Westwood Village. Next slide, please. I would like to pivot now and speak about the pandemic and our bids, action and responses. Next slide. Here are some highlights of Liberty Transit. Responses to COVID 19, including actions taken since the week of February 3rd, 2020, following the first reported COVID 19 cases in the United States. We started early. Activity formed across the pod. Mental Health and Safety Executive Task Force to activate our response to the COVID 19 threat. The Task Force provided information to our employees and customers, encouraging all to follow the CDC guideline for personal hygiene and to stop this spread. We implemented an enhanced cleaning process and distributed and continues to distribute personal protective equipment to all employees. We introduced our Skippers Seat Skipper Crew and Stop the Spread Information campaign and we installed plastic chains in the front of the bus and implemented right rear door boarding aimed at promoting social distancing on all our busses. The health and safety of our employees and customers continue to be Liberty's top priority. Next slide, please. In support of the effort I just spoke about. We use various communication tactics that are listed on this slide to inform and educate our customers. Also pictured is some samples of those promotional and informational materials. Next slide, please. At this juncture, I will speak about the challenges Albert is enduring due to the COVID 19 pandemic. Next slide, please. Prior to the pandemic, MVD operated 36 routes and used 190 busses in the peak morning and afternoon rush hours. Service hours were Monday through Friday, beginning at 4 a.m. and ending at 1:30 a.m.. Weekend services began at 4:45 a.m. and ended at 1:30 a.m.. Once the safer at home orders were declared, service levels were adjusted. LAPD currently operates 27 routes, with 82 peak busses and daily service hours from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.. Frontline employees like operators, mechanic and supervisors are working modified schedules to minimize their exposure to COVID 19. Next slide. AVP average weekly boardings in February 2020 was 326,651 customers. This graph shows the weekly ridership decline from week from the week of March four at an average of 323,966 boardings to the week of June four, June 28 and 100 and to 315 boarding since the declaration of the COVID 19 pandemic. LPT has seen a reduction in ridership of nearly 80%. Next slide, please. Correspondingly. In February 2020, LBC, average weekly fare revenue collected was $207,108. This graph shows the fare box revenue of $207,108 in the first week of March to less than $100 in the week of June 28. So we have this in parallel with the ridership reduction. The loss of revenue is 99.94%. We have basically collected no revenue. Next slide, please. This year due to the COVID 19 pandemic and the uncertainty of. Project funding for the fiscal year 2021, which is July one to June. The Board of Directors adopted a continuing resolution authorizing an extension of fiscal year 2020 budget spending levels through the first quarter of fiscal year 2021, which is July 2022 June to September 2020. This allows the agency to illegally encumber and expend funds in the absence of an adopted fiscal year 2021 budget. Transit is a labor intensive business as we people in the people business. That being said, 73% of all Long Beach transit expenses are wages and benefits. Elbit is fiscal year 2021 budget will be presented to the Board of Directors at our August 27. Meeting. Next slide. I will now close with some highlights from BP's recently completed economic impact study. Next slide, please. In the spring of 2019, LGBT engaged, engaged at California State University, Long Beach, Department of Economics, Office of Economic Research to conduct an analysis for analysis of LGBT economic impact on Los Angeles and Orange County and the State of California. Their analysis measured Albee's economic impact in terms of jobs, income and economic value created. He also provides access to communities and employment centers, often for those who are socio economically disadvantaged, thereby contributing to the equity, inclusivity and diversity of the region. Of course, Albert, his contributions to the region and state are far more extend, far more extensive. In the L.A. O.S. region, LAPD has 815 employees. The agency spends $52.4 million on payroll and expended $91.4 million over. The fiscal year of 2018. The analysis found that IBD supported 604 additional jobs and generated $39.5 million in addition additional labor income. Consequently, LPT supported $112 million in additional economic output in Los Angeles and Orange County. Next slide. With an annual operating budget of just over $100 million and 815 employees. Lead has a significant impact on the regional and state economies. Every dollar spent by Elbit annually generates $2.25 in economic output for California, and each employee creates enough economic value to support 1.70 jobs in the state each year. In the local areas. For every 100 people employed by Long Beach Transit, our agency supports an additional 74 jobs, thereby creating 174 total jobs in Los Angeles and Orange County. Also, for every $100 spent by Long Beach Transit, it supports an additional $123 of output. Generating $223 of economic output in L.A. and Orange County. Next slide. This concludes my presentation. I invite you to visit our Web site to learn about. More about Long Beach Transit than all programs and services. Thank you for the opportunity to present to you today. I know your interest in our agency. Thank you. Okay. Thank you so much. And I'll take the privilege to move the item to receiver file. Is there a second? Speaker 2: And Sunday House. Speaker 4: Thank you. And before we go to a wild and public comment before our vote, I want to just just say thank you, Mr. McDonald, for taking the time to come out and indulging. The Council is late, as you have to present. While there is some separation between the operations of public transit and city government of Long Beach, Kansas was actually established by the City Council as the primary public transportation service provider in our city. And I can't recall the last time that there has been an opportunity for a public dialog between the Council and Beach Transit. This matter, Metro has come before a council on several projects and so I appreciate this opportunity to have dialog. Though it's not in person at this time and not what I mean necessarily a vision is will help foster a stronger partnership, I'm sure. And for many workers and residents in our community, including seniors lobbies, transit is the means to getting to work or getting to the grocery store or fulfilling their other essential needs. So providing confidence in public transportation during COVID 19 is very important, and you have given us quite a bit to think about in understanding how ridership has fallen off during this pandemic. With that, I have a number of questions, but in the interest of time and understanding that we still have a big agenda. I'm going to email you those questions. And and, you know, we'd like to get these these these are some answers in a public manner because, one, this transit is an important , important partner. You should be important to be a part of everything that we are considering in terms of strategic planning, including our economic development efforts, are our planning efforts throughout the city. We need to know and be in sync for the benefit of all of our residents. And of course, we want to promote public transportation as much as possible. We have another item that will be talking more about Safe Streets. And so those are my comments. With that, I'd like to turn it over to. Thank you. All Councilmembers at De House. Would you like to say something? Speaker 2: Yes, I think yes. Thank you, Councilmember Austin. And first and foremost, thank you, Mr. MacDonnell, for this great presentation. And I know I am very biased when it comes to Long Beach Transit. You know, not only because I'm I have been in Tacloban, a very active bus rider and very proud bus rider of Long Beach Transit, but also have been I have had the opportunity to work very closely with you in the board of directors position, which I hold very close to my heart. And I've seen Long Beach Transit grow immensely and really accomplish some really amazing goals throughout the time that I've been involved with Long Beach Transit and now as a city council person, I just welcome your your presentation and you know, my heart goes out to you transit during these COVID 19 days because of how detrimental it has been to to our city, to your company. It's just it's been hard in there, you know, seeing those numbers, how how drastic they have dropped really, really hurts me. But I know that we will all come out of this together and and stronger for it. I also wanted to commend you on your daily live program that if the public does not know about the pilot program, I encourage you to find out more about it. It is a program that tailored to the our most vulnerable population, which are seniors and people with disabilities. And it's a form of transportation that has been around for for many, many years. And it's not part of the ADA. But this is something or I should say it's not a requirement of the ADA because there is another transportation company that fulfills the ADA requirement. But Long Beach Transit has been very, very good in keeping this program around for Long Beach residents. Signal, Hill, Lakewood and. Now Paramount. So I'm I really love that that program. I think that, you know, I can speak forever on that program, but in the interest of time, I will I will let my other colleagues again speak. And also, I look forward to creating a stronger partnership along with city council and Long Beach Transit. So thank you again, Mr. McDonald, and please say hello to everyone at Long Beach Transit. Speaker 4: Thank you. Thank you. Councilmember Pearce is now cued up. Speaker 2: Thank you, Councilmember Austin, and thank you for that great presentation. I know it's kind of late. I know that there were some questions that my constituents raised about the process. Whenever you move pick up locations. And I know that that was particular to the night of the protests that happened downtown. So I'd just like to give you an opportunity to publicly share with folks kind of the process. I know there was a city a requirement on our end, but I'd love to hear what your process is on your. Speaker 4: So what we what I would what I would love to do is to send that in writing to you or come back in and go over that process, a deeply involved process, and involve the city. When we have a request. And I, I my understanding is what you're talking about is if we are going to relocate a bust up or move a bust up for any reason whatsoever, if it's we advise whoever you said when we had the curfews going on, we did it many times, had to relocate. When the when the the marches were going on in the city, we had to relocate bus or bus stops, way or the reroute busses. But if I if I can get exactly what you are asking, I can give a much clearer information if you can give me that in writing and I can send something back and or come back and explain exactly how we deal with our bus stops. Speaker 2: Of course, having it in writing would be great. I'd also in the future, I know that everybody is kind of looking at how we shift our our business models. Obviously, the same must go for transit, you know, not in an urgent timeline or anything. But you and I have had many, many conversations about the appropriate type of transit for areas like in our downtown and serving our senior populations and our our parking impacted populations. And so I definitely would love to hear some thoughts at a later date about how you guys see the next 2 to 3 years. And if that includes the same type of busses that you have now and just how we're being mindful about our new reality and our new income. But I really appreciated the presentation today. Definitely enlightening me. So thank you. Speaker 4: Thank you. Thank you, Councilmember Price. Speaker 2: Councilman Alston, I just wanted to thank Mr. McDonald for doing the presentation for us tonight. But more importantly, I wanted to thank you for working with us. I'm not sure how many council offices have reached out to you, but we certainly have had to reach out to you and ask for your consideration on some modifications in light of our Open Streets concept. We're all doing everything we can to help our businesses and our restaurants continue to thrive during this time. And the location of the bus stops in relation to where we have planned the parklet spaces to go. Has has at times been at odds. And so we've we've found ourselves having to come and ask for accommodation and we're really grateful that you are willing to consider that type of collaboration during these unprecedented times. So thank you so much. We appreciate it. Speaker 4: Thank you. Me. There's no public comment for this item. Wonderful. And with that said, thank you, Mr. McDonald, again for your presentation. Counsel. Let's go to a vote. Speaker 1: District one. District one. District two. Speaker 2: District three. Oh, I. Speaker 1: District four. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District five. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District six. Speaker 4: Oh. Speaker 1: District seven. Speaker 4: I. Speaker 1: District eight. District eight. Speaker 4: All right. Speaker 1: District nine. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 1: Motion carries. Speaker 4: We're so members, we have six items left. We will go on to go to item number 29.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to receive and file a presentation regarding Long Beach Transit's relationship with the City and steps taken to address recent challenges, including the COVID-19 pandemic. (Citywide)

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Speaker 4: Okay. So the next item, I believe, is the number 22. Speaker 1: Report from Human Resources recommendation to authorize to purchase a self-insured retention buy down at a premium not to exceed 831,000 citywide. Speaker 4: Is there a motive? Council member communities moved their second moves that they heard. Speaker 3: Richard. Speaker 4: Thank you. We will go to. And we get a brief staff report on this and then we'll go to Councilmember Pearce. Speaker 5: Yes. A very brief staff report. Speaker 2: Good evening, Mayor and city council members. The Human Resources Department is requesting City Council approval to purchase access liability insurance coverage with a self-insured retention of 7.5 million for a premium not to exceed 831,000. The city annually purchases excess municipal liability to cover exposures arising from city operations. Coverage is to be obtained through the city's casualty broker record of life insurance services. On June 23rd, 2020, the City Council approved the purchase of this year's policy for accessing municipal liability insurance with coverage limits of 40 million excess of a $10 million self-insured retention for all city departments, including the police department. Last year, due to historical claims, frequency and severity, the city's self-insured retention was increased to 10 million, the highest it had ever been this year. Early in the insurance renewal discussions, the city did not appear to be eligible for lowering the self-insured retention back down to 7.5 million. City risk management staff worked with the city's broker or insurance services to secure an option to buy down the current 10 million self-insured retention to 7.5 million. Self-insured retention through decisions against local government are trending towards larger amounts and are more, more and more likely to exceed 7.5 million. The City Attorney's Office, the Financial Management Department and the Human Resources Department all support this insurance change as a as an approach to better manage the Liability Insurance Fund and its financial status. Staff is available to answer any questions related to this request. Speaker 4: Thank you for that report. Council Member Richard, I'm sorry. Speaker 2: Pearce No questions. Just great job stuff. I know you guys worked hard to get to this point. Speaker 4: Council member interested? Nope. Okay. Let's call for the vote. Speaker 1: District one. Speaker 2: Hi. Speaker 1: District two. Speaker 4: I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Was there public comment? Speaker 1: There's no public comment on this item. Speaker 4: Okay. Speaker 1: District three. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District four. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 2: District five. I. Speaker 1: District seven. Speaker 4: I. Speaker 1: District eight. Speaker 4: II. Speaker 1: District nine. I know she cares. Speaker 4: Our next item is item number 23.

Contract

Recommendation to authorize City Manager, or designee, to purchase, through Alliant Insurance Services, a Self-Insured Retention buy-down at a premium not to exceed $831,000, for the period of July 15, 2020 to July 1, 2021. (Citywide)

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Speaker 4: Okay. So our last item of. Let's go to item number 26. Speaker 1: Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code by relating to interim housing red and adopted as red citywide. Speaker 4: And I get a motion to. Speaker 2: See. Speaker 4: The second. Speaker 2: Sun house. Speaker 4: They moved in second it. Is there anybody want to comment on this? There are none any public comment. Yes, we have. And control your time starts now. It. Speaker 2: And Control again. And I question whether the title for this agenda item. Speaker 4: Is in. Speaker 2: Conformance with the Brown Act. Nevertheless, to make clear this is a change in zoning to allow homeless shelters to be built in residential neighborhoods where they're currently not allowed. Also to allow homeless to live in their cars, in sites not previously allowed. This will. Speaker 4: Also. Speaker 2: Increase the low barrier emergency shelter. Speaker 4: Beds. Speaker 2: And increase accessibility for populations that currently have limited shelter options, which includes couples, parents with children and people with pets so they can remain together. I have no problems. With these additions I do have problems with. Speaker 4: The next group of. Speaker 2: People, which are those with multiple diagnoses, especially those with mental illness. Speaker 4: And substance abuse. Speaker 2: I do not believe that these. Homeless individuals that have this kind of problems. Speaker 4: Should be. Speaker 2: In the same shelter with families. Also the safe parking sites. Require. Staffing. Safety measures. Health care, restrooms, clean up lighting, utilities, water, trash disposal. I'm wondering who is going to be paying? For all of these services. I have the feeling that. This will bring. People from outside of Long Beach and to our city. And so if you do. Speaker 4: Pass this. Speaker 2: Safe parking site. Part of the resolution. I hope that it'll be limited to Long Beach residents only. Lastly, I'm asking that you. I give more public outreach. Before you vote. So I would ask you to leave this over until the other. The public has had a chance to be informed. Speaker 4: Thank you. Thank you. Next, we have carelessly. Speaker 3: Your time starts now. Speaker 2: I call this district. I urge you to vote no on this. Not because I oppose interim housing, but because the way this proposal is structured, it throws out the work done on the land use plan. And the public deserves to be. Speaker 4: Included and. Speaker 2: Understand that they also should have outreach on the Everyone Home project, which is the foundation these days for the policy on the. I am most concerned with the changing definitions of commercial and institutional. I couldn't decide what to call this. This is either a Trojan horse or Pandora's Box. This allows the developer to take parcels with a commercial designation on the land use plan and turn it into multi-story affordable housing. A.B. 1763 The rezoning of the homeless provides large parcels, parcels of land under the designation of commercial. These changes override the land use plan as it was approved. If you pass this item without public knowledge, you are violating the public trust. All that work done on the Hill, you might as well be thrown away. The proposal to put low barrier meaning they are not required to be in a program or mentally ill and not on meds into a community where children play and everyday citizens are being exposed to them does not promote safe and healthy living for the general population. If you want to build something as zoning is an issue. Speaker 4: You can do. Speaker 2: What you've always. Speaker 4: Been able to do, which is. Speaker 2: A conditional use permit. Thank you. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our last speaker for this item is Jordan. When your time starts now. Hi there. This is Jordan Winn from the second district. I signed up to this item very specifically to counteract the last two statements that you heard. Letters went out. And I just want to speak a little bit more frankly than I usually get to on items like this. It was kind of funny the way you heard the past to comment on this item as they lay out one vision versus another vision as to what is going to be the case with, you know , creating, you know, housing and shelter for people who are experiencing homelessness right now. One says that there's going to be temporary shelters that result. The other is saying that there's going to be affordable housing that result. And somehow that's the net negative overall versus the alternative, which is having people who are experiencing homelessness on your street unsafe and potentially vectors for a current coronavirus that is within our city. I think it's silly to be opposing plans that lay out and provide additional opportunities for us to aid people experiencing homelessness. I think that it is a scapegoat that people are using when they bring up the land use element on items like this. I think it makes a lot of sense and last week it was a unanimous vote by the council. I hope that you stick by your vote last week to approve this item. I think we need more now, more than ever, especially given the crisis that we have to look at our options as to how we can take care of people experiencing homelessness on the street today, and to open our hearts with kindness instead of trying to obstruct the ways in which we can actually get people to receive care. And off the street. There's a lot of stigmas around what people are experiencing on the street today. But I do want to impart three specific facts. Namely, number one, the majority of people who are experiencing homelessness on the street today are not experiencing what's called chronic homelessness with debilitating condition. They're experiencing temporary or episodic homelessness. These are families, students and kids who are on our streets that make up the majority of our population of people experiencing homelessness. Number two, 78% of people experiencing homelessness right now in the city of Long Beach are unsheltered. And number three, black homelessness has gone up by 30% in the past three years. We need to be taking a stand and continuing to build out our infrastructure of affordable housing, interim housing, bridge housing and other appropriate service resources to help aid people experiencing homelessness. I thank you for bringing this item forward and I hope you will approve it like you did last week. Thank you very much. Thank you. And that concludes public comment for this item. Okay. Thank you. Is there any other comment or any comment from the council? Speaker 2: Councilmember Alston, I cued. Speaker 4: Okay. Go for it. Speaker 2: Thank you. I just want to reiterate that I've been combating false narratives and fake news in my district now for a week. So I just want to be clear and ask development services. Does an approval of this plan today allow a property owner to build low income housing in commercial zones? Speaker 9: No council member. This item does not have to do with that. Speaker 2: Thank you. I've literally had to say that 100 times in the last week. Additionally, at meetings, I think that there are individuals that even stated now that they want a conditional use permit and a lot of the properties identified, at least the ones that I've specifically worked on with specific people, have had specific questions. They all require conditional use permit to get to the next round of consideration. And furthermore, a lot of the facilities identified as potential allowable have been. Discussed and the possibility of them there in in our lifetime is is is limited because of the current uses and other barriers. And so that one of the things that continues to come up is why did we identify so many places. If we don't need as many as are identified on the map and I think that you've clearly stated before, that's because as a part of this plan, we are required to come up with options and that the market is really going to drive the results. Is that. Speaker 4: Accurate? Speaker 9: That's exactly accurate council members. So you have some very high land values and higher rents in your district, making it relatively less likely that these types of uses would populate in your district. But we do need to provide a wide range of available options. One, because we're required to do that by state law. But two, because the chance of any individual site developing for these types of uses is so low that we need to provide many, many options out there so that hopefully the market and the funding sources are able to deliver one or two of these types of uses across the entire city. So when you look at those maps, they do show broad areas. That's not to say that there's going to be anywhere near that amount of these types of uses. This is really just about the opportunity and this is just about changes to the zoning code as to what is allowed. And there is no project whatsoever contemplated at this time. Speaker 2: And the last question that I received and addressed yesterday. Was related to. And thank you, Miss Tatum, because sometimes I go to these meetings and people are. Yelling information at me over and over again, and I start to doubt myself. And the briefings that you guys have provided and the questions that I've asked over time and I know this has been a two year project, but I think the main question was related to if there were any portion of a map that was colored. So let's say on a map that has a bunch of red coloring and a neighbor says, I want this one red coloring removed, that that's impossible to do because this is not a change of zoning. The zoning remains in place. It is the change to the definition of available uses for that particular zone and that we would not be able to exclude any one particular property. Thank you for the question. Councilmember Mongeau, this is Alexis, our appraiser. Yes, you are correct. We would not be able to change one particular parcel zone as that's considered spot zoning and is prohibited by state law. And we wouldn't even be able to remove a a, a, a section that has multiple parcels on it. If it's currently zoned a particular way, you couldn't exclude one or the other, all of them within that zone. Correct. I'm sorry. Wonderful. Thank you. I don't think there were any other questions that came up at the community discussions I've had over the last week or so. But I want to just thank Oscar, RC and Chris and the whole team and all the work that you guys have done. I actually do know one other question you guys answered. There was a question related to the amount of community input. On this process. Could you give a little bit of background on that? Certainly there were several meetings held, the first of which was beginning in October of 2019 and was actually a focus group with. Speaker 1: External stakeholder holders consisting of a range of participants. Speaker 2: From Long Beach City College, Cal State, Long Beach, Linc Housing a number of other nonprofits. And then we went and did our homework and research. And then eventually in early or late January of this year, we held two community open house meetings, one at the Long Beach Multi-Service Center. Speaker 1: And the second one. Speaker 2: At the Mark Twain Neighborhood Library. For both of the events, messages were sent out via link, LRB and other social media format. The noticing is about 1500 people total from those two, from those methods of notification. And we had about 20 to 25 participants from both of the meetings. And we also have posted the material on the Internet since January of this year, allowing people to who are unable to attend to review the information by that method as well. Wonderful. Thank you for all of your work on this. I have no further questions. Speaker 4: Harry. Nothing else from the council. So we. Let's go to a vote. Speaker 1: District one. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District to district three. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District four. Speaker 4: I. Speaker 1: District five. Speaker 2: II. Speaker 1: District seven. Speaker 4: I. Speaker 1: District eight. District nine. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 1: Motion carries.

Ordinance

Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code by amending Sections 21.15.966, 21.15.2290, 21.15.2795, 21.15.2810, 21.15.2985, 21.15.3095, Table 31-1, Table 32-1, Table 33-2, and Table 34-1; by adding Sections 21.15.1475, 21.15.2382, 21.15.2793, 21.45.153, 21.45.163, 21.51.278, 21.52.238, and 21.52.269.1; and by repealing Section 21.15.2475, all relating to interim housing, read and adopted as read. (Citywide)

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Speaker 4: So we'll go to another audience for a second reading. Number 27. Speaker 1: Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code relating to parking at city owned and operated lots with disabled plate or placard read and adapted as read citywide. Speaker 4: However, Councilmember Susie Price motion is their second. Thank you. Councilmember Richardson, Councilmember Price, you want to speak to this? Speaker 2: You. Speaker 4: As a member, Richardson. No. Is there public comment on item 27? Speaker 1: There's no public comment on item 27. Speaker 4: Let's call for a roll vote. Speaker 1: District one. District two. I. District three. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District four. Speaker 4: All right. Speaker 1: District five. I. District seven. Speaker 4: I. Speaker 1: District eight. Speaker 4: Are. Speaker 1: District nine. Speaker 4: Right. Speaker 1: Motion carries.

Ordinance

Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code by adding Section 10.34.040 relating to parking at City-owned and operated lots with disabled plate or placard, read and adopted as read. (Citywide)

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Speaker 1: Motion carries. Speaker 4: Okay. My final item tonight is new business item number 30. Speaker 1: Report from Health and Human Services recommendation to execute all necessary documents to amend contract with curative for COVID 19 testing kits and lab services to increase the contract amount by 690,000. Speaker 2: Citywide version site comparison there has. Speaker 4: Both the second. Duke. We have just a really quick staff report on this. Speaker 5: Yes. So we do purchasing for our testing kits. That's what this is. We did an emergency purchase under the emergency authority, granted the city manager and we're bringing this to you for ratification. We are making additional changes to our testing. We know a lot of people are coming to our testing sites, will be announcing that later this week and will be testing about 13 to 1400 people every single day. And this this money will help us do that. And if you have any specific questions, Kelly might still be up and awake on the call. Speaker 4: So we think she's there. We appreciate this. This is a very I wanted a quick staff report. Obviously, this is very important for the city and the people are lined up trying to get called the test. So most consecutive, you know, is there any public comment on. Speaker 1: There's no public comment on this item. Speaker 4: Let's go to a vote. Speaker 1: District one. District two. I. District three i. District four. Speaker 4: I. Speaker 1: District five. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District seven. Speaker 4: Hi. Speaker 1: District eight. Speaker 4: I. Speaker 1: District nine. Speaker 4: I yield my time. Speaker 1: The motion carries. Speaker 2: A. Speaker 4: Okay. So that that concludes our agenda. I'd like to go into new business. Any new business? If you will indulge me for a second. I would like to just give some closing remarks. Recommended by the mayor. I just want everybody to know that July 26 marks the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act

Contract

Recommendation to authorize City Manager, or designee, to execute any and all necessary documents to amend Contract No. 35546 with Curative, Inc., of Menlo Park, CA, for COVID-19 testing kits and lab services, to increase the contract amount by $690,000, pursuant to Chapters 2.69 and 2.85 of the Long Beach Municipal Code (LBMC), and to include a contingency in the amount of $3,475,000, for a revised total contract amount not to exceed $6,507,813; and Increase appropriations in the amount of $4,165,000 in the Health Fund Group in the Health and Human Services Department. (Citywide)

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Speaker 3: Refrain from doing so. We're going to go ahead and go into our first hearing and and then right into public comment. Speaker 0: Report from Development Services recommendation to receive supporting documentation into the record concluded the public hearing declared ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code relating to interim housing. Read the first time and lead over the next regular meeting of the City Council for Final Reading and adopt a resolution to submit the ordinance amendments to the California Coastal Commission citywide. Speaker 3: Thank you. Go ahead. Read this overstep. Speaker 1: Mara, I'd like to introduce the development services staff that will make this presentation. We have Oscar Orsi, Development Services Director, as well as Alejandro Sanchez Lopez for this presentation. Speaker 4: Thank you, Mayor, and members of the city council. Alejandro, our project planner, will give you a brief presentation. Good afternoon, honorable mayor and members of the City Council. The item before you today the citywide zoning code amendment to update the definitions, land use regulations and operating standards related to various forms of interim housing. This update seeks to address local, regional and statewide housing and homelessness crisis by expanding the zoning opportunities for various forms of interim housing. Update and add definitions for said housing forms and related services. And establish operating standards that are based on best practices for these uses. In doing so, it would bring the city into compliance with applicable policies, most notably SB two, which was adopted in 2007 and has specific zoning requirements for emergency shelters that the city does not currently meet. This update will make it easier to develop interim housing and related uses and broaden the opportunity sites for said uses in an equitable manner throughout the city. The next few slides will walk through each of the major changes proposed. This isn't. It's a different kind. Speaker 3: Again. Staff You guys are putting up a different presentation on the screen right now. So can you please take this one off? Speaker 5: So my city clerk is working on pulling that stuff off. Speaker 3: Thank you. Speaker 4: Okay. Moving along. First, the update will create a new definition for interim housing. Interim housing is an umbrella term that encompasses all uses involving temporary sleeping accommodations for people experiencing housing insecurity. These uses include emergency shelters, transitional housing rates, housing and safe parking sites. In a definition. In addition to the definition itself, the update will establish general operating standards for interim housing. These operating standards include a coordinated assessment system to connect residents to services and networks, along with security and lighting requirements for all sites. Next, the definition for emergency shelters will be amended to allow for kitchens and additional supporting amenities in shelters. Shelters will also be allowed as an accessory use in existing religious facilities and as a primary use in certain residential, industrial, commercial and institutional zones to address the dearth of site availability currently allowed. As a map here shows, current zoning regulations severely restrict where shelters are permitted in the city. The following map shows where Seltzers may be permitted either by write or with an entitlement. The hatching indicates an entitlement is required in that corresponding zone. Next, the definition for transitional housing will eliminate a minimum length of stay. Specify a target population and require there to be a link to supportive services. Land use regulations will also be updated to expand this housing to be allowed in the industrial and commercial zones shown on the map as well as pre permitted in an ancestor use and when incidental to a primary institutional use. Next, a new definition will be created for safe parking sites. Safe parking programs have become more common throughout the state. Different jurisdictions addressed the housing crisis at the local level. These sites are limited to properties outside of the right of way that are managed by an institutional or nonprofit organization to provide a safe place to park overnight for folks who are working towards gaining permanent housing. These sites help to address how to maintain public safety, provide services to people at risk of falling into cyclical homelessness, and prevent spillover effects into residential neighborhoods. Safe parking sites are proposed to be permitted in limited commercial, industrial and institutional zones as an accessory and as an accessory use in all zones only where all lots are owned and operated by the same entity. The update will also establish operating standards to minimize the impact these sites have and implement best practices. Next, the definition for supportive housing will be amended to specify the various populations that can be served by this use. Additionally, the land use regulations will be expanded to allow for more sites in certain industrial and commercial zones, as shown on the map. Next. Social Services. Social services facilities will have the definition updated to broaden the scope of applicable services, such as showers or storage facilities, Imani's for pets and meal services. These facilities will also be permitted in additional commercial zones. Finally, it is important to note that this proposal is not in conjunction with any one specific project, but merely a zoning change. In all zones where an interim housing use is allowed by. Right. Any project will still be required to submit for an administrative land use review. This review process maintains a level of staff oversight and an appeals process for any agreed parties, but it does also provide a reduced application cost and a streamlined process for applicants. As an example, the map on the right shows that Magnolia Industrial Group Business Improvement District area in the Purple outlined the majority of this area, which is hatch wood acquired and entitlement for an emergency shelter to be located there or any project in the areas in dark gray at the North and South ordinance would be required to go through the administrative land use review process. As a reminder, city staff conducted three public outreach events and two presentations to the Planning Commission. Public comment at the outreach events was generally supportive of the code changes. In addition to the public outreach notice of a public hearing was published in the Long Beach Press Telegram on June 23rd of this year and notice of the proposed code amendment was distributed throughout the city. Link Lobby. Email Notification System. City Councilors before them. The public comments submitted to the city since a hearing notice of public. In conclusion, the Planning Commission's recommendations that the City Council accept the negative declaration for the project, approve the Interim Housing Zoning Code Amendment, and adopt a resolution to submit the Code Amendment to the California Coastal Commission. Thank you for your time. This includes staff presentation. I'm available to answer any questions. Speaker 3: Thank you. I'm going to start with councilman's in Dallas. Speaker 1: Thank you very much for this presentation. I know that it it is something very good that, you know, that we're doing this and I am supportive. Thank you. Speaker 3: The second by Councilmember Pearce. Speaker 1: Thank you, Mayor, and thank you staff. I am really happy to see this come before us today. I think that the city, at least in my four years on the council, we consistently try to identify new locations. We consistently have conversations about where else in the district or in the city. We can put some of these transitional supportive housing and also safe parking. And so I was happy to see a lot of areas marked in the second district. I had one question. You mentioned that existing ones would still have to go through a review to be able to operate there. I just want to make sure that we're not and I think I know the answer, but we're not setting ourselves up to where like our transitional parking that we've already identified in those locations that going through this process would mean that they no longer could operate that transitional parking where we've already identified areas. Speaker 4: No. Councilmember, this is Christopher Coons. To answer more precisely, existing uses that were approved by the city have existing rights to continue. I think that reference was made to there are operating standards associated with this package in front of council and we will be attempting to apply those operating standards to all entities, including those that already exist . So this is going to help us in terms of our community expectations and being able to to make sure the operations are run well. The other thing is we oftentimes see these entities grow or change and they subsequently come back to the city for various permits. In that case, these new regulations would apply to them. Speaker 1: Wonderful. And I had a question about outreach. I knew about them at the Planning Commission. I have to say that it either on my end or I'm not sure what what slipped through, but I was not aware of the public meetings being had around this topic. So can you share with me how we did those meetings? I see. One was locally here near us at the Mark Twain Library. How were those notified and what was attendance like for those? Good evening. Speaker 0: Councilwoman. This is Alexis Harpaz. Speaker 1: A current planning officer at the. Three events. So the two open house meetings were advertised via the link L.B. as well as to stakeholders. And on our link l be notification. It's about 1500 people. Speaker 0: That are. Speaker 1: Subscribed to that and the attendance at both of the meetings was ranged between 20 and 25 people total. Yeah. I just. I really love this idea, and I wish that I saw more areas on the map that were open to that and so on. I guess my last question would be the consideration around putting these really only in the commercial zones and adjacent areas. Can you just speak to that before I give my wholehearted excitement support for this item? Speaker 4: Yes, sir. Council Member So this is a legislative item and we feel that it correctly addresses an existing problem where the city is out of compliance with state law and city attorney is on the line, if you'd like to hear more about that. So I hear your comment. I think that staff was balancing input from stakeholders that, you know, some may have like your comment felt that that additional sites were needed. Other comments were received that what the city is proposing is too many sites or includes parts of town, that it's not included. So our goal was to expand the number of available sites to do so consistent with state law and federal guidance and to do something that was workable and an improvement against the status quo. We're going to evaluate these as part of our housing element and as part of our annual reports back to council. So if what we've come up with tonight is not sufficient, it would be within Council's discretion to add additional areas or make changes in the future. You have public comments in your packet. Some of those comments are positive. Some of them are negative. It's never a fun position, but oftentimes we know we found a sweet spot when not anyone is perfectly satisfied and everyone is only slightly dissatisfied. And we think that that's where we found ourselves with the regulations that are in front of the Council. Speaker 1: I really appreciate that thoughtful comment and that I wholeheartedly support the fine. Thank you. Speaker 3: Thank you. You know, I do have other council members. I have a comment, but I didn't see it. Is there any comments from anyone else, Madam Clerk, that we need to do from the public or any sort of appellant comment that has to happen? Or can I continue with the Council comments? Speaker 0: There are three public comments for this item. If you'd like to continue with those. Speaker 3: Well, are they are they connected to the actual hearing or are they just just public comments? Speaker 0: No, they're connected to the actual hearing. Speaker 3: Okay. Let me let me let me do let me do. No, I understand it. But I mean, is this members of the public or are these individuals that are that staff has been working on as part of the hearing that was. Speaker 0: Members of the public? Speaker 3: Okay. Okay, then let me finish with the councilwoman. I'll go to the members of the public. Perfect. So Councilman Richardson and Councilman Super now I'm fine. Speaker 2: I cued up the second, but I've got to my comments. Thank you. Speaker 3: The ultimate super or not. Speaker 2: Thank you. I just had a question for staff. If you could walk us through the parking things and specifically the traffic circle area on the map that it shows, like a big red area. And if anything you can add to how this process will work, that would be helpful. Speaker 4: Sure. So the safe parking sites, we do have at least one operating in the city today. And what we were trying to do was formalize the opportunity for that use. So the map on the slide, which does include some commercial sites around the traffic circle, as well as sites throughout the city, are just locations that the zoning would now allow for a safe parking use. There are no locations proposed at this moment and they would need to go through the appropriate process. And these typically are an accessory use, which means you have a primary use that could be a church most commonly, but might be a different type of use or social service use, even a retail use. And they allow folks that are living in their vehicle to safely park overnight. This is something that occurs without the benefit of regulation throughout the city today. And what we're trying to do is have it occur in safe locations with specific standards so that things like waste and noise are controlled. So you did note that the location within your district, but if you can see the slide, there are locations in every council district of the city. And what we're trying to accomplish is places for people who are living in their car to try to park overnight without being towed, but to do so in a safe manner, where there is a sponsor who is making sure that the location is clean and orderly and that folks, to the degree possible, are matched with social services. Speaker 2: Okay. Thank you. Speaker 3: Okay. I don't have anyone else on the council to do that. Mr. Clarke, can you do the public comment? Speaker 2: First we have Janet West. Your time starts now. Okay. Speaker 1: Um, I objected to this zoning update. The public was not informed on Housing First. State law, which requires admission of drug and alcohol users even if they refuse to get rehabilitative therapy services. The public was not informed that the target population and current ordinances will be eliminated for supportive housing. In fact, there was misleading information on that table and personnel did not include looking at AB 1763, passed in 2019, which includes major density and incentives for these housing developments. The public was not informed of the increased parking problems which which will result from these changing changes. The public was not informed that these developments are not restricted to Long Beach area residents. The public was not informed that a person may be designated as homeless solely based on their oral statement. That there's a possibility of them becoming homeless. The public was only given a vague, term, appropriate level of security with no indication of what that means. The public was not informed of how the neighborhood compatibility will be achieved with no required on site staff. If anything, that COVID 19 has taught us is that we should not be increasing density. These new ordinance will increase density, especially with the major increases to the density for low income housing. Supportive Service. Supportive housing is included in all the residential areas of the city. This will change our city and it will change it forever. And although I know the supportive housing requirements are, for them to be in all residential areas is a state law. Long Beach. Speaker 2: Should not. Speaker 1: Be increasing the likelihood of these developments being built. Thank you for your time. Speaker 4: Thank your next speakers and control your time starts now. Speaker 1: Good evening. And Cantrell. And my main objection to this is lack of notice. I don't receive the press telegram, as many do not also don't. And the only notice I am aware of was. Published in the Press Telegram on June 1st. I am very. Much agree that we need to get the homeless off the streets and into safe and sanitary conditions. But there was no time to read all the pros and cons on this item, and I urge you to lay it over till the public has been informed. Also carelessly attempted to sign in to speak and missed the 12:00 deadline because it's not published. So I would like to read. Speaker 2: Her. Speaker 1: Comments. She says there are many good things in the every home report, every one home report. And I'm pleased the city is moving out to work to work out the homeless issue. However, many residents in Long Beach do not know about this rezoning and do not realize the rezoning could result in a low barrier homeless facility. Speaker 2: In. Speaker 1: Close proximity to their neighborhoods and schools. Low barrier means the clientele are not obligated to commit to drug or alcohol rehab and the mentally ill who at times exhibit violent behavior, will be residing in these facilities. Only two public meetings were held on this back in January, which is inadequate public outreach on a serious topic that will change streets and neighborhoods. I doubt more than 25 people in the city know about the rezoning plans. Please delay moving forward with approving rezoning and request that town hall meetings be held in all districts to roll out the Everyone Home report and capture and integrate public input into these plans. I'm concerned that policy statements in the Everyone Home report are being implemented without a public vetting process. The maps shown in the staff report seem to identify locations, but there is no verbiage that makes these maps a governing document, and that is the conclusion of Chorus's report. Speaker 2: Thank you. Speaker 4: Thank you. Our last speaker is to Africa. Your time starts now. Speaker 2: Hello. Dave sugar on file? I'm speaking to you from outside City Hall, where I'm staring at a lot of confetti. Two quick points. Density does not mean overcrowding. And that's a very important thing in the middle of a global pandemic. We want people to be able to live. And live well and live safely. And we seem to do it just fine now, though, we're building more buildings. But second point, equity is not about keeping people. Right. I mean, even from people who got in the game, it's about picking the team that puts people in this socially antagonistic relationship, like being a perpetrator and the victim or mistaken identity or overgrowth. We're in the middle of a pandemic. We have a vested interest in not only compassionate. Servicing and the application thereof. But in continued public education will thank. Thank you. That concludes public comment for this item. Speaker 3: Thank you for that. And there is no way I'm going to go and cause a hearing. There is no more council comment either. And we'll go ahead and do a roll call vote. Please call the Robert. Speaker 0: District one. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District two, i. District three. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District Court. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 0: District five. I. District six. Speaker 2: II. Speaker 0: District seven. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: District eight. Speaker 2: Hi. Speaker 0: District nine. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 0: Motion carries. Speaker 3: Thank you. We are moving on. Madam, quick, if you can facilitate the public comment. Period. Thank you.

Ordinance

Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code by amending Sections 21.15.966, 21.15.2290, 21.15.2795, 21.15.2810, 21.15.2985, 21.15.3095, Table 31-1, Table 32-1, Table 33-2, and Table 34-1; by adding Sections 21.15.1475, 21.15.2382, 21.15.2793, 21.45.153, 21.45.163, 21.51.278, 21.52.238, and 21.52.269.1; and by repealing Section 21.15.2475, all relating to interim housing, read and adopted as read. (Citywide)

LongBeachCC

LongBeachCC_07072020_20-0637

Speaker 3: Q Mr. Clarke, we're going to go to the regular agenda and we're going to do item 24, just so the next two items are 24 and 25. So we'll start with 24. Speaker 0: Communication from Councilwoman Zendejas, Councilmember Pierce, Councilwoman Mongo, Vice Mayor Andrews. Recommendation to request City Manager to take advantage of upcoming available external funding with the goal of creating an emergency housing incentive program. Speaker 3: Okay. This comes from us, and they have to destroy your item. Speaker 1: Yes, Mayor, thank you. First of all, I would like to thank my colleagues for joining me in and helping put this item forward. I'd also like to thank a city staff, especially Theresa Chandler, for all her outstanding work that she's been putting into this day in and day out. As you know, based on the results of our homeless count that we that were released this month, Long Beach saw a 7% increase in our numbers of unsheltered people from 2019 to 2020. We should also be clear that this does not reflect the thousands of people who have likely become house homeless during this time of COVID 19 . Even after an outbreak of COVID 19. I was hearing from my residents every day that they're looking for solutions to help address homelessness. And each day, my colleagues and I would say the same thing. This means that. As a community. We all know that homeless is is a huge problem and it needs to be addressed. This said, our current circumstances have left us with opportunities to rethink what emergency housing looks like. In California, Project Roomkey has helped draw a line between the needs of our unsheltered neighbors and our historical low motel occupancy rate during COVID 19. Whether someone wishes to stay with with a partner, a family or animal companions, or if the fear of violence and health issues is in a shelter project room key and the ability to use the motels as emergency shelters has really helped during this time. Unlike emergency shelters which have low occupancy rate, our project ROOMKEY units are at 97% occupied. So which which also indicates that there's a big need for them and that folks are actually being. I mean, folks are actually taking advantage of having this opportunity. Our city staff. I mean, our city has around 5000 hotels and motel rooms right now, the majority of which are being kept empty right now due to the crisis that we're in. The goal here is to create incentives for additional motels in Long Beach to participate in a program that continues expanding access to room for everyone in our city in need. It is of utmost importance to note that we would benefit from the the motel owners and operators by compensating them for rooms and that otherwise would actually just be sitting there without occupancy. So we're healthy. Not only are we helping are those experiencing homelessness, but we're also helping those businesses who are in dire need of business. We also have the opportunity to offset some of these some of these costs. With efforts and working together with the state and federal funding that is that is going to be available and is available at this time. In terms of funding, I think it's important to note that while items request. Staff to to come back in 30 days. Many opportunities are are very short time. So we must act quickly on this. This month alone, $5,500 million became available from the state of coronavirus relief funds for motel acquisitions and non congregational bridging housing. The funding begins to be has begun to be distributed and it is a first come, first served basis. So this is why it's also very important to act now. There's also additional 450 million of the state coronavirus relief fund that will be available for cities who have not previously received their own unique allocation of CRF dollars. Long Beach included. The city is also set to receive 13.8 million in phase two emergency solution grants from the Federal Government of Housing and Urban Development. These funds can be put towards non congregational shelters as well. And finally, it is the. The case of the state's coronavirus relief fund. In that case, if it cannot help for the long term ongoing expenses of such a program, 350 million of these, say General Fund, is is most likely to become available to cities and could be used for this. And important means. There are several avenues for federal and state resources available. But again, we must act quickly to make sure that we that we get what we deserve and what is needed to help our. Neighbors experiencing homelessness. Again, with that said, I really, really appreciate my colleagues for joining in on this item with me. Thank you. Speaker 3: Councilwoman. I have a box cued up, so we'll just go Vice Mayor Andrews and then right into Councilmember Pearce. Speaker 2: Thank you very much, Mia. I first of all, I think council and data will engage me on this item. You know, in my opinion, this woman in District six has been the most proactive in building and accepting affordable housing in the district. You go down Long Beach Boulevard, you'll see it. We're still building. Revamping current motels into supportive housing is a very creative way to approach blight and illegal activities already occurred. And these sites. With the proper safety protocol and community engagement and this idea, I think we can approach two problems with one solution. But my hope and request is that we look and expand opportunities. We do so equally and across all nine districts so we can all truly be a part of the solution to end homelessness. And thank you very much for this item. Speaker 1: I'll go ahead and start, since it sounds like the mayor already called on me. As Councilwoman Pierce, I want to thank Councilmembers and de Health for bringing this item forward. And, you know, one thing that some of us keep saying about this moment in history is that it's an opportunity for us to lift up some of the work that we've been trying to tackle for a long time. And this is also the case with housing, transitional housing and trying to make sure that we provide services for those that are experiencing homelessness. I know that this council has long reviewed opportunities to be able to add additional transitional housing, as was noted with the hearing item that we had today. And so I love this item. I would like to ask staff on the what are we currently doing? And the funding sources that councilmembers and DE have mentioned are those opportunities that we think we can make a big impact. And is that impact only in being able to provide additional vouchers and incentives? Or where are we with the bigger conversation that we've had about being able to purchase some of these motels that have been problem areas in transit, turn them over to transitional housing? Speaker 5: This time. So I will turn that over to Theresa Chandler. I do want to say that this is an area that we're excited about. This is the very first time we've had these types of resources and be able to stand up a program such as taking over a hotel and making that our area that we accommodate some of our homeless clients. And it's been successful. We've learned a lot, and we're interested in doing a lot more. And there is now federal and state money that can help but do do both of the things that you talked about. So I will turn that to Theresa. Speaker 1: So exciting. Thank you. Oh, thank you. Thank you, council members, for bringing this item to the forefront. As Tom said, it is a very important issue for us. And as we've had the opportunity to work with Project ROOMKEY and have it have participants in Project ROOMKEY, we certainly don't want every turn those folks into homelessness. And so we're excited at the opportunities that are coming to us through the State Project Homekey program. And so the application guidelines have not quite been released, but we will be applying for those funds. And so we do have an affordable housing workgroup within our city teams where we are putting together lists of potential sites for acquisition . And of course, you know, we can look at the sites, hotels, motels, different things across the city available for acquisition. The issue has always been how to fund the programs ongoing. So with the current funding coming in through the Emergency Solutions Grant and also the second round of HAP funding, the expectation of about $3 million to come to Long Beach. There are some opportunities where we can actually move forward with project based vouchers and other types of programing set forth and then also with future HUD funding potentially for permanent supportive housing. So this is a really exciting opportunity for us to move forward and to keep our neighbors experiencing homelessness in housing as they've been sheltered. And also just just as a city to collectively wrap our arms around folks who have previously been on the streets. Wonderful. Thank you. And, you know, we've got, I think, four motels off the top of my head that would make great locations in the second District. So I fully support that. I also just before passing it on, I want to say, you know, there's been a lot of work that led up to this moment, not only with the current COVID, but with Measure H in the county and Andy Kerr and the housing groups that have done work to get us to this point . So there's a couple of exciting moments tonight that I just want to make sure we recognize that this is what happens when you never let your foot off the gas and you just continue to try and try and eventually some things will fall into place. So thank you guys for this. Appreciate it. Speaker 3: Thank you, Councilwoman. Next up, we have Councilwoman Mango and then Councilmember Richardson. Councilwoman Mongo. That's when Mongo. Okay. Let me move on and come back. Councilman Richardson. Speaker 2: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. A couple of things. First of all, thanks for bringing this item forward. Councilmember and House is certainly on time given given all the efforts the city and the region has done to ensure that we don't lose focus on the homelessness issue while we face a crisis on multiple fronts. Two things I want to highlight, though. Look, I understand that the goal is to incentivize folks to participate and project homekey. And and so Homekey is what you know, a lot of the funding that's coming out is Project HOMEKEY separately from Roomkey. And I understand that there's a deadline of July 15 or the process opens July 15th, rather, for hotels and organizations to apply to participate. I know that some of this research may not come back until well after that, but I think that we should do and I hear from staff what I think we should do is use our communication channels to make sure that we promote this window that's opening, because I know that other cities are beginning to do that. Let's make sure that we promote that this grant, this opportunity is opening. And then secondly, whatever incentives that we put forward for people to participate, we can maybe talk about those now before they're even in place to demonstrate that whoever has participated will receive whatever incentives we're able to put together so that they understand that although the incentive may not be in place today, then it may take, you know, a number of weeks to pull it together. Go ahead and apply now for the program. And I think it's important that we we nuance that. Tom, Tom, do you understand what I'm what what I'm trying to articulate here? Speaker 5: Yeah, I think we do. So we are going to apply for those dollars. And as I understand it, if we get good actors who are working with us and want to be able to do this work and they're really doing a good job, that if we come up with some kind of program in the future on this , that they would certainly benefit and be a part of that to the extent we can legally do that. Speaker 2: Right. And and my understanding is when the application opens up, it's not necessarily cities who apply. It would be motel owners and affordable housing developers. And those are the types who would apply for funding. In addition, it may be in addition to cities, but but that's that's the challenge. We don't have our folks ready and I get a number of motel owners may say, hey, this isn't for me. But they need to understand that, number one, they can make money from this and it helps the city and we will support this this process. So so I think the communication to them and making sure that that gets our message gets out is important. Thanks a lot. I'm satisfied there. The second thing that I would say, just, you know, I want to make sure that we are and I've talked with Tracy Longo, who led our motel strategy. I want to make sure that we connect the dots between our nuisance motel strategy in the city and this project. Homekey, because there may be opportunities for some of these motels that are nuisances. There's already strategies to acquire them that we can leverage some of these resources to make sure that we are we are engaging some of these motels so that ultimately we can convert them into a much better use that has less crime, less human trafficking, less violence, and something more stable like affordable housing. I just want to make sure that we lift that a lift up that point that. Speaker 3: And next week Councilman Mongo on the line yet her councilman Mongo. Okay. Let me go to Councilwoman Pryce and then, Councilman, your anger. Speaker 1: Q Mr. Mayor, so I want to thank Council members and the House for bringing this item and for her colleagues that are colleagues that signed onto the item. I think it's a fantastic opportunity. I think Councilmember Pearce is correct that as unfortunate as the situations around us have been since the middle of March, they have provided some opportunities, especially in terms of grants and opportunities for us to get resources from the state and federal government and the county to try to address some of these issues that we've been talking about for years. So I think this is a great opportunity. I also want to acknowledge the great work of the United Way team who I know several of my colleagues had an opportunity to talk with in advance of tonight's meeting, and they just did a fantastic briefing for for those who are like me, who enjoy reading things. I thought that their briefing sheets were really, really well prepared and very objective. And I just want to acknowledge that we get briefed by a lot of entities and weigh in from a lot of different entities. And I found that the presentation tonight and the efforts by those who care about this topic to educate council members before the vote was really fantastic. So I just wanted to acknowledge that and thank you council members and our house for bringing them forward. Speaker 3: Jan Ringa. Speaker 2: Thank you. And I want to agree with the council, my colleagues, in terms of our customers and neighbors bringing this forward. It's a great idea at the time that I've gone beyond our need. We really need to have this. It's been long overdue, and I'm glad that it's here and that we're discussing this. But as we know, when we're dealing with homeless individuals, we have the additional challenge of the services on there, and they're wanting to take advantage of some of the services that are being offered to them. So with that, I'm asking the question as to are there moneys being set aside for additional services to individuals who are experiencing homelessness and who would be able to take advantage of these programs? Because as it's been said before and other previous comments and by researches and papers that we've had, we've seen it takes 14, 15, sometimes 20 contacts with a homeless person before they accept any kind of assistance. So with that, is there any. Plan or any resource is going to be going into helping them personally as well with behavioral services and other types of needs that they may have before you take advantage of these programs. Speaker 1: Sorry for the delay. Yes, that is always something that we're looking at on how to engage folks. There's more funding through the ESG dollars as well for that that those outreach efforts and which leads into case management. And that really is what helps wraparound folks to get them connected to services. So there's always that's the first thing we look at when funding opportunities come in that have more flexibility is how we can truly connect with people. Because, as you said, it's about 17 contacts to get people to just say yes. But then the real work happens when you want it, when people are then ready to come in and then getting them to stay inside. So that's always a priority for us. Speaker 2: Well, again, thank the council members in their house for bringing this forward to full support. Thank you. Speaker 3: Thank you. Councilmember councilman, among other. Councilman Mongo. I know you said that you're. Speaker 1: Can you hear me? Yes, Mayor. Hi. Thank you. And the mayor? Was I the second year of the motion? Before I got disconnected. Speaker 3: Before you got disconnected, you know, you queued up against a lawsuit in the queue because you didn't know you were not. Speaker 1: Okay. Thank you for this opportunity. I really appreciate the work that Councilwoman Sun has said and her team also along with the work the city staff did. This is important stuff. I think that fining people homes is the first step. We also need to have the plans that go with the the motel room opportunities. So I like that this is a comprehensive approach. I like that the city is looking at this along with many other things, including rent abatement and other things for that fund. I think it's important to outline and oversee all the funds in their entirety. And while I appreciate the item and signed on to it, because it's important, it's also important for us to take each of those funds as they come in and evaluate all the different opportunities for working and healing and supporting the residents of our city . So I just want to keep that in perspective as we go forward. There are a lot of funds. I know the city staff put together quite a comprehensive list of of opportunities that we can use these funds. And so I want to make sure that we look at the best return on investment. I think this is a very good return. When we do house people. We also need to make sure that those individuals then move into more permanent housing to reopen those beds up for other individuals who need the transitional housing. Thank you. Speaker 3: Great. I got it. Before I turn this back over to councilman and he has to close. Want to just add so I know there's been a lot of work in this area happening. I think this is a great piece of legislation to kind of put all that together and and move the city forward. I wanted to just maybe ask Mr. Kerley, who's probably, I'm guessing, is on the line as well. So there have been a lot of efforts this year, I know through the through the mayor's group and just through our legislative or legislative calendar, an agenda on obviously getting more funding directly for homelessness. Obviously, Project ROOMKEY has been a big part of the governor's initiative around COVID. Do you do you Mr.. Mr. Kerley, how much did we get from a funding perspective? I don't I couldn't remember the number of stuff in my head. I know we made a last minute push to get additional funding for homelessness separate of the COVID recovery money. You have that number for Long Beach by any chance for this year. Speaker 4: Yes. Separate from the hotel motel acquisition program, they set aside 300 million total for homeless services. And we're estimating based on last year's allocation methodology, that we would receive around 3 million this year for homeless services. And those are separate from the CARES Act dollars. So they're tied to the general fund and are not tied to the December deadline for using those dollars. Speaker 3: Those are programmatic dollars. And then how much money is in the kind of hotel motel acquisition bucket that the governor put in place? Speaker 4: So the state fund for hotel no topic acquisition is $550 million. Speaker 3: Okay, great. That's great. And then let me also just add and again, I want to thank our our government affairs team is. Last year, actually, the city of Long Beach sponsored legislation through Senator Amberg and Senator Embry actually introduced legislation for us to kind of fast track through the secret process, motel conversion for this kind of very reason. And so I think that that really sets us up to be ready for this infusion of resources that's coming down from the state and and other places, obviously. And so that's another great piece of all of this as well. And so I just want to want to also just throw out some thank you to obviously the governor for supporting this work. Senator Amberg for the support of his bill last year. And certainly to our own team, to you, Mr. Curley, and our our local government affairs team for just the work and to making sure that we get these resources as well. So thank you to everyone. And let me turn this over to Councilman and Dallas. Speaker 1: Thank you, Mayor. And yes, thank you again, city staff for all your hard work. I also wanted to share some incentives with you of this program. So one of the things that we are hoping to do is that the city would cover costs for maintenance and upkeep, as well as reimbursement for damages, a wear and tear and some ongoing cause. We would also have dedicated support and case managers from from our Health Department and human services and and also services from our homeless services team. And so that would be really helpful to to help those hotels and motels more more likely that, you know, to actually have an incentive to actually participate, especially like what Councilmember Gordon said may be, you know, really focusing on those motels that are not doing so good. And and maybe this is a way of uplifting those motels is good. It's very important that we take these steps not only right now because it's just needed, but it's really, really needed because of COVID. Just the other day, we had a horrendous event where one of our neighbors that's experiencing the homeless, Kenny, was brutally stabbed. And, you know, we cannot have our homeless neighbors living in those situations and putting themselves at risk, not ever, but especially not right now during COVID. So, again, I appreciate everybody who's supporting this this item, and I look forward to working really hard to make this a very successful pilot program. Thank you. Speaker 3: Thank you. Before I go to the public, he's he's going to hate that I do this, but I got to correct myself. It's not Mr. Curley, it's Dr. Curley. So sorry about that. He had Dr. Curly and with that good public comment. Speaker 4: Our first speaker is Mark Cavaney. Speaker 2: Your time starts now. Thank you. My name is Mark Shinobi. I'd like to thank Councilwoman Zen de Haas and the other council members who cosigned us for bringing it forward. I've been a resident of District two and Long Beach for 12 years and I am in strong support of the emergency housing incentives program. I see vulnerable, unhoused residents in my neighborhood every day, and this program has the potential to immediately provide them with the safe housing they need to protect them from the COVID 19 pandemic, and also provide them with the necessary services and care to put them on a path to long term recovery. It's no secret that the COVID 19 pandemic is getting worse, not better. And as Councilman Richardson and others have pointed out, the RFP for motel acquisition funding opens in less than ten days. So this item is extremely urgent and needs to be acted upon quickly. The report back on available resources should bring back an ordinance as soon as possible that outlines a plan for the funding to be used to create permanent non congregate housing for our most vulnerable unhoused. 78% of all people experiencing homelessness in Long Beach are unsheltered, which is an 11% increase from last year. 23% of people experiencing homelessness in L.A. County are elderly, which puts them at increased risk regarding coronavirus. And let us also not forget that homelessness and the coronavirus disproportionately affects the black community in Long Beach. 13% of the population of Long Beach is black, but they make up 38% of Long Beach unhoused population. The Emergency Housing Incentives Program will have a direct, immediate and lasting impact on these populations. I urge all council members to please pass this item tonight and bring a plan back for approval as soon as possible. Please take advantage of this opportunity to help our most vulnerable unhoused neighbors. Thank you. Thank you. Next year, Seagrams, your time starts now. Speaker 1: Hello. District three. I am in full support, Stacy or Susie of this item and I hope all of you vote to pass it. Just as the person who so eloquently spoke before me stated This needs to be passed and needs to be acted on immediately. We have a lot of our community members are living, unhoused and need support. Period point blank. They need support. They need our support. This gives the emergency housing incentive program gives. And so I understand 500 units of single occupancy shelter. We need more than that. I mean, this is. Yes. 500 beds. Yes. But we need more. We need probably, like way more than double, if not triple that, to meet the needs of our community. We have the money, as we know, that ties back to the issue of police funding. We have the money if we take away the funds from the police. I know this might sound simplistic, but there is a process for this to happen. If there isn't a process created, we're acting. We're asking. You were demanding that you be creative in this moment. This is what this is what this moment is asking of us to be creative, to be adaptive, and to think outside the box. Do not continue on the road that we are on. We need new options. In order to meet the needs of our community. I yield my time. Speaker 2: Thank you. Next year, Jordan, when your time starts now. Hi there. This is Jordan Win District two and field director for the Everyone in Lomita program. I really want to thank Council member Marion DAVIES for her hard work on the site and we worked pretty closely to help put this together and I'm really grateful for council members Mungo Pearce and Andrews who signed on to this item as well. I'm glad that the city is taking a very proactive first step at helping really build out and amplify our infrastructure for caring for people experiencing homelessness, both in the short and long term. I love the fact that the city is also looking proactively at the fact that this is going to help create immediate units while also looking at the long term implications and building out permanent fixtures to help aid in caring for those who are on the streets right now and most vulnerable. We need 500 emergency housing units as quickly as we can get them on the ground to help aid our most vulnerable populations of people experiencing homelessness, including seniors and those with medical disabilities. As was stated earlier, 78% of all people experiencing homelessness were counted as unsheltered this year, which is 1578 people. And this opportunity here to acquire motels and create these sites gives us a rare opportunity, as was noted by Theresa Chandler, to substantially reduce the number of people who are unsheltered on our streets. I do want to bring up a point of clarification on Project HOMEKEY, which is the $550 million that is set aside for motel acquisition by the state. I believe it was mentioned by Councilmember Richardson about, you know, developers applying or operators applying. I want to clarify that. It's it's the government plus the developers. So the municipality plus the operator that would need to apply or it could also just be the municipality, and then they can grant out the money given from its acquisition to developers or operators, depending on what the city so chooses. Just wanted to put that clarifying point out because the RFP will be opening up on July 15th. But keeping that deadline in mind, I do think that it is important for the city to get this item back to council as quickly as it can because that is kind of the linchpin of this program, is that $550 million in order to get those on the ground. I love the fact that councilmembers are bringing up adaptive ways to utilize these dollars. Councilmember Mongeau is completely correct in that it is important not just to have the housing but to also have the wraparound services there . It's something that has definitely been seen and learned from the Project Roomkey site that we're currently operating in Long Beach, and I definitely want to see that continuing here in the city. So once again, thank you to all the council members. Let's make sure that we get everyone in as quickly as we can. Thanks so much. Thank you. That concludes public comment for this item. Speaker 3: Thank you. It's going to a roll call vote. Speaker 0: District one. Speaker 1: Upheld by. Speaker 0: District two. I'm District three. I district for. Speaker 2: All right. Speaker 0: District five. District five. District six. Speaker 1: Okay. Speaker 2: All right. Speaker 1: Yeah, I. Speaker 0: District seven. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: District eight. Speaker 2: II. Speaker 0: District nine. Motion carries. Speaker 3: Thank you. We're going to go ahead and move on to item 25, please.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to request City Manager to work with relevant departments to take advantage of upcoming, available external funding with the goal of creating permanent, non-congregate bridge housing for people experiencing homelessness and report back within 30 days on how the City can leverage external funding opportunities to support permanent non-congregant housing options in Long Beach.

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LongBeachCC_07072020_20-0636

Speaker 3: Thank you, Madam Clerk. We are now doing item 23. Speaker 0: Communication for Mayor Garcia, Councilmember Richardson, Councilwoman Zendejas, Councilmember Pierce, Councilman Austin. Recommendation to request City Manager to engage California State Lands Commission regarding potential modifications to the oil barrel production tax request. City Attorney to prepare all necessary documents to place a ballot question on the November 2020 ballot for an increase in the oil barrel production tax. And request city manager and City Attorney to explore the feasibility of preparing a ballot advisory question on whether to reinvest future cannabis revenue. Speaker 3: Thank you, Madam Cook I'm going to make a few just opening comments. I know that the Council is queued up to to discuss and make comments, so I'll be fairly brief, but I just want to make some overarching comments. I just wanted just a little a little context. Obviously. I think that as we know that from a timing perspective, the council is going to consider anything for the November ballot. Now is the time to consider those and trying to give the city attorney enough time to bring what a ballot measure would actually look like in front of the city council. So that's why this is being discussed. So the in line, which we have, of course, an oil barrel production tax, it's a common in cities that have this industry. We know that here locally, the last time that this tax was raised was about ten years ago. Actually, it was part of a proposal by our city auditor, Laura Dowd, who increased and took to voters an increase of $0.25 to the oil production tax. Back then, it was 11 years ago that passed the voters and at the time it was put in place for public safety services. And in fact, we still see those to this day. We know that in Long Beach, the oil for the oil barrel production tax is $0.47. You look at our neighbor in Signal Hill and it's at $0.67. And so there certainly is a difference between us and and our local our local neighbor. These taxes just for the council discussion are not taxes on residents. So local residents, of course, don't pay into this. It's directly on oil barrel production and essentially is on companies that that that produce oil. But in addition it's also on those that that see revenue. So if you include the state of California, the city of Long Beach, which also, of course, the oil revenue are also part of the overall production pie as it relates to revenues. And we concern it just broadly speaking, obviously, you think about Long Beach is as a leader on climate, we've been doing a lot of great work around climate, whether it's been the cleaner action plan that we've got to finally adopt solar or the first cities to go to all LED lighting craft across the city, water quality issues, electrification at our ports, our bike biking, multimodal plans. We've been aggressive in those areas, but we also know that we have had and continue to have in the city a debate about the future and quite frankly, debates happening across the country as far as what's the sustainability and the dependance on oil here locally at home as well. We know this is a very this market is unstable. We can see where the prices are today versus where they were years ago or or years before that. And so we know that this is just a piece of that conversation, but it's one that I think we should have in this time. There's an opportunity for us to reinvest in issues around climate justice, around equity and health, around the work happening, around the framework. And so I think this will be a it's a good discussion to have, and it's certainly not it certainly comes with precedent. And there's something that the city has increased, you know, over over the years, the last time being ten years ago, when we look at this time to look at it again. And I want to thank everyone that's been involved in the conversation. With that, I'm going to turn this over to Councilmember Richardson, who has a motion, and then I'll go through the list of of members. Speaker 2: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I want to start just acknowledging that we have a great city. We talk about it all the time. We speak about it all the time. You know, downtown on the waterfront, largest port in the United States, great educational institutions. We're also a city with deep, deep economic health and environmental divides. And we have to do better to change our systems and invest in equity. We're at a critical point in our history, the history of our city, the history of our nation. We have an equity mandate in front of us, calling on all local governments to recommit to structural investment investments into equity programs, governments at all levels. I've heard from community that they expect more from us specifically as it relates to the investments that we make, our commitment to equity and addressing inequality in our communities. This call to action from the from the public is why the City Council moved to embark on the framework for reconciliation four steps acknowledging, listening, convening and catalyzing action where we're in the process of concluding the listening process over the next week. And then we begin the process of shaping recommendations immediate, short term, medium term, long term for action for the City Council. And we know the staff have done a good job. I applaud their efforts to engage with community and we think staff are meeting the commitment. When we started this we said, Hey, make sure that you keep us in alignment to not miss the opportunities for this November. The staff has come to us and let us know what that timeline is, which has prompted this this conversation tonight. I want to be clear that this item isn't meant to undercut or diminish the framework process. We're continuing with that and we're making great progress and we're going to take a look. We should be in a position in a matter of weeks, not months, to begin taking action, but rather we are complementing that by making sure that we meet these critical deadlines that have the resources necessary to actually take meaningful, meaningful action to advance equity. As we discussed, discussed tonight's actions. It's a this is a process of us asking to prepare and engage with stakeholders on a source of revenue to actualize many of the things that are coming to light throughout this framework process and will be further informed by it. In addition, there's additional actions that require other processes to take place concurrently, like our budget. So let's get started. Let's go to the next slide. So today's recommendation has three parts. First, we're asking the city manager engage with State Lands Commission and other stakeholders regarding the modification of the oral burial production tax. I want to be clear. Other ideas may come up from this. So we want to you know, we want to really listen to what folks have to say because it may inform what what ultimately goes on the ballot. Secondly, we want to request the city attorney to prepare all necessary documents to place a ballot question on the 2020 ballot for an increase in the oil production tax. Third, we want to explore the feasibility of preparing a ballot advisory question on whether to reinvest future cannabis revenue into economic equity, health equity and youth investment. Next oil. We have a long history, a little bit of context. We have a long history of oil in our city. From 1911 when the state placed all of its all of its state lands within the city limits. 1932, when when oil when discovered oil was discovered in Wilmington oil field. And for the past 60 years, pipelines has been restricted to Titan's area, making it difficult to invest resources into other parts of the city that are also affected by oil related industries. Pipelines goes into services like police and fire lifeguards, beach maintenance, lease management, parking operations, a whole host of investments. And 27 Long Beach voters approved Prop eight. That's the police and fire public safety oil production tax to increase the barrel tax on oil producers to support public safety. That was the legal strategy the more broadly invest outside of the titans by taxing oil production. That is the legal way to invest in the entire city utilizing the oil production tax to fund service. So this is not a new concept. That's the point. In fact, public safety departments still receive funding for oil production taxes that were approved 13 years ago. Although the city's an operator of our domestic oil production, we operate as a trustee of the state. Because of this dynamic, we are engaging with state lands and that is a part of this motion. I had a very productive talk just this afternoon as chair of State led with the staff from the from SLC. They were very open to talking with us. They were very appreciative that we spoke with them and they look forward to the conversation. It was a very productive discussion. We have a meeting next week with the lieutenant governor as a member of the commission. She was very open and willing to have a talk. She's one of three members of the State Lands Commission. So these are very productive conversations. And above all, this is an opportunity to leverage funding to advance health and environmental equity that includes climate investing, youth programs, the resources and address the economic issues that have been raised within our communities that have been historically left out. Let's go to the next slide. So so we have a unique opportunity to respond to the disparities impacting, you know, the North and the northwest, the southwest parts of our of our city. The areas that are impacted by environmental challenges. That map on the left shows Long Beach residents where Long Beach residents live by race and ethnicity. Asian Pacific Islander, Latino black residents live northwest, the southwest part of our city and greater concentration to the right. You see the Carolyn Biro screen that reveals that those neighbors, those same neighborhoods, are exposed to higher concentrations of pollutants, which also happen to be in northwest and southwest parts of the city. I didn't include a map of household income levels where they live, but the correlations are the same. Low income communities of color are concentrated in portions of the city that have the worst air quality and environmental health metrics. Near the port adjacent, the 1791 corridors in our industrial corridor. These neighborhoods have fewer open space or green space options. They're on some of the largest environmental waste generators means of color in Long Beach already experience health disadvantages, such as higher rates of asthma, heart disease, diabetes, low birth weight. These environmental health disparities are also apparent in the overrepresentation of African-Americans, Latinos and positive COVID 19 cases and hospitalizations. More. Additionally, with respect to cannabis, in 2016, the state of California legalized recreational cannabis, followed by Long Beach, passing ordinances on both medicinal and adult use cannabis in 2016 2018, which includes a cap on 32 dispensaries in light of the legalization of cannabis as well as the adoption of cannabis, social equity programs are steps in the right direction. There are still equity issues that exist in the in the high cost of entering into the industry and that it continues to exclude many communities of color. These communities have been impacted by the war on drugs that's left a long standing impacts like loss of property, disqualification from employment opportunities, reduced earning potential exclusion from public benefits and other negative impacts. The night's item offers an opportunity to explore to buyers requesting that cannabis revenue back into communities and retool to invest in ownership opportunities. We may or may not the council may or may not move forward this question. We understand that, you know, there would be there are ways that we can achieve this without action on the ballot. But we want to make sure we head down this direction and we can make that decision. Whether to move forward on this part or not based on additional research will do on what we can access the council meeting next. Like really this this is a great opportunity for us. It's an opportunity for us and we don't have to start from scratch. We have you know, we can fund key areas where we know inequity persists. Our research and engagement has already been done on a lot of this. Now is the time that allocate resources, support the findings and drive change as it relates to youth development. The city department has published the safe Long Beach Violence Prevention Plan. We discussed it tonight. We need to fund these things and fund you. We're in the we're engaged in a youth strategic plan process and the Parks and Rec Department. Both of these plans employ collective action approaches to understanding gaps and opportunities for our youth. Early, early intervention. This is an opportunity to make a real commitment to our youth and a world class youth development operation in the city of Long Beach. Next, you'll see under as it relates to environmental health equity, we are in the process of establishing our first ever climate action adaptation plan, and we're reminded of the various impacts of climate change on our low income neighborhoods, kids of color, their ability to respond and adjust. Long Beach Community Health Community Health Assessment also called out health and quality of life disparities facing disadvantaged communities. Investing in programs like Black Infant Health, Climate and environmental education, placemaking infrastructure that improve health outcomes in the most impacted neighborhoods are types of the types of things that we can we can address. And then as it relates to the economy, we know that we have tools. We've done the research over the last few years and work like everyone in economic empowerment zones, our digital inclusion roadmap. We know that we understand the disparities as relates to how our communities, the economic divide within our communities and the strategies move forward. We've already adopted these things. We've lacked the resources to invest in it. These are things like investing in and opportunities to make sure folks who buy homes, small business support, teen workforce centers all of these things are things that we can move forward if we have the resources to do. Let's go to the final flight. So, so close. Number one, it's not this is not a new taxes proposal. It's not a tax among these. Rather, this is an opportunity to align our oil production tax with neighborhoods, neighboring cities, and invest in areas where are in the issues where our disparities exist. It's an opportunity to align funding with our city's current priorities. This is an opportunity to have a world class youth development strategy make a real difference as it relates to our health, climate and environmental issues, and also make real steps to close the economic divides of our cities. Our next steps engaged California State Lands Commission and other stakeholders regarding the potential modifications engaged community partners such as the Best Youth Coalition around what the resolution may look like for this next report. Back to the City Council in time for us to give direction in order to get it over the November 30 ballot. And I want to add that we also want to make sure that we evaluate options to create an oversight mechanism that can look like aligning with an existing commission or creating or creating some other oversight mechanism to make sure that we're continuing to invest these resources in equity as we move forward. That that is my my presentation. Thank you. Speaker 3: Thank you. I know that was a motion seconded by Councilmember Pearce. That's our. Speaker 1: Thank you, Mayor. I appreciate all the work that's gone into this. This motion, this concept of being able to at least get at par with our oil tax, with our neighboring cities. We know that right now we're in a historic moment where we have lifted up the systemic issue of racism that we have not given enough time to in the future and in the past. We know that we are living at a time when our climate continues to deteriorate as much as we have been a leader in things like electrification and trying to bring in new EV charging stations. We also know that. Time is running out. Some of you guys might have followed me online. I am taking sustainability classes at UCLA right now, so I'm bombarded when I'm not in council with the reality that even if we did everything that we needed to do today, that the effects of what we've already done are going to be lasting into our great grandchildren. And so I'm continually feeling the urgency of figuring out a way to inspire us to act on a bigger scale with our climate. And when I dove into the numbers and recognize that the number one cause of death for people in our community is not police violence, even though that is the most violent and atrocious because we see it and we know that we are paying out our community members to not have that happen. The number one killer is diseases that are caused by pollution and other issues around our heat islands, around poor water quality, around lack of access to food because of food deserts. And so when I see this item, I see all the buckets that Councilmember Richardson has talked about. But I really talk about climate, not only because it's a tax on oil, but the reality is that the market for oil is going down and that when the cost of oil goes down, it's not necessarily great for our climate and the cost of oil goes down. It means that it's difficult for people that have been living below their means to access, whether it's electric cars or green energy on their home, whether it's solar or whether it's retrofitting that it's important for us to make sure that that that gap is thin. And when that happens, we're able to see more investments in clean energy. And we as a city can play a role in making sure that we're using this this pocket of money to create new renewable opportunities, to create more opportunities for solar, to do a home retrofit program that has a jobs component. Some of you know, I've been very busy talking to everyone from Black Lives Matter, to people in the labor movement to organizations in Los Angeles that have dealt with how we close this gap. And they've all been supportive. I'm really happy to see, at least on one letter, there's 15 organizations that have signed up to say that they support this and several community members. So I support all the buckets and making sure that we get to the highest payroll tax that we can. I think that the $0.67 mark is an important mark for us. I think making sure that we have an oversight commission is absolutely critical and we know this idea has been talked about over the years, but we really saw a window on an opportunity right now to move quickly. So I know that some people haven't been able to be fully involved in the conversation, but I'm hopeful that that will change now that this vote has happened or will happen. And I want to make sure that we have public process in the meantime, where we're talking about the opportunities for the jobs pipeline, for health impacts, and making sure that those that are most impacted by our poor air quality are along the 710 and the 91 are the ones that can have access to the benefits of increasing this tax. So I am very supportive. I'm very thankful for the mayor and Councilmember Richardson's work on this. I look forward to hearing from our community stakeholders that are going to speak on this item as well. Thank you. Speaker 3: Thank you. And also, before I move on, I have Councilmember Austin next. Before I move on, just want to clarify also that this is a this is a all about production taxes. It's a general tax would not be a special tax. Just wanted to clarify that. And the city attorney was asking and so just to clarify that as well. Let me move on to Council member Austin. Speaker 2: Thank you to Mr. Mayor. And I believe this item also of to a cannabis. Question on the ballot, potential ballot as well. I think we should also give some attention to that. But I'm pleased to sign on to this item because it makes me feel good about this measure of poor oil production tax. It makes fiscal sense for us at this time and makes good timing sense. It makes sense from a community justice standpoint, from a fiscal sense. Our residents are demanding more investments in programs to address disparities and inequities that affected our communities of color for far too long. There is systemic change and greater investment in and community in, particularly the black community. Given the budget constraints we are facing in the coming year, identifying new revenue sources makes sense. Oil production tax is not a direct impact on our residents, especially our communities, and we're trying to help make a difference in November by putting it on the November ballot and if it's approved by the voters, will be able to start investment funds within a matter of months to benefit our revenue by dedicating funds to programs that support our youth economic opportunity and health and environmental equity. We're committing to our residents that we have been have been disproportionately affected by the health crisis, academic, economic impacts and lack of opportunities for our youth. I strongly support the goal to ask our residents to vote on this investment in our community. But I do have a couple of questions regarding the other part of this item. And of course, I signed on to it as a code. But there and again, I think most of this makes a lot of sense. I want to understand that that, you know, putting forth ballot initiative is also a cost for the city. And the and as I understand it, the part regarding cannabis and perhaps, you know, the interesting thing to clarify, but the part regarding cannabis, cannabis is meant to be advisory or only an advisory measure, a question to the voters of and that of revenue and revenues the city already receives from a measure, and they are a general tax, from what I understand. So the Council can already vote to allocate some of the revenues of that program already for measure or may without an advisory measure. I'm not mistaken. And so I guess the question is, what about it? I've seen a while of having an advisory measure. Measure is there rather than part of the budget process or framework of the reconciliation. We see community input about investing a portion of these residents, these revenues from cannabis. I hope you guys got that. You know, so basically, are we are is this going to be too damaged, spending this extra money for a question to the voters that we as a city council already have the ability to to move? I guess I put that question to you, Mr. Richardson. Okay. Thank you, Councilmember. You're absolutely right. So we're you know, we're in the process of obviously exploring what we can and cannot do get in one of the cannabis laws measure M require to go to the ballot. Kind of the the are on recreational adult use did not. It seems like we can probably get to this without the ballot question. So if I go so far as to say it was strategic, this was included strategically. But we may not need we may be able to abandon this at the end if we as we kind of research and learn a bit more, the timeline for this, the timeline for the framework of running concurrently, the listing process ends this week. We should expect, you know, in a matter of weeks, not months, for recommendations. And that process might play out in front of the council. And that's when we will know very clearly about what our options are. So I agree with you. If there's a way for us not to have to do this and save a little bit money, we can. And I think we'll get to that point when this comes back to council. Okay. Thank you so much that that's my comment for now. Again, I support moving forward with this with the question mark on the cannabis question. And you know, I'm sure a staff research it wants to put this together. We can we can make a decision down the line. Within the next couple of weeks. Thank you. Speaker 3: Thank you very much, Councilwoman and House. Councilwoman in the house. Speaker 1: You may. You can hear me, right? Yes. First of all, thank you to Councilmember Richardson for bringing this item forward. I think it's very, very important. I share the same sentiments as my colleagues, and I look forward to to the development of this item and putting it on the ballot. Hopefully, we are we are headed to some very, very difficult times when it comes to talking about our budget. I think it's going to bring this item would bring additional revenue to service our communities that are so much in critical need. So I'm fully supportive of this item. And, you know, it's going to be something really good that the public will actually have the opportunity to vote on. And I think that whenever we have the public be able to vote on something, I think that's very powerful. So thank you again for all the hard work that's done on this already. Councilmember Richardson and all those who've signed on to it as well. It's important to make sure that our budget reflects our values here in the city, and I really think that this is an important step in doing that. So thank you again. Speaker 3: Thank you, Councilmember. Councilman Price. Speaker 1: Q Mr. Mayor, and thank you to my council colleagues who brought this item. I think this is a very productive discussion. I think it's an opportunity that's definitely worth exploring. I do have a few questions and I also think. Well, let me just let me ask that some of the questions I have, and then I'll come back to that. So in regards to the item, I really in my opinion, I don't think the cannabis piece is essential. I think that we have flexibility with our current structure to allow or some policy decisions to be made regarding the expenditure of those funds. I am curious when we're talking about cannabis as a revenue source. I know the last time we received an update. The revenues were falling far shorter than what we had expected. Mr. Modica, do you have an update on that revenue source? Speaker 5: And if so, we will as part of the budget process? We're looking at that right now. My general sense is that it's doing better than it was last year. So we always knew this was going to be a lagging revenue source where it takes a couple of years to build. We are now seeing more dispensaries on board and so we do expect some revenue to be increasing from this, from that, the exact amount we'll have in a couple of weeks. Speaker 1: Okay, great. But I do think that we have some opportunity there. Maybe the city attorney could weigh in on this. I mean, is it necessary for us to expand 3 to $400000 to put this on the ballot? Or is the city infrastructure in place to allow the council to weigh in on how those revenues would be expended , given the language in May, as the city attorney can the city attorney weigh in on that? Speaker 2: Council member this is Charlie Parker. And you're correct. And I think Councilmember Richardson said it, too, that you have in place during the budget process that revenue is coming in and is currently allocated under the budget and could be reallocated by the Council during the budget process. Speaker 1: Okay, great. So good. It sounds like we're all kind of in alignment on that. That was one question I had when I was reading the item. So I'm glad we had some clarification for Mr. Modica. Is this a tax? And I know that Mr. Madison I talked to off line about this, but I have received quite a few questions from residents as well as some oil operators as I have several of them in my district. So would this be a tax that would be placed on local producers? Speaker 5: So the way the oil barrel tax works is, it's essentially a tax on those who are producing the oil in Long Beach and it becomes a unit expense of the oil field. So it is ultimately paid by the person who has the mineral rights as one of the operating expenses of the field. Speaker 1: Okay. And does the city have the mineral rights for any of the fields that are operating right now? Speaker 5: So about 94% of the funds that, you know, that would be spent are come from the state of California. And of that pot, the city has a portion of that where we get some interest in tidelands. We also get some upland. So we would pay a portion of this. The state pays the vast majority of this. And then some of the other operators that have oil interests and mineral rights would pay that as well, as well as anyone who else who owns little fractions of oil. We do have some of those in our community. Speaker 0: Okay. Speaker 1: So when the report comes back, will it outline what the city's obligation would be if there were a change to the rate? Speaker 5: Yes, we would take a look at, you know, what what this could generate. I believe the item is to have us look at a number of different, you know, factors and then come back with a recommendation. And we would certainly do a financial analysis as well. Speaker 1: Okay. Because obviously, it would need to make financial sense for us since we would be responsible for some of the some of the tax obligation as well. Speaker 2: Correct. Speaker 1: Okay. The other question that I had is I know there's a request for communication and outreach with stakeholders. Are we including oil operators, local oil operators and producers in the city as part of the stakeholders? And will we be doing outreach with them? Speaker 5: So we haven't designed that process yet. I think we wanted to hear from counsel. We can certainly ask those who are, you know, kind of the bigger players. We're only going to have, you know, a couple of weeks at most to bring everything back. Be happy to talk to anyone who is a person who is affected by payment of the tax. It's going to be a pretty small group. Since this isn't a tax and it doesn't tax our population, it really has a limited group. So we'd be happy to talk to anyone who has an interest. Speaker 1: Okay, so I'd like to add a friendly I'm not sure who made the motion, but to the maker of the motion, I'd like to add a friendly that the oil producers who would be subject to this tax be included in the stakeholder outreach. Speaker 2: Council member, my understanding is only three potentially. So that's a synergy signal, Hill Petroleum and CRC. And so they've already they've already engaged with the city. And so I don't know that we need to put it into the into the motion to call out specific companies. I think in general saying stakeholders. I think that broadly says if they're paying into this, they are a stakeholder and they're already used the manager, the flexibility with them. Speaker 1: That that's fine. The reason I made the friendly is because I received calls from them today. They didn't know anything about it. So I just want to make sure they got that. At least all of these stakeholders, every single one of them, is involved in the outreach process. So if that friendly is denied, I appreciate that. But it was just meant to be inclusive. So hopefully the city manager can hear that. Speaker 2: I think city manager, I think I think under the current motions in front of us, I think you have that flexibility to do it. Speaker 5: Councilmember Price And now we can talk to to those groups for sure. And if you have any others, let us know. Speaker 1: We'll do. Thank you. And then in terms of the Tidelands Fund, Mr. Modica, can you please explain the impact, if any, of this ballot measure, if it were to pass on the existing tidelands funds that we utilize for capital and infrastructure projects in the Tidelands area and also for operation of services in the Tidelands area, including police and fire. Speaker 5: So we'll know that a little bit more in specificity when we come back. My general sense is it's going to be pretty minimal. We would probably be looking at a, you know, something in the range of a, you know, ten cent, 2010, 30 cent, maybe 40 cent increase. We don't know yet. We have to calculate that. And each $0.10 is about $1,000,000 and the state is probably about 60% of that revenue. And the city is, you know, in the 15 to 20%. So our share is going to be pretty small. We would certainly do our best to estimate what that impact would be, but we don't expect a big impact on on existing projects. There might be a slight reduction in some of the Tidelands revenue, but ultimately we will have more revenue in the general fund net because we would be taxing, you know, the state of California would be paying a big portion of this, as would a couple of others. Speaker 1: Okay. So when the report comes back, is it going to include a breakdown of how it would impact current existing enterprise funds like the Children's Fund? Speaker 5: Yeah, we would do a financial impact of what it would mean for the general fund and what it would mean for Tidelands. Those are the two big funds that would be impacted. Speaker 1: Okay. And then the Tidelands Fund has currently has some restrictions on where that money can be spent and what for for what purposes would that restriction remain in effect? And those tidelands funds still be limited for that purpose? Speaker 5: It's my understanding that when we do a citywide tax, it becomes a a general fund revenue. That's how we do it with sales tax. So for example, sales tax in the of sales in the Tidelands becomes a general fund revenue if it's applied citywide. So it's something we'd work with our attorney, but we that's how the tax has been applied in the past. Speaker 1: But that's the tax portion. It's not the tidelands portion that we currently use. Speaker 2: For this trial. That's correct. That the Tidelands portion has to remain in the Tidelands, as Tom explained as a tax. It is not considered restricted by the Titans fund. Speaker 5: Yeah. So all the oil money that we normally get from Tidelands would not be affected. Just whatever that tax amount is that is increased would become general fund. Speaker 1: Okay. That sounds good. And then the other question that I had is, is there any tax opportunity for oil that is imported into the city? You know, the tankers that we see out there filled with oil. Is there any tax revenue opportunities on those sources of oil? Speaker 5: So we currently get some franchise fees. We'd have to look into that a little bit more. We do get franchise fees for certain pipelines that are in the ground that we have an interest in, and that is part of our general fund revenue stream. Typically, the taxing of imports into the United States is a federal issue rather than a local issue. Speaker 1: Okay. Is that something that can be definitively studied and reported back on is is imported oil and whether the city has any sort of opportunity to. Exercise any options in regards to tax revenue on that? I agree with you. I believe it is a federal issue, but is that something that can be definitively researched and included? Speaker 5: If that's the will of the council, we can do that. They would probably not. That's going to take a little bit more time. We we wouldn't be able to do that within the 30 days. We can do the initial research, but maybe not a full proposal, but we can look at that if that's the will of the council. Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, I think that I think it would be a fairly simple question. I mean, if it's a federal issue, then the city wouldn't have jurisdiction to impose any tax burden on it. Speaker 5: So we can do that high level analysis. Yes. Speaker 1: Yeah. Because if it's not an option that it's not an option, then you don't have to go any deeper. But I'm just interested to know is does the city have any standing to impose tax on imported oil since we do have a port in the city and we do are source of receipt of a lot of imported oil. So I think the answer to that question is that it's a federal government standing and not a city standing. But if it requires further research from that, then maybe you can report on that and we can require further action on that. That would be. Speaker 5: Great. Yes, we can report on that high level question and then it'll be more of a nuance question about franchise fees. That gets pretty complicated. So we'll do our best to answer both those questions. Speaker 1: Okay. Thank you. I have nothing else. Thank you very much. Speaker 3: Thank you, Captain Ringa. Speaker 2: Thank you, Mayor, and I appreciate all the commentary from my colleagues. The one thing I do like about this coming forward is that the fact that it will include some kind of oversight of those funds, and I think that's wonderful. It would be an opportunity for the community to keep abreast as to how we're spending those funds. Once it starts generating, of course they need to pass first. But so I'll be very supportive of the settlement. Thank you for bringing it forward. Speaker 3: Thank you, Councilman Mongo. Woman Mango. Speaker 1: Can you hear me? Speaker 3: Now. Yes. Hello. Speaker 1: Oh, wonderful. Thank you. Thank you for bringing this item. It's important to kind of talk through some of the high level things. A lot of those questions have been fleshed out. But what I think it's also important to. But I think it's also important to kind of recognize is that the price of oil is that. By the market. And so it doesn't necessarily mean that this tax is passed on to the consumers. I will say that when we added some fees at the airport a few years ago, I don't think any of us could have predicted that the largest share of the fees would be burdened by one hotel or one user or one person. And so when we look at this, I'm really interested in seeing this protocol. You said 65% would be paid by the state of California. 15% would be paid by the city. And then of that remaining, 25%. I hope that it doesn't fall on one provider. I know Mr. Richardson stated that there are three providers and one would hope that. It's not being burdened just by one company the way that some of the other feeds have kind of turned out. And I know that that wasn't done in a way to harm any particular company. I think it was an unintended consequence of a policy that when the information came back to the council, that level of analysis wasn't included. And so while I'm not here to ask the specifics of any of those three companies, I think it's important for us to know whether or not any one company is going to be taking a burden that's significantly larger than the other two. But I don't know what the production levels like, and I also don't know if every year the percentages that come out are the same or if there are various volatility and variability of their production makes that difference. So is that something that you think a quick high level could be included? Speaker 5: Sure. We can report back on what the the users are a bit of the Long Beach unit and then some of the private just in general how many barrels per per day that they produce. So the numbers I gave were kind of rough swags. You'd be happy to kind of show you what that actually looks like in terms of barrels produced. Speaker 1: And then when it comes to the marijuana side of the discussion, I appreciate Mr. Austin and Mr. Price's discussion. It is something that we can do at the council level. I just would like to remind us that we were sitting at the dais not four months ago, reducing taxes on marijuana. Now that everyone has gotten up and running and a lot of these facilities are at full steam ahead, I don't know that the stated objective of the reduction in the tax has actually come to fruition. I don't see that we've had any additional applications or any of those things. And so I think that it's a good time to restore what the community asked for. In terms of the question of what level tax should be at. And I think that that's important, at least in my discussions with some of the. Individuals that are in that industry. They want some certainty. They don't want us coming to the table and reducing and then increasing and then inducing and increasing. And the same is true of what that does for the market around them and the customer base. So I think it's important for us to set a standard and if we want to have an escalation over time or a rebound of what changes things in the future, I think we just need to come up with some policies that are consistent and forth and very transparent to that group of individuals so that they know what they're working with as a business owner. The most harmful thing that they're facing these these times is the uncertainty of so much. And so to add another component of uncertainty, in my opinion, would be not great for the industry. And so I think that we need to work with everybody to come up with what that could look like. Other than that, those are my comments. And thank you for my colleagues for their openness to discussing and understanding the depth of impact of this before we make what could be a very impactful decision. And then I think I'll just add one additional question. Mr.. MODICA It's my understanding that the amount we pull out of oil, out of the resource over time is going to be declining. So we would be theoretically creating a new revenue stream that would decline over time and eliminate itself. Speaker 5: That's correct. The number of oil barrels produced declines about 8 to 10% every year. And then at times we get large investment and it actually goes back up and then it tends to decline over time. Speaker 1: And so at the the highest level, $0.40, we're talking about $4 million a year. And then it would go down theoretically at 8% a year until a potential investment came. And then theoretically, it could pop back up. But we're never talking about large amounts of money of more than 4 billion a year. On the oil side. Speaker 5: From the oil bear attacks. It's it's I don't have the exact numbers. It's roughly in that in that range. Okay. It doesn't go up. It's huge amounts. Speaker 1: Yeah. All right. Thank you. Speaker 3: Thank you. And I'm going to go to you before I go to Consul Richardson and then also then to the public. Just as a as a just a perfect nation, I think there are three major companies. But there are more than three companies, I think, that are involved in this work. There are some small, smaller operators as well. And I wanted to clarify that as well for the council, the public. So, Councilman Richardson. Speaker 2: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And I think it was a good discussion by the council. I want to take a minute and just acknowledge the letters that have come in today in support letters from Senator Gonzalez. Dr. Benitez, come on, girls in action. Invest in you. Long Beach Forward, LLC seven Neighborhood Group, The California League of Conservation Voters. California Mexico Study Center. Earth Justice Green Education Inc. Great Alternatives to Los Angeles Long Beach three six. The Long Beach Alliance for Clean Energy. Long Beach Coalition for Good Jobs and Healthy Community. Long Beach Community Choice Energy Working Group. Long Beach Environmental Alliance. Long Beach Sacred Resistance. Long Beach Alliance for New Economy. Small World Strategy. 350 South Bay. Los Angeles also acknowledged that we've received letters from the State Lands Commission. We again, we spoke with them today. They acknowledge that within that letter, and we're going to continue to talk with them as as state led and staff is going to do that based on the result of this vote, as well as the Long Beach Chamber of Commerce. And and we want to just acknowledge all of those stakeholders for for submitting their letter. That's it. Let's go to public comment. Thank you. Speaker 3: Thank you. Madam Court. Please go through public comment. Speaker 4: Our first speakers and a christianson. Speaker 2: Your time starts now. Speaker 1: Anna Kristensen, Sierra Club Conservation Chair, Long Beach Area Group. The Long Beach Area Group would like to share the following concerns and suggestions regarding this agenda item. We find the goal of ending racial. Speaker 2: And social injustice in our city. Speaker 1: To be both admirable and absolutely necessary. The city can and must take immediate action by directly funding measures to address. Speaker 2: These critical issues from the city's general fund. Speaker 1: And must not rely on the success of a November ballot measure to do so. Additionally, we are concerned that the oil. Speaker 2: Production. Speaker 1: Tax is like those on cigarets and alcohol, basically a center in which the city profits from a product. Speaker 2: That is destructive. Speaker 1: To the health and well-being of individuals and the community. Funding social and environmental justice should not involve doing harm to people or to the natural world. As the agenda item points out, is primarily low income. Speaker 2: Communities of color in Long Beach who are most impacted by GHG. Speaker 1: And other toxic emissions from importing drilling, refining oil as. Speaker 2: Well as from vehicle emissions. Speaker 1: Sierra Club takes the position that oil should be left in the ground and. Speaker 2: Cannot help but wonder. Speaker 1: If increasing city revenues from drilling will. The center buys us to end oil operations in our community? Culver City is moving toward eliminating oil production, and Long. Speaker 2: Beach must do the same. As stated in the agenda item, the Aquarium Pacific's calculations. Speaker 1: Show that. Speaker 2: Our oil operations are one of our largest polluters. Speaker 1: Sierra Club stands with Black Lives Matter and advocates for defunding the police. Speaker 2: Therefore, we do. Speaker 1: Support a ballot measure to either repeal Prop. Speaker 2: Eight or to redirect Prop eight funding for police officers and the related. Speaker 1: Costs of policing. Speaker 2: To address equity concerns. As instead, current operations. Speaker 1: In the lower Cerritos wetlands are at the highest level of. Speaker 2: Toxic emissions in the city. This area is within the sacred. Speaker 1: Side of both Obama and both Sierra Club and tribal leaders. Speaker 2: Oppose the city sponsored. Speaker 1: Expansion of oil drilling operations, leading to the. Speaker 2: Release, which will lead. Speaker 1: To the release of an additional 70,000 tons. Speaker 2: Of additional GHG emissions. Speaker 1: Native Americans suffer when the land suffers both spiritually and physically. Racial and environmental. Speaker 2: Justice for. Speaker 1: Tribal people means leaving oil. Speaker 2: And ancestors in. Speaker 1: The ground as the oldest and largest environmental. Speaker 2: Organization. Speaker 1: In the United States. Sierra Club asks to be included in council members and city staff outreach. We have not been, I might point out. Speaker 2: And to shape. Speaker 1: A ballot measure. Speaker 2: Should this agenda item be approved? I find. Speaker 1: It very interesting that that no. Speaker 2: City council member reached out to Sierra Club. Speaker 1: And yet you managed to find people up in L.A.. Speaker 2: So maybe you knew that we would have problems with funding social justice by. Speaker 1: You know. Speaker 2: From oil money. Thank you very much. Speaker 4: Thank you. Next, we have Cesar Armendariz. Speaker 2: Your time starts now. Hello. My name is Cesar Armendariz. I live in zipCode and I know a24. I am calling in support of this item. When I think of oil and pollution, I can't help but think of my son. His name is Steel. He was born with chronic lung issues, and the more that we pollute the environment, the more likely that he is going to suffer because of it. And my story is not unusual. There are many, many people in the black and brown community, kids with respiratory issues because of the pollution in the air. So the other thing I think about is I want to make sure that when we move on from this earth that we leave behind something for the future generations. And the scientists have made it clear that unless we phase out immediately from oil corporations and fossil fuel corporations, that we are not going to leave a habitable planet behind for our kids. So for me, this to measure this item is about taxing the oil industry out of existence, period. Now, I understand that there are some political maneuvering that has to happen. I understand that everybody has to talk about incremental change and all of that. But this is about the environment. And ultimately, unless we act quickly, we're not going to leave the planet behind for our kids. And so I do support this item now as we think about, okay, if we were to tax the fossil fuel industry out of existence, what about the jobs of the people in that industry? Well, we should also be talking about a just transition process to a green economy, and that is part of this conversation. Now, in addition to that, I would like to see as we tax that oil industry out of existence, I'd like to see those that that tax revenue go to the black and brown folks who have been paying taxes with their lives. Air pollution is a big reason why black and brown folks have short lifespans. And so as we tax these big oil producers out of existence, it's important that the revenues go to the black and brown communities. Councilman Richardson has talked about dealing with the upstream issues rather than downstream issues. And so the upstream issues would include investing in the youth programs, libraries, park health programs. So I asked them when we passed the House tax possible, the revenues are specifically earmarked to lift up our black communities and other communities that have been left behind by our economic system. Councilwoman Mongo is right that oil production is diminishing and that we can't rely on this revenue stream. So to address our budget issues, we also have to look at our budget and reassess our priorities, which will also include divesting from the police and investing in programs that are more effective and helping our quality of life. Thank you very much. Thank you. Speaker 4: Your next speaker is Christopher Chavez. Your time starts now. Speaker 2: Yes. Mayor Garcia and city council members. My name is Chris Chavez and I am the deputy policy director for the Coalition for Clean Air. I am also a resident of the sixth District. I wanted to thank the councilmember and the mayor for bringing this item forward. This is an important conversation and the need to correct decades of environmental injustice that the people on beach face, particularly those living in the western, central and northern parts of the city, needs to be addressed. Simply put, the global economy is subsidized by the health of long beaches, front line communities. The South Coast Air Quality Management District estimates over 75% of the air toxic cancer risk in West Long Beach is from diesel particulate matter. Oil drilling, transportation, storage and refining emit volatile organic compounds which help form smog and impact public health. Meanwhile, the climate crisis continues unabated, putting us all at risk for more extreme weather, coastal erosion, disaster intensification and more. What we cannot forget, however, is that communities of color and low income communities are disproportionately impacted by air pollution and the climate. Our letter to the Council submitted earlier today recommended several policies and practices for reinvesting and transforming the community. I want to emphasize for currently first the oil palm oil production tax revenues must be directly invested into Long Beach's disadvantaged and low income, low income communities. It's a similar to the requirements governing over the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund for the state's cap and trade program through SB 535 and AB 1550. Second, there must be community buy in and control over the investments and programs that are created through these funds. Third, local nonprofits and community benefit organizations that work to organize, educate or provide direct services to disadvantaged communities should receive some of these funds. Lastly, these investments should yield quantifiable benefits via air quality public health or economics to the community, as well as avoid harming the community and the population currently in place. Finally, if the city is truly committed to correcting these and other environmental injustices, Long Beach face as many environmental injustices the city must create and implement policies that are consistent with this goal. We urge the city to carefully consider its actions and incorporate environmental justice principles in its actions. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Next up, we have Dave Shukla. Your time starts now. Hello, this is Dave Shukla. In this capacity, I speak as the operations director for the Long Beach Alliance for Clean Energy. We wish to applaud the the council people who brought this motion forward. The voters deserve to decide where oil money are spent. Proposition eight. 11 years ago, they decided that public safety would be a priority. The values, the vision. The priority. Of this country, of the city. Are changing the revolt. There is no stopping, but there is no stopping the recognition that we have maybe ten years to not only bend the curve planetary emissions, but bring them all the way driven down on a trajectory that goes one direction, like the Mongols suggested. It draws down. We need to start discussing things like a drawdown date for his own oil operation. We need to start discussing things. Like the cost of inaction or how much money we've left on the table. We need to start talking meaningfully. Microsoft, as mentioned and as I mentioned earlier, only certain people have already been paid with their lives, with shortened life. For the way that other people live. The way that other people get from. And that's the crux. So much of what we talk about. When we talk about transforming the system into one that works for everyone. The people who are tired, who are desperately tired to an economy of death need not be. Patronage transitions, although. Thank you for your support on this item. Thank you. And last speakers and control your time starts now. Speaker 1: Good evening. And control and looking at the air quality map included in the staff report. It's obvious that oil and gas production have a tremendous negative effect on air quality and health of Long Beach residents. Speaker 2: This is one. Speaker 1: Of Karp's arguments against allowing new oil drilling near the Los Cerritos wetlands. According to the ballot measure the staff report, the ballot measure will address two different taxes oil production and cannabis, and how these moneys will be spent. Speaker 2: They should be. Speaker 1: Two different ballot measures. It is stated that future cannabis revenue be spent on, quote, economic equity, health equity and youth investments. I believe most voters would agree with this use. Speaker 2: This does. Speaker 1: Not say how the oil production. Speaker 2: Tax will be used. Speaker 1: The staff report requests the city manager and the city attorney to provide options and financial impact on the amount of tax and mechanisms for a progressive tax. Speaker 2: That. Speaker 1: Increases over time and for a resolution defining the Council's intent for the use of the funds. Currently prop age oil revenues, $0.33 a barrel can only be used for fish, police and firefighters. I would suggest that the entire oil barrel tax increase be designated for clean energy, such as putting solar on every public building in Long Beach . This might make the syntax more acceptable to those of us who want to leave the oil in the ground. Also, the cost of this election is not three or $400,000. It is 1.4. Million dollars. I think that the council can come up with a better way. Speaker 2: Of. Speaker 1: Providing social equity than causing them spending over $1,000,000 for another election. Thank you. Speaker 2: Thank you. Speaker 4: That concludes public comment for this item. Speaker 3: Do you think you will go? And with that, I think we're going to go ahead and do a roll call vote. Speaker 0: District one. I district to. I district three i. District for. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: District five. High District six. High District seven. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: District eight. District nine. High motion carries. Speaker 3: Thank you. Next item, please, is going to be on the eviction moratorium discussion. 26.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to request City Manager to engage California State Lands Commission and other stakeholders regarding potential modifications to the Oil Barrel Production tax; Request City Attorney to prepare all necessary documents to place a ballot question on the November 2020 ballot for an increase in the Oil Barrel Production Tax and to work with the City Manager to provide options and financial impact on the amount of the tax and mechanisms for a progressive tax that increases over time and for a resolution defining the City Council's intent for use of the funds; and Request City Manager and City Attorney to explore the feasibility of preparing a ballot advisory question on whether to reinvest future cannabis revenue into economic equity, health equity, and youth investments, and to further strengthen our cannabis equity program to expand equitable ownership opportunities.

LongBeachCC

LongBeachCC_07072020_20-0639

Speaker 3: Thank you. Next item, please, is going to be on the eviction moratorium discussion. 26. Speaker 0: Communication from City Attorney. Recommendation to Review 8.100 of the Long Beach Municipal Code, which provides for a temporary eviction moratorium and rent deferment due to the COVID 19 pandemic. Consider and discuss potential changes there to and if necessary, direct city attorney to prepare an ordinance amending the chapter citywide. Speaker 3: Okay. I don't know if we first need a. I have a I have emotion by account. Number one concern. I'm not sure if we need any type of report. If you want one council member or if you want to make some money, can you give us a little update of the agenda item? Speaker 2: Absolutely. This is Rick Anthony. Can you hear me? Speaker 5: Yes. Yes. Richard, we can hear you. Speaker 2: Yes. Okay. Honorable Mayor in Council Member. As you'll recall, on May 26th, you extended the application of the current eviction moratorium through July 31st, 2020 and also extended the deferred rent repayment period through July 31st, 2021. At that time, council gave staff explicit direction to bring back an item. Council could consider potential changes to the ordinance in light of updated information regarding the COVID impacts on the economy and to check in with what state and county governments have done with respect to their eviction moratoriums and orders. So that's why we're here before you tonight to give you that opportunity as we were directed to do. And before you begin any discussion you might have regarding any possible changes to the moratorium, including a possible extension of the application of the moratorium or the rent deferral period. I want to note a couple of things. And the first is that I've received a couple of questions from a couple of council members wondering if the city moratorium were to expire. No action between now and July 31st and it expired then. Would the existing county ordinance, which also imposes an eviction moratorium, apply to any tenancy tenancies sorry, in Long Beach? And everyone, if they don't know, should know that there is an existing Los Angeles County ordinance which applies to tenancies in the unincorporated, unincorporated areas of the county. And it also applies to cities that do not have moratoriums in place, but cities that do have moratoriums in place are exempt from the county ordinance. So Long Beach currently has such a thing in place. But if it were not to come August 1st, it is not entirely clear to me that the county ordinance would for sure apply to Long Beach tenancies, and I think a lot of people are assuming that it would, and therefore the expiration of the Long Beach eviction moratorium would not have a significant impact on Long Beach tenants. I'm sorry that I don't have a clear answer for you on whether it would apply or not. It's it's I didn't have time to really bottom that out, but I just want to let everyone know we will be doing that. Our office will be doing that over the next couple of weeks, but we should not move forward. Assuming that the county ordinance would necessarily apply if the Long Beach ordinance expired. Its second thing, if it did if it did expire, I'm sorry. If it did apply. So if the Long Beach I'm sorry, the Long Beach City ordinance expired and the county ordinance did apply, it wouldn't necessarily cover all of the tenancies that the city one did, because while the ordinances are very similar to one another, they are not exactly the same. And that might lead to some incompatible application of the two ordinances to the same tenancy. One would be covered in, one wouldn't, which would be legal, but it would be odd and maybe a bit cumbersome. The second thing I wanted to note, and this is noted, I think in the letter and this is the final note I'll make is that Governor Newsom recently extended one of his executive orders, which suspends the application of certain state laws which would prohibit cities from enacting eviction moratoriums. In short, any city in the state can but is not obligated to extend its eviction moratorium through September 30th of this year, subject to further executive orders. And with that, I'm happy to take any questions and look forward to the discussion. Speaker 3: Thank you, Councilman Richardson. Speaker 2: Thanks, Mr. Mayor. Just first, thanks to city staff. City Council asked that a periodic basis before the eviction moratorium expire that you have not given us an opportunity to weigh in on what we want to do so we don't have to continue what's not on the agenda ourselves. My thoughts here are that we've moved in alignment with L.A. County. I want to thank you for the excellent explanation of what the county is doing. I want to what I think the right thing to do here in this place is engage with the county directly, see what they're going to do if they take action or don't take action. I want to hear from from Mr. Mayor that we can, if needed, we can pull a special meeting together at a later date, within this month, prior to the end of the moratorium, to take action if we need to in terms of aligning with the county. Mr. Mayor, is that something that we can do? Speaker 3: Yeah. We'll be having a special meeting later this month, to my perspective, to address the oil tax burial tax measure as well. So there will be a special meeting and an opportunity of the council wants to take action later this month. Speaker 2: I think that makes I think that makes sense and gives us some time to engage. Because, you know, when you have the conversation about if they moratoriums the it triggers the conversation about extended repayment periods and resources this so a large conversation that we need to make sure that we're we're in alignment with the county. I would say that's the direction we should go and that would be my motion receive on file this tonight we're engaged to see where the county's going and then come back, you know, at a later date, you know, prior to end of the month so we can take action. Speaker 3: Thank you. That's the motion. There's a second by Councilmember Pearce. Councilor Pearce. Speaker 1: Thank you, Mayor. I agree with this direction. I know that we've had a lot of conversations. I would want to make sure that the motion is very clear, that it's been filed, a staff report today, and that it's directing the city attorney to prepare an ordinance for council consideration in late July, which would amend our muni code at that time. And so I definitely want to make sure that that's just clear. Councilmember Richardson, is that clear that something. Speaker 2: Is if what I want to make sure is city staff or rich city attorney. So when we say I'll come back at a later date with, you know, perhaps a special meeting for the in the month. The idea is if we're going to take action to expand the urgency ordinance, we want it noticed. In that way, we can go into effect immediately. That makes sense. Yes. This is rich. So what I want to make sure I do get before I don't I don't know what I'm bringing back exactly in the very end of July. So I would like to get I mean, I think I know, but I don't want to guess. I want the council to give me explicit direction on what you expect to see in the ordinance that I bring back. So I'm afraid and I know no one likes to hear this just because it makes it just start up agenda items. But I think we need to agenda items. At some point we're going to need a discussion and direction given to the city attorney's office to bring back an ordinance with specific detail on what you want to see in that ordinance. And then the second meeting hopefully will be a quick one, because I'll bring back exactly what you told me to bring back, and then you will actually have an up or down vote on that ordinance. You don't have to give me the specific instruction tonight, but I'm afraid that you will have to give me specific instruction, perhaps on July 14, assuming I think I know there's no meeting on the 21st. And so I need we're going to have to have that conversation at some point before the special meeting on July, whatever it's going to be. 28, 29, 30th. Speaker 1: Okay. I believe I still have the the floor, so I will. You know, I went straight into the motion. I want to say that, you know, the county might extend. They might not extend. It's important, as Councilmember Richardson says, that we go along with it. I know that there's, you know, a. Different opinions of whether we should move forward or not or how we move forward. I think that a lot of us in the community and on the council are exhausted about bringing these items forward. And we have to have two votes every council, every time that we bring it forward every month. And it would be my hope that we would be able to act swiftly, act in a manner that gives the city attorney direct, you know, direction, that says just come back at the end of the month so that we know what the county is doing and align it at the end of the month with the county. And we can vote at that time whether we move forward or not, bringing something on the 14th, then at the end of the month, then another reading at the beginning of the following month. It's just a lot. And I know that I've talked to people, you know, like Jeremy Harris at the Chamber as well as some of our other community members. And a lot of folks, I think, would appreciate a simpler process as we continue to move forward this crisis. So, you know, I I know that Councilmember Richardson has spoke at this point, that I really would encourage us to be able to give clear direction to the city attorney, as he's asking, so that we can set up that next process and not have eight more meetings about it. So I might queue up again. I'm curious to hear what my council colleagues have to say. Thank you. Speaker 3: Thank you. Before I before I continue, just wanted to clarify. So, I mean, the way I interpret Councilman Richardson's motion is to receive and file and to then obviously continue engaging with the county to assess what the county's next step is going to be. And, of course, keeping in mind that if the county moves in a certain direction, there's got to be enough time for the council to react. If the council chooses to make a policy decision based on any additional action the county the county would take. And obviously we would work with the attorney or anything else to give the council the opportunity to do that. And so Mr. Anthony obviously will ensure that that happens. But I understand the motion that's being made, which is to receive and file and to give us time to see what what happens over the next few weeks with the county. So let me go out to Councilman. Speaker 2: I think you're right, Mr. Mayor. I think that's pretty simple and straightforward what you just described. That's that's the idea. You know, once we understand what they're going to do, we do have time to come back and do it by the end of the month, which is the spirit of why we ask staff to come back and do this update. It puts us in a position to think about how we want to move forward. If council wants to go a different direction, that's that. But I think what you articulated, that's what that's the process that I think we should take. Speaker 3: CEP is counsel, among other. Thank you. Speaker 1: Hi. Sorry it took me a long time to unmute with the double button push thing. I think you could. Mr. Anthony, could you explain the difference by date of the variance currently between the county and the city of Orange? Speaker 2: I'm sorry. Did you say by date? Speaker 1: Yes. There there is ends when and their repayment period is until when. Speaker 2: There's ends on July 31st. Same as the city of Long Beach is does I think it's widely anticipated that the board of Supervisors will extend that? I don't know how far I think people are getting to August 31st, but that's not going to happen in the end of the month. And I'm not sure on the specifics of the ordinances repayment period. To be honest, talking about the count. Speaker 1: So we are currently in alignment with the county with the July 31st date. Speaker 2: With respect to date, correct. Susan. Speaker 1: And would you say that you mentioned specifically that there are different things that are covered? Do you can you outline any of the contingencies that are covered under there that are not covered under. Speaker 2: Sure. Speaker 1: Or vice versa. Speaker 2: I can give you some examples. And one of which is in the dependencies in the tidelands, as you'll recall, commercial tenancies in our tidelands are not covered by the ordinance, and they would be covered, in my opinion, by the county ordinance. Assuming that it's not more than 500 employees and the county has similar exemptions along those lines, multinational companies, companies with more than X number of employees. But we have a tidelands exemption. We also have an airport exemption. I don't believe the county has either of those. Speaker 1: Those would be important. Okay. That helps me a lot. I would only ask just from a procedural standpoint, Mr. Richardson. Would it make more sense to, instead of receiving a file today, carrying this over to the July 14th meeting, then to Mr. Pierce's point, there wouldn't have to be any agenda by a staff member. It would already be ready to go. So just just a thought from a procedural standpoint of that for you that you hear that analogy. And then at that time, if it's not ready, we could just take a single vote to carry it over to the 21st or 28th or whatever happens. That's just a thought. Other than that, I appreciate the presentation and the report, and I think those are very notable variances that could be important to distinguish how we handle them locally. Thank you. Speaker 3: Thank you. Councilman Sunday House. Speaker 1: Thank you, Mayor, and thank you, Councilmember Richardson. I as you know, I am a renter here as well in Long Beach. And these times are very uncertain. So I can just imagine the difficulty it is right now for tens, maybe thousands of residents here in Long Beach. So I just wanted to say that I support the motion on the floor as it is right now and that we come back to. To to do this in a quick way. We also need to recognize that this is this is a crisis, and this crisis is certainly not over. Just last few weeks, we have seen our our reopening process needed to scale back because of this. This is not the numbers that are that we would like to be seen as far as COVID 19 goes. And it's just, you know, we don't know what the what the future near future holds for us. So the better the faster we can get this approved and extended hopefully and aligned with the counties, the better, because we really are facing some very uncertain times right now. Clearly there's there's an incredible need for assistance in our community. And we need to find those solutions to help without, you know, just simply being able to be there and create policy that helps them. And this is going to be a way of doing that. I'm so very grateful to the rental assistance programs that we have developed through the city. And I you know, I'm really happy about that, but I also am realistic about it in that it's only helping a very small percentage of those people, those residents that are in much need in our community right now. So, again, thank you for the work you've already done on this city staff and the work that you are going to be doing in the next couple weeks to bring something forward to us so that we can have a vote. Thank you very much. Speaker 3: Thank you. And Councilman Soprano. Speaker 2: Thank you. During our last discussion of this topic, Assistant City Manager Linda Tatum was going to research funding from the CARES Act that would, I think, provide for a 50% program to pay for deferred rent. If if there's an update on that, I'd like to hear it now or at least bring that item back to our next discussion. Also. Speaker 1: Councilman Supermom. This is Linda Tatum and we are working on a TFF that will provide an update on that. Those additional funding sources are not committed funding sources or better yet, we understand that we will be getting them, but we don't have a timeline for those additional sources. So we are going to, in the TFF per vote, provide an alternative to address the matching issue that we talked about during that last council meeting and that TFF will be coming back, I want to say, next week. Speaker 2: Okay. Thanks. Speaker 3: Thank you. That concludes council comment. Let's go to Republican. Speaker 2: Our first speaker is Seagrams. Your time starts now. Speaker 1: District three. It seems like there's a lot of talk going on, but very little action. Conversations are in the making are going to be happening. But this is stated as a temporary eviction moratorium and rent deferment. And we need a permanent eviction moratorium and rent deferment. When you're in these conversations, I hope you consider the demands of the people. Speaker 2: Which is. Speaker 1: Cancel evictions, cancel rent, defund the police, and pay the people's rent. Get us out of this hole they all created, maybe not created. These problems were definitely created by greedy forefathers, but you perpetrate them. No. You. Yeah. And it is your job to create the solution. So September 30 sounds all good, but we need a permanent eviction moratorium and rent deferment. We need it past September 30. We need it until people are back to work, until we have a health care system that can support all people, until our house people and house people are housed. So consider that when you're in these conversations. Thank you so much. And I see you next week. Speaker 2: Thank you. Our next speaker is Joshua Christian. Your time starts now. Good evening, Mr. Mayor. Members of the council, I think I've begun. So, first of all, to say that we don't support the motion to table this debate and that we prefer it be resolved sooner rather than later. I'm going to start getting panicked phone calls from tenants this week asking what's going on August 1st? And I'd like to have an answer for those people quickly. But either way, let me let me talk about what we'd like to see in the final version of the ordinance. There are gaps in the eviction moratorium. They're preventing renters from enjoying substantial protections that are available at the county level. We've seen no abatement in no fault. 60 day notices issued to renters. And we've seen a substantial increase in, honestly, very startling incidences of landlord and tenant harassment. And both of those are banned at the county level, but neither was included in the Long Beach moratorium. Now it's our opinion that the simplest way to deal with that is simply to let the Long Beach moratorium expire, at which point the counties will kick in. You know, the foundation believes that that is clearly what will happen. So we have a disagreement with Mr. Anthony on that point, although we we entirely respect his opinion, of course. So if if the moratorium is not permitted to expire, then I'm going to urge the Council to consider introducing amendments to the Long Beach Ordinance. There was no way to predict several months ago exactly how serious this problem was going to be. But it is very important that tenants have these protections on the ground experiences showing that it's a real problem. Regardless, I request that a final ordinance extend the eviction moratorium to September 30th, which will align it with the governor's moratorium , which he just signed, the executive order that was signed on June 30th. Two weeks ago, I testified here, and I mentioned UCLA's prediction that 120,000 renters are going to experience homelessness in the next year because of the pandemic. That number came out after eviction moratoriums were in place. So that wave is coming. So jurisdictions that choose to end their moratorium sooner are simply inviting that wave of evictions and homelessness sooner. So most of those newly homeless individuals are going to be from vulnerable communities, low income communities, and especially communities of color. The Census Bureau reported that 43% of black renters nationally were having either little or no confidence that they would make rent in July. The number was the same for Latino renters, 43% of renters, there were 20% who had the same concerns within the white community. And that is that's within the national numbers. So it does not account for a community as diverse or as a renter impacted or as coded impacted as as Long Beach. Thank you. Next, we have Mike Martinson. Your time starts now. Good evening. Gary, the mayor and council members on behalf of rental property owners, I urge you to look at other options before you extend the eviction moratorium later on this month. You know, we've been going round and round with this, and it would seem to me that there may be another alternative in that we get this into like a subcommittee, either housing or economic development, so we can start looking at creative ideas to try to resolve this. The one thing I do know is there's no evictions going on right now, and there's none this year in California. Judicial Council has already come out and said the civil courts are not taking unlawful detainer cases. So this talk about evictions occurring right now, it's not accurate. It's not real. So we need to come up with something else. I'm concerned on behalf of property owners that while we support Rex Richardson's idea of getting CARES act money to pay 50% of the deferred rent that are owed, that's what the assumption that there's no strings attached, i.e. income levels. As for the assumption that the tenants going to pay 50% of the deferred rent, whatever that amount is. Those are great assumptions, but that's what they are assumptions. So we need something a little bit more definitive. We need something to give some kind of mortgage relief. We darn well know that the city is not in a legal position to forgive rents. There's this talk going around town that the city council, the county, the state can forgive rent. They cannot forgive rent. To my knowledge, the only person to forgive rent the federal government. So unless the federal government decides to chime in and forgive rent and forgive mortgage payments, it's all stuck on the landlords. So I just urge you to come up with some kind of creative solution in the interim, prior to the 29th Council meeting, set up a subcommittee meeting, set up an opportunity to discuss this through, see what else we can come up with. Landlords are willing to come to the table and come up with creative solutions while this is going on. Thank. You. Thank you. That concludes public comment for this item. Speaker 3: Thanks. I just want to make one quick clarifying point. I just it's been mentioned and I talked about this with our city attorney today as well. There was a public comment and I've heard other comments about whether or not we would align with the county. And I know that our city attorney has an opinion on that. I think I think that we'll have an opportunity also to make some clarifications on that over the next few days. I know that the county might have one opinion and we might have another and certain groups might have a different opinion out there. And so I think there's also just gives us an opportunity to kind of clear some of that over the next few days. And the county is going to be having some discussions as well. And so I would encourage us to use the next week or so to get some of that clarity and just make sure we're on the same page with L.A. County, because there is some difference of opinion about what about whether or not we should just have ours expire and whether or not that county would kick in. So I appreciate your opinion, Mr. Anthony, and we'll go ahead and go to a vote. Speaker 1: There are about one clarifying question, please. Speaker 3: We go to the queue or your queue? Okay, go ahead. Speaker 1: Here. Thank you. Yes, I appreciate the explanation. As I mentioned, we did a lot of conversations today about what would be covered in the county and not. And I just want to stay on the record so that we recognize one of the areas that I'm was told that would not be covered if we weren't with the county are the entities that we left out of the business part, which would be our port or tidelands and our airport. So I just want to recognize that while I wholeheartedly have talked for five days about going with the county, that when that information was brought up, it raising concerns for me, which is why I was supportive of the motion to give direction to come back with the county. To be clear on timeline, I think there were public comments concerned around clarity when the council would take action and the city attorney wanting direction sooner rather than later. So should we assume that this item will be on next week's agenda? Because the next county meeting is on the 28th and I know that we're having a special on that, but if we don't get clear direction today, we need to do that before the 28th, correct? Speaker 2: Yeah. This, right, Anthony? Yes, I would like that. Clear direction before the tape. I assume you should assume that it might come back in a week. I think the mayor and I won't speak for the mayor, but I think I think there is value in in doing some fact finding, talking to the county and allowing our office to do a little more research. If we can get a better opinion and a more clear opinion on whether or not the county ordinance would apply to Long Beach in the event that the city ordinance expires. Speaker 1: I appreciate that. So that's. I just wanted to make sure before we went to a vote that we were clear that you needed to have some of that direction. I appreciate the time and recognize that today we we all felt like every half hour the facts were changing. So I appreciate this and support this motion. Thank you. Speaker 3: Councilman Mongo. Councilman Bango. Speaker 1: Then you hear me? Speaker 3: Now we can. Yes. And we're going to go to a vote. Okay. Speaker 1: So one thing I would like to say is if we do find out that the counties would take over and the county is considering an extension, I think it's important for us to advocate for the similar exemptions of the tidelands, the airport and the. I can't think of one right the second so that we don't lose a lot of those federal grants in the airport area at least. But that was one of the reasons that I was a part of it. And then I just have some hesitation. One of the biggest Tidelands clients has a conflict of interest with one councilmember. And so maybe if we could make sure that the other eight of us are the ones doing the advocacy with the county on that specific thing, I think that that would be the most appropriate way to handle that next. Speaker 3: I think it, Councilwoman, and I think that the exemption question was brought up that you just brought up also. Absolutely. I think that's something we have to work out. You know, those are important to this body. So with that, we would go ahead and take a vote and do a roll call. Speaker 0: District one. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District to. Speaker 2: My. Speaker 0: District to. I am District three I. District fourth. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: District five. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District six. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 0: District seven. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: District eight. I District nine. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: Motion carries. Speaker 3: Okay. Thank you. Next step is item 14. You know. I'm sorry, Adam. 15.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to review Chapter 8.100 of the LBMC which provides for a temporary eviction moratorium and rent deferment due to the COVID-19 pandemic, consider and discuss potential changes thereto, and if necessary, direct City Attorney to prepare an ordinance amending Chapter 8.100 of the Long Beach Municipal Code. (Citywide)

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Speaker 3: Okay. Thank you. Next step is item 14. You know. I'm sorry, Adam. 15. Speaker 0: Communication from Councilmember Pierce, Councilwoman Price, Councilmember Richardson recommendation to direct city manager to work with the fire chief to present a report on the status of one beaches Hart and 30 days. Speaker 1: Go ahead. Thank you. I have done this in previous years. Doing this before the budget cycle is kind of what we do. This was one of the very first. Items that I was able to help usher through the budget process in my very first year on council, the Hart Team has been an organization that has helped augment some of our calls for those that are experiencing homelessness, as well as mental health challenges. I know in previous years we've had videos and great reports. I'm curious on the numbers and statistics about how the Hart team is working. I know that one of the Hart teams is able to respond to 911 calls. Would like to be able to understand that a little bit more how that's working out. And so I know it's a tight turnaround. I did check in with the fire chief ahead of this. And so I feel pretty confident about it and hope that my council colleagues will support this item. Thank you. Speaker 3: Thank you. Next up is Councilwoman Rice. Speaker 1: Mr. Mayor, I want to thank Councilmember Pearce for bringing this item forward and for including me on this item. And I just I am incredibly grateful for the program and everything that we have accomplished, especially when we're talking about things like social services and creative ways of addressing these common issues. And so I'm grateful for the opportunity to have a report back. Speaker 3: Vice Mayor Andres. Speaker 2: Thank you very much. First of all, I think this is this item is a wonderful idea. I believe that we should board up these conversations and discuss online portals so everyone can access and connect this data, data and data from public outreach teams as well. You know, there's nothing more frustrating to a resident than calling to report a person experiencing homelessness and not receiving follow up, sometimes due to hyper or other factors. Information cannot be shared. But even if we could just sheer numbers like these, it would be a great, great idea. Thank you very much. Speaker 3: Okay. Public comment, please. Speaker 0: There's no public comment on this item. Speaker 3: Thank you, Rocco. Speaker 0: District one. My district to. I was district three. Speaker 1: By. Speaker 0: District four. Speaker 2: At my. Speaker 0: District five. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District six. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: District seven. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: District eight. District nine. High motion carries.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to direct City Manager to work with the Fire Chief to present a report on the status of Long Beach’s H.E.A.R.T. in 30 days and to include data on calls of service, proactive contact with individuals experiencing homelessness, and the Continuum of Care Partners.

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Speaker 3: Item 27. Speaker 1: Or. Speaker 0: Communication from Councilwoman Mongeau, Councilwoman Zendejas, Councilman Super Na, Councilman Austin Recommendation to request City Manager to include commercial small business rent relief as part of any future rent relief funding initiatives provided by the city. Speaker 1: Mr. Mayor, this is Susie Price. I need to declare a conflict. Speaker 3: Okay. Speaker 1: I am a small business owner in the city of Long Beach, and although I have sought and received a formal opinion from the FTC regarding my voting on items involving businesses and have been approved to vote on those items as falling within the public generally exception, I am choosing to conflict off of this item and not participate in the discussion or the vote in order to avoid an appearance of impropriety. Since any benefit to businesses on this particular item might result in a direct financial benefit. With that, I'm going to log off of the meeting. Speaker 3: Okay. Thank you, Councilmember. Council on Mango. Speaker 1: Gil. Many of our small businesses are the backbone of our city. And those small businesses have certain revenues coming in. And they have to make tough decisions about the number of employees that they can reemploy and the number of hours that they can offer to those employees. And it's often based on their ability to meet, rent and other things that have put them over the top in terms of the balance of expenses versus revenue in the last several months. And so I hope that as we evaluate the different options for matching funds and rent support, that we also include those commercial businesses. Because while it is both important that people have a roof over their head, it is also important that they have their jobs so that they can again afford to pay rent. Furthermore, I'm hoping that there can be some research done into whether or not businesses that hire back Long Beach residents are able to get a higher priority in any of these kinds of funds that are become available. Does that really support our Long Beach neighbors with jobs? Thank you. For all the councilmembers that supported this item. Speaker 3: They got the present day out. Speaker 1: Thank you, Councilmember Mongo, for this, but I think that this is absolutely the right thing to do. It is very critical for us at this point to not only look to look at our tenants, but to also look at those tenants that are in commercial areas. And I think that they also have been very much affected by COVID 19, and they continue to be affected because of the health order. And now even the fact that we're scaling back and we always have to keep them in the front for, you know, thinking of them and in front and, you know, so it's really it's really important that we bring this item and that we definitely include them in anything pertaining to any kind of rental assistance or or moratoriums, anything that to do with rental policies that we do consider them and keep them in mind are small businesses, as was said, is what makes Long Beach. And it brings so many jobs and so many people that are invested in those small businesses to create the wonderful community that we have here in the city of Long Beach. So in turn, I hope that we also can can provide them with assistance and making sure that they know that we care about them as well and we continued to invest in them. So again, thank you, Councilmember Mongo, for allowing me to sign on to this item and for your thoughtfulness about our businesses here in Long Beach. Thank you. Speaker 3: Councilman Austin. Speaker 2: I thank you. And ditto to both the maker of the motion and sponsor Councilmember Mongo in the House. I agree wholeheartedly with everything that has been said. Obviously, our small businesses are really part of the DNA of our of our city, of our communities throughout the city, and they should be supported however we can. I believe this item is consistent with the values and spirit of the Council. The priorities that have been set forth already, and our economic support packages that we put together already. And so this, I think, further emphasizes that I'm happy to support. Speaker 3: Any public comment? Speaker 2: We have one comment from Dave Kuka. Your time starts now. Hello. Dave Chappelle from the third district. I urge your support on this item, like with the rental eviction moratorium. Eventually we're going to need to not only reckon with. The forces that wanted to reopen to early. The forces that have directed a lot of the funding available at the federal level. But also those that have generally been getting fed up of three and a half years of illegality at the federal level eventually is going to have to seriously consider. Going to the bank on behalf of the small businesses in town and having serious discussions about restructuring and canceling debt. That's what this is. The people primarily responsible. The rentier class would add much to the productive economy and not let the small, small businesses be struggling with their own. Thank you for your support of the fight. Speaker 3: Thank you all the. Speaker 0: District one, district two. I District three. District four. Speaker 2: All right. Speaker 0: District five. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District six. Speaker 2: By. Speaker 0: District seven. By District eight. District eight. Speaker 2: All right. Speaker 0: District nine. Speaker 2: All right. Speaker 0: Motion carries.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to request City Manager to work with all appropriate departments to include commercial small business rent relief as part of any future rent relief funding initiatives provided by the City.

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Speaker 0: Motion carries. Speaker 2: Now we'll move to item 16. Would you please me? Speaker 0: The item report from Development Services. Recommendation to request city attorney to prepare ordinances to designate 1005 Locust Avenue and 141143 East 10th Street as historic landmarks District one. Speaker 2: Just to go on. You have any comments on this item? It is a day that comes when they have. Hello? Speaker 1: Yes, thank you. Vice Mayor. I just wanted to say how excited I am about this item and that it's really it's really important when we make such historic homes and actually put them on the books as a story. This is a beautiful, beautiful place. And I'm so happy to have this district. So thank you. Speaker 2: Thank you very much. Do you have a staff report on this item? Speaker 4: Yes. Thank you, Vice Mayor and members of the city council. We are very delighted to bring this matter to your attention for your review. We are requesting that the city attorney prepare an ordinance to designate the two subject properties as landmark historic designations. With that, Christopher Coons is here to provide additional information. Just briefly, vice mayor, members of the council under the city's Cultural Heritage Ordinance to declare an item, a historic landmark. It can't just be all that it needs to meet certain criteria, either associated with the great work of architecture or associated with persons or events from the city's past. In this case, there is two structures. At 1005 Locust Avenue. The architect that commissioned these works was Horace Austin, who was the first major architect professionally credentialed, an office here in the city of Long Beach. The work was commissioned by Charles Buffon, who was a prominent business person, owner of the bar from retail store, a civic leader, and also mayor from 1921 to 1924. And the house was built in 1905 as an intact example of the Edwardian architectural style. The second structure on the lot, that duplex served as the residence of Walter Porterfield, who was instrumental in bringing telephone service to the city of Long Beach. And it was built in 1901 and is the oldest building, is one of the oldest buildings in the city and one of the last remaining examples of the four square architecture style. There's additional interesting information in your agenda packet if you're interested in local history. And this nomination came from the property owner. It received no opposition and it was approved by the Cultural Heritage Commission on February 25th of this year. Thank you. Speaker 2: Fine. We have a person in second in this item. We please take a call. Speaker 0: Can we get a seconder on this item? Speaker 2: Yes, you I think what I think we were expecting it. Speaker 0: Thank you. District one. High district to. District three. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District four. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: District five. Speaker 1: It. Speaker 0: District six by District seven II, District eight. District nine. Speaker 2: All right. Speaker 0: Motion carries.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to request City Attorney to prepare ordinances to designate as Historic Landmarks two residential buildings located on a single lot: a single-family house with the address of 1005 Locust Avenue and a residential duplex with the address of 141 and 143 East 10th Street. (District 1)

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Speaker 2: Mean. Thank you. Now we move to item 17. Clark, would you please read the item. Speaker 0: Report from economic development recommendation to authorize an advance payment expected to be owned owed under management agreement to as and global for operational expenses at the Long Beach Convention and Entertainment Center due to COVID 19 impacts. District two. Speaker 2: Yes. You have a first and second on this. Speaker 1: Councilman or Vice Mayor Andrews. This is Councilwoman Price. I'm happy. 2 seconds. Speaker 2: Thank you. You have a first and second. Would you please as well. Speaker 1: Can we on this one? Can we get a stop before. Speaker 2: You want to? Okay, fine. We'll get a staff report on this, please. Speaker 5: Yes, John Keisler will get the staff report. Good evening, Mayor, and members of the City Council. This item pertains to our operating agreement with SMG Global or formerly SMG. This is an agreement that's been in place for for a couple of decades now. And typically what happens each year is that there's a revenue share component which results in about a $500,000 surplus that is paid to the city. However, in years where operating costs exceed operating revenue, there might be a deficit. And it's very rare. But because of COVID 19, many, many events have been canceled. And as a result, there are still costs associated with utilities taking care of the building, maintenance, security, etc.. And so the convention center is reporting an operating loss to date. This action allows for us to advance some of the funds that we anticipate that we will be paying out toward the end of the year, because there are issues with cash flow for those things that are described, utilities, maintenance, etc.. So by taking this action, the Council will allow for city management to move forward with advancing some of those funds ahead of time. Currently, the projected deficit could be as high as 4.7 million by the end of the fiscal year. Right now, we're just requesting authority up to $3 million cash advance so that we can keep SMG solvent in helping to manage the building until that time. I'm happy to answer any questions and thank you for your support. Speaker 2: Fine. Do you have any public comment on this item? Oh. Speaker 1: Vice Mayor, I have some questions. Speaker 2: Oh, excuse me. Speaker 1: It's kind of a big item. I just wanted to hear from staff. What happens if we don't? And then also understand what other cities are doing with their convention centers. I'm just so we can have an understanding on that before we vote on it. Speaker 5: So if we don't, we would be in violation of our agreement. It would be a legal dispute and it is clearly spelled out in the operating agreement. We have to do this. We haven't looked at other cities. Every city has different agreements with how they do this. This agreement is about 25 years old and it is nearing expiration. So we would certainly look at it going forward, maybe some different models. But, you know, it is something we're contractually obligated to do. Speaker 1: All right. That's all I needed you to say for sure. Support. Speaker 2: Brian Levin in public comment on this. Speaker 0: There's no public comment on this item. Speaker 2: I think we did well. Speaker 0: District one. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District two i. District three i. District four. Speaker 2: All right. Speaker 0: District five. It's District six. Speaker 2: By. Speaker 0: District seven. District eight. District nine. Speaker 2: All right. Speaker 0: Motion carries.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to authorize an advance of payment expected to be owed under Management Agreement No. 21667 to ASM Global for operational expenses at the Long Beach Convention and Entertainment Center due to COVID-19 impacts. (District 2)

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Speaker 2: Thank you. Now go to item 18. Speaker 0: Report from fire. Recommendation to approve the expenditure of 10,000 in the General Fund group as a reward for information leading to the identification and conviction of the individuals responsible for an arson fire on May 31st, 2020 citywide. Speaker 2: And to have a report on this. Yes. Anachronism with lobby fires on the line on May 31st, 2020, civil unrest impacted Long Beach. A video has circulated that shows multiple subjects approaching the men's food outlet at 655 Pine Avenue and throwing two incendiary devices into the business. The ensuing fire destroyed the building and the following businesses the main outlet, the legacy, beauty and Barbershop, 10th Planet, Long Beach, Jiu-Jitsu. People ready as well as the Urban School of Self-defense. The loss is in excess of $5 million. To assist the investigation, the ATF contributed $10,000 or towards the reward for information leading to the identification and conviction of the subjects responsible. An additional $10,000 by the city of Long Beach would place the total at $20,000. The fire department believes that this would be beneficial to establish a reward, which may prompt reluctant witnesses to come forward and help solve the case. As this isn't an active investigation. Any support would be greatly appreciated. And a report. Thank you. And see that councilwoman as well. Kudos. Speaker 1: Yes. Air Vice Mayor, one of the things that I want to say is thank you, thank you for this city step in closing the the horrific thing that happened to our business here in the first District and these businesses were attacked unjustly. And so I'm really happy that this city is putting forward an item to help protect the perpetrators of this crime and hopefully stop them from any any bad doing in the future. So I am really excited to be able to see this reward and to the community that's out there that, you know, this would be a really good incentive for those people that may know of them to actually come forward. So thank you again for this item. Speaker 2: Thank you, Councilman Kinzinger. Do I have a second in this place? I may have a second on this. Speaker 1: Vice mayor, this is Susie Price. I'm happy the second. Speaker 2: Thank you. The only public comment on this item. Speaker 0: There is no public comment on the side of. Speaker 2: All right. We police de-growth. Speaker 0: District one. Speaker 1: By. Speaker 0: District two at district three. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District four. Speaker 2: All right. Speaker 0: District five. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District six. Park District seven. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: District eight. Speaker 2: II. Speaker 0: District nine. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: Motion carries. Speaker 3: I'm I am back with going to do item 19.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to approve the expenditure of $10,000 in the General Fund Group as a reward for information leading to the identification and conviction of the individuals responsible for an arson fire on May 31, 2020. (Citywide)

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Speaker 3: I'm I am back with going to do item 19. Speaker 0: Please report from Long Beach Airport recommendation accept a grant award an airport improvement program grant for federal fiscal year 2020. Funding for capital improvements to taxiway B and taxiway L and an amount not to exceed 50 million District five. Speaker 3: Okay. I have a motion as well. A second by Councilmember Austin. I see no public comment. So unless Councilman Mongo. You want to say any words, I will go to a vote. Actually. Actually, I do think there is a public comment. Madam Clerk, is there one public comment on this item? Speaker 0: No. Mr. Shukla is no longer. Speaker 1: On the line. Speaker 2: Okay, great. Speaker 3: And let's go and go to a roll call vote on this, councilman, alongside the comments. Speaker 1: That I'm in support. Thank you, sir. Right. Speaker 0: District one. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District two I, district three I. District four. Speaker 2: All right. Speaker 0: District five, i. District six. Speaker 2: By. Speaker 0: District seven. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: District eight. Speaker 2: Hi. Speaker 0: Nine. My motion carries.

Contract

Recommendation to authorize City Manager, or designee, to execute all documents, including any necessary amendments, with the Federal Aviation Administration, to accept a grant award in Airport Improvement Program Grant for Federal Fiscal Year 2020 funding, for capital improvements to Taxiway B and Taxiway L, in an amount not to exceed $50,000,000. (District 5)

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Speaker 3: I'm 20. Speaker 0: Report from Long Beach Airport. Recommendation to award two contracts for as needed construction material, materials testing and inspection services for various development projects at Long Beach Airport. An aggregate amount not to exceed 2,300,000 District five. Speaker 3: Do you have a motion? Can I get a second, please? Okay. I have got some of your anger. Can I get a second, please? And Councilman's in Dallas is the second. Please go ahead and do a roll call vote. Speaker 0: District one, district two. District two. District three i. District four. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: District five. District five. District six. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District seven. Speaker 2: By. Speaker 0: District eight. Speaker 2: By. Speaker 0: District nine. I motion carries. Speaker 3: Random quirk and I had Dave Shoe go on for that item as well. There was no other comment, right, for that item. Speaker 0: No. There are no public speakers for that item.

Contract

Recommendation to adopt Specifications No. RFQ AP19-133 and award contracts to Ninyo & Moore Geotechnical and Environmental Science Consultants, of Irvine, CA and Twining, Inc., of Long Beach, CA, for as-needed construction materials testing and inspection services for various development projects at Long Beach Airport, in an aggregate amount not to exceed $2,300,000, for a period of two years, with the option to renew for three additional one-year periods, at the discretion of the City Manager; and authorize City Manager, or designee, to execute all documents necessary to enter into the contracts, including any necessary amendments. (District 5)

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Speaker 0: No. There are no public speakers for that item. Speaker 3: I didn't. 21. Speaker 0: Report from Public Works recommendation declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code relating to no cost parking at certain city owned and operated lots for drivers with valid disabled plates or placards. Read the first time and later the next regular meeting of the City Council for Final Reading. Citywide. Speaker 3: I got a motion by Councilman Price. Can I get a second, please? Think about customers in Dallas seeing no public comment. Speaker 1: Mr. Mayor, can I just make a comment on this item? Yes. So this was our item that we brought to council three years ago. And I want to thank staff for bringing it back. I know it took a long time for it to come back to us because it needed to go through Coastal Commission. But I do know that this is something that we've been advocating for on behalf of a few of our residents, and I'm grateful that it has come to pass. So thank you very much for coming to council, hopefully to pass. So I want to thank city staff for getting us to this point. Speaker 3: Customers in the House should some comments also. Speaker 1: Yes, absolutely. I just wanted to say thank you again for to Councilmember Price for bringing this item forward and and for all the all the hard work you've done. I know that this kind of work was not easy, but on behalf of all the residents that used placards like this, I just want to say thank you. It is really difficult to find a parking spot as it is already that has a disabled accessibility and they're very limited. So this kind of eases that. And so I'm very thankful that to actually see this come into fruition. So thank you very much on behalf of those who use those placards. Speaker 3: Thank you. And with a roll call. Speaker 0: District one, district two I'm District three I, District four. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: District five I, district six. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: District seven. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: District eight. Speaker 2: All right. Speaker 0: District nine. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: Motion carries.

Ordinance

Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code by adding Section 10.34.040 relating to parking at City-owned and operated lots with disabled plate or placard, read and adopted as read. (Citywide)

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Speaker 3: Thank you. And Item 22. Speaker 0: Report from Development Services Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code relating to various sections of Title 21 zoning regulations read and adopted as read citywide. Speaker 3: There are recues on this. Speaker 1: Sorry. What was I. Speaker 3: Do? Speaker 1: Because, yes, this comes from a pure Socrates myself, working with urban commons. Thank you. Speaker 3: Okay. There is again a motion by Councilwoman Pryce. Can I get a second, please? Take my customers in Dallas. Let's go ahead and do a roll call. Speaker 0: District one. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District three. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District four. Speaker 2: Right. Speaker 0: District five I. District six. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: District seven. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: District eight. Speaker 2: All right. Speaker 0: District nine. My motion carries. Speaker 3: Thank you. I believe that concludes all of the items on the agenda. Is that right? Speaker 0: That's correct. Speaker 3: Okay, great. Then we will move on to a journey to meeting investors. Any new business from anyone? I don't have anybody queued up. So see? See? No, no queue ups for any announcements. I will just go ahead and then close the meeting and thank everyone for the day and will see everyone next week for the council meeting

Ordinance

Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code by amending Section 21.25.903, Subsection 21.25.904.C, Section 21.31.110, Table 31-1, Table 32-1, Table 32-1A, Subsection 21.33.060.C, Table 33-2, Section 21.52.232, Section 21.52.260, Subsection 21.56.030.C, Subsection 21.56.100.J, Section 21.56.120, and Subsection 21.56.140.C, relating to various sections of Title 21 Zoning Regulations relating to assembly uses, urban agriculture, wireless telecommunication facilities, and adult-use cannabis incorporating the suggested modifications by the California coastal commission, read and adopted as read. (Citywide)

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Speaker 4: Thank you. Next up is the hour. We have two hearings, hearing item 12, please. Speaker 0: Or from Development Services recommendation to receive supporting documentation into the record, include the public hearing and find the project exempt from secure declare or simply. Speaker 4: You know what? Madam Clerk, I'm sorry. I think we have a full public speakers. This will go in just to public speakers right now. So, Madam Clerk, if you want to just do the public speakers that we have, I know we've hit our ten limit, so there will be 90 seconds. Why don't you go and go through those right now? Thank you. And you can just you could just take those one after the other. Speaker 0: Thank you. We don't have public comment callers queued up at this time. Speaker 4: Oh, okay. You're kidding. You're still keeping them up? Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 4: Okay then please go and cue them up and we'll do the hearings and then it'll be queued up right after that. Okay. Speaker 0: Thank you. It's a report from Development Services recommendations received supporting documentation and of the record to conclude the public hearing and find the project exempt from secure declared ordinance, amending various sections of Title 21 of the Long Beach Municipal Code. Read the first time and lead over to the next regular meeting of City Council for final reading and adopt a resolution to submit the ordinance amendments to the Coastal Commission for Certification Citywide. Speaker 4: Okay. Go ahead, please. Speaker 7: Oscar Orsi are development services director there. Speaker 1: This is Councilwoman Pierce. I'm going to recuse myself from this item for working with from the earth. Thank you. Speaker 4: Thank you, Mayor. Members of the City Council in accordance with the city's local coastal program, various zoning code amendments were that were approved by the City Council or were submitted to the Coastal Commission for the LCP amendment. The Coastal Commission considered the amendments and took action to approve them, subject to certain modifications. Those modifications are minor in nature. They include some type of in some clarifications, adjustments to our tables, allowing for minor deviations from the LCP to comply with the Lupa, as well as some standards for lighting and etc.. That said, staff is requesting that the Council approve the modifications and if approved, the audience will be submitted to the Coastal Commission for approval. That concludes my presentations will be more than happy to answer any questions. Okay. Is there any public comment on the hearing? Speaker 0: There is no public comment on this hearing. Speaker 4: Okay. Then we'll call it public comment. And can I see a motion to approve a accounts from Ranga? Can I get a second? Can I get a second, please? Okay. Speaking about Councilman Price, unless there's any comment from either the motion or the second or Councilmember Ringa, we'll go ahead and do a roll call vote. Speaker 0: District one. I district to. District three, I. District four. Speaker 4: All right. Speaker 0: District five. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District six. Art District seven. I District eight. District nine. High emotion carries. Speaker 4: Okay. Thank you. Next is hearing 13. And Madam Crook, I'll be going right into public comment after this hearing, just so you know. So hearing item 13.

Ordinance

Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code by amending Section 21.25.903, Subsection 21.25.904.C, Section 21.31.110, Table 31-1, Table 32-1, Table 32-1A, Subsection 21.33.060.C, Table 33-2, Section 21.52.232, Section 21.52.260, Subsection 21.56.030.C, Subsection 21.56.100.J, Section 21.56.120, and Subsection 21.56.140.C, relating to various sections of Title 21 Zoning Regulations relating to assembly uses, urban agriculture, wireless telecommunication facilities, and adult-use cannabis incorporating the suggested modifications by the California coastal commission, read and adopted as read. (Citywide)

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Speaker 4: Okay. Thank you. Next is hearing 13. And Madam Crook, I'll be going right into public comment after this hearing, just so you know. So hearing item 13. Speaker 0: Report from financial management. Recommendation to receive supporting documentation under the record. Conclude the public hearing and grant an entertainment permit with conditions on the application of the bungalow. Long Beach at 6420 East Pacific Coast Highway number 200 for entertainment with Dancing District three. There is an oath required for this, and there are appellants on the line to give testimony. Speaker 4: Staff. Speaker 0: Getting Mayor in council. We will have staff from the financial management department to present this this public hearing. Speaker 2: Monique? I don't know. Did you want to administer the oath now? Before I did my staff report? Speaker 0: Yes. The applicants on the line. Speaker 2: Yes. Yes. Speaker 0: Do you solemnly state that the testimony you may give in the court now and pending before this body shall be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God? Speaker 2: I do? Yes. Speaker 0: Thank you. Speaker 2: Yes. I mean, good evening. I ran for mayor and members of the city council. Tonight you have a for you an application for entertainment with the theme for the Bungalow Long Beach, LLC. Doing business at Bungalow Long Beach located at 5428 Pacific Coast Highway Number 200. Operating as a restaurant with alcohol inclusive disagree. There is one change that I need to make two additional condition. Number one, there was a typo at the end of that condition that reads in the interior of the establishment, and I need to change that to say, dancing is only permitted in the interior of the establishment the way it currently reads without this change. So the confusion and this will make it clear that dancing is only allowed in the interior of the business. With that correction. All of the necessary departments have reviewed the application and have provided the recommended conditions as contained in the hearing packet. I, as well as the police department, stand ready to answer any questions Council may have, and that concludes that report. Thank you. Speaker 4: Okay. Thank you. Any public comment, please? Do you want to have the appellant speak? Madam Clerk. Speaker 0: They're on the line. Do you have any comments? Speaker 2: Yes. This is Mike. I mean, the representative for the bungalow, Mr. Brant Millhouse, is also the principal of the bungalow is on the line. We first wanted to thank staff for the incredible work they did to get us to this hearing, as well as the police department, which we met with and spoke with quite regularly, as well as the Building and Safety and Fire. We're here to answer any questions that you may have. Thank you, Brett, for the correction to that condition. Otherwise, we've read, understand the conditions, stand ready to be a part of the community in Long Beach, and I look forward to answer any questions that you may have also. Mr. Brett Malthouse is on the line and he's ready to answer questions and if he has anything to add, he's certainly. No, I'm just here to the councils. Any questions on, you know, what the bungalow is? We have two other locations, one in the city of Santa monica, one in the city of Huntington Beach. And this will be our third location in the city of Long Beach. And we're super excited to be part of the community. Speaker 4: Okay. Councilman Price. Speaker 1: Very much so. I want to thank staff on their work on this project. I know that second PCH has presented a lot of opportunities for staff to work and to think about all the different uses that we have in that space. I want to welcome the bungalow to Long Beach, and we we look forward to having a great partnership with you. I will note that it's unusual for us to issue and approve and recommend and advocate for entertainment permits. Usually that's a very long outreach process that involves a lot of feedback from the community. But given the location of this restaurant and given the potential for this site to be used in many different ways, I think this is going to be an excellent fit for this specific use. So, gentlemen, welcome to Long Beach. We look forward to working with you. Thank you. Speaker 2: Thank you. Thank you very much. Speaker 4: Thank you. Can I get a second on the motion, please? There's a second account from your Ranga bloke over. Speaker 0: District one. I district to. I. District three. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District four. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: District five. High District six. I'm District seven. Speaker 6: I. Speaker 0: District eight. District nine. Speaker 2: All right. Speaker 0: Motion carries.

Public Hearing

Recommendation to receive supporting documentation into the record, conclude the public hearing, and grant an Entertainment Permit with conditions on the application of The Bungalow Long Beach, LLC, dba The Bungalow Long Beach, at 6420 East Pacific Coast Highway #200, for Entertainment with Dancing. (District 3)

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Speaker 4: Thank you. We're going to hear items 16 and 25, which are both fireworks related together, please. Speaker 0: Communication from Councilman Price, Councilmember Pierce, Councilman Super Knob, Vice Mayor Andrews. Recommendation to receive and file a report from the Long Beach Fire Department and a presentation from the Third Council District Committee on illegal fireworks. And item 17 is a report from Health and Human Services, a recommendation to award a contract to Volunteers of America to provide operational I'm sorry, $0.25 item. Speaker 4: Actually, I'm going to do one at a time. I just wanted to note that to hear one after the other. Okay. Sorry about that. So why don't we go ahead and do item 16? Speaker 0: The recommendation receive and file a report on the Long Beach Fire Department from the Long Beach Fire Department and a presentation from Third Council District Committee on Illegal Fireworks. Speaker 1: Mr. Mayor queued up. Speaker 3: I think you're good to. Speaker 1: Can you guys hear me? Yes we can use as he comes on our earth. Is the video queuing up or. Speaker 0: Yes, we can hear you. We can hear you on this. And if you'd like to start your presentation. Speaker 1: Okay. So I think there is a video for this presentation and I don't know if it's getting queued up or not, but I do have some comments on the item before we show it. It's one of our public service announcement videos that we work with Cal State, Long Beach every year to create. Speaker 0: Oh. My name is Biscuit. When I was a puppy. Speaker 1: I was really scared of these loud. Speaker 0: Bright lights in the sky. Speaker 1: I used to hide wherever and whenever I could. But then I knew. Coming. Comfort me. No matter what, everything is going to be okay. But then. My husband went away for a. And when he came back, it was the happiest day of my life. But he wasn't the same person. Speaker 0: He used to be. Speaker 1: My police dog friends tell me it's from these things called fireworks, which are these wild things that aren't allowed in Long Beach, but the humans use them anyway. So now it's my job to let my human know that no matter what, everything is going to be okay. I. Speaker 2: So. Speaker 1: So we wanted to kick off this item with that PSA. I think many of my council colleagues know that for the past several years we've been working really hard on education and outreach for fireworks leading up to the 4th of July. A few years ago, our office created a citizen committee to deal with fireworks. I know that, Ken Wise, I hope he's on the call right now. I think he wanted to give an update on the fireworks committee. And I think the importance of that is I don't know how many of my council members remember in 2018 when they did a presentation, they spent over 100 hours interviewing different public safety personnel throughout the city of Long Beach. They pulled data on hospitals in terms of 4th of July fireworks related injuries. They interviewed cities all throughout the region about how they deal with fireworks, education and outreach and also enforcement and prosecution of violations. And they presented a report to council. And as a result of that report, we brought several items over the past few years asking for the city attorney's office and the city manager to look at things such as administrative citations and other ways that we can better enforce and regulate fireworks activity in the city of Long Beach. This is to me, the situation is even worse this year. I know I've talked with Chief Luna about it and I've talked with Councilman Austin, who I know is also very concerned about this item and has brought an item as well tonight. This is an issue that for me, this year appears to be a lot worse. And in talking to the chief, I don't really know what the reason for that is, but the situation is out of control. It's almost nightly now, especially that on weekends. And so we're we're bringing awareness to the issue because I think it's important for us to have outreach and education through the pieces. I know that Ken Weiss, who's on this call, has been very successful in getting those pieces introduced into Long Beach Unified. He's worked, and I think he can speak to this himself, but he's got thousands, tens of thousands of views on these pieces just through the work that he's done with the committee that we created. And it's completely volunteer committee. So I'm really grateful for that. I also want to acknowledge our city prosecutor, Doug Halbert, who I spoke with earlier this week, who is going to be announcing, I think later this week a public facing website that will allow residents to be able to upload videos and to be able to lodge complaints. And we have that for price gouging. We're going to do a similar thing for fireworks, and that will allow the opportunity for home owners to also be held accountable for activity that's taking place on their property, even in the situation where the police officer doesn't witness the violation, which is necessary for a misdemeanor offense. So I'm going to turn it over. If it's okay, Madam Park, I don't know exactly how this would work, but I would love to hear from our fireworks advisory committee member Ken Weiss, if he's on the call and have him give a few updates and then and then we can move the item forward. And I know Councilmember Pearce reached out to me because this is an issue that's of great concern to her as well. So I know she's going to want to talk, but if we can ask Mr. Weiss to talk before she does, I think that would be great. Speaker 0: Mr. Weiss's on the call. Speaker 2: However. Speaker 0: Mr. Weiss. Speaker 1: Met. Speaker 2: Can you hear me? Speaker 0: Yes, sir. Speaker 2: Mr. Mayor. City Council members, thank you very much for letting me make a few more hours and make a few comments tonight. Our committee has worked really hard this year on developing a fourth PSA relating to addressing the PTSD and how the fireworks effect affect individuals that have that problem. And we worked with Cal State, Long Beach and the Veterans Administration, and we just had a wonderful experience with a different administration. They were just anything we needed. They stepped forward and helped us. With the project and they did it. They were wonderful. I want to do it real quick because I know time is short. We all the pieces are now in the Long Beach Unified School District curriculum and are being shown to all the elementary school children. They are also in the Long Beach library system and are going to be available, I believe, through the youth learning part of the library. We we developed a static piece of art to go along with the with the pieces. And that's that piece of art is on the Long Beach Convention Center. Billboard As we speak, we have a language on the. On the Veterans Administration billboard on Seventh Street that has that was started at the beginning of June and has been run through 4th of July. We took the we had kind of a I think it's a wonderful thing. We had a citizen a protest and ask he he wanted to be involved with our committee, but he couldn't make the time commitment. And so he asked us, he said, of all the things that you have done this year, what haven't you been able to do? And I immediately said, Well, I'm going to do a bumper sticker or a Windows sticker. And he said, Send me the artwork and I'll make make it happen. And two weeks later, I had a box of 5000 bumper stickers on my on my front porch. And we've distributed them to different organizations around Long Beach here. 5000 isn't enough, but it's a start. The the pieces are on Long Beach TV. Parks and Rec is going to show them in front of the movies in the park when and if things get back to normal. The VA has. Has put out the and the the the yes A's through their social media. We worked very hard last year to develop a distribution network specifically in Long Beach, and we have 140 partners who are now distributing the pieces, all four of them to their organizations. And they are people like the Boys and Girls Club, Homeowners Association, just a whole myriad of organizations in Long Beach that are concerned and upset about the fireworks situation. We as of yesterday, the safety squad pieces. I have I have earned 24 million views. Which I think is just outstanding, just amazing and blows me away to think that 24 million people have seen what we created. If any of you have any questions for me, I'm. I'm more than happy to try and answer. Speaker 1: And I don't have any additional questions for you, but I wanted to thank you on behalf of the city and on behalf of me and my team for the amazing work that you've done. I know that when we started this process, we talked a lot about trying to do outreach and education at the grade school level and the middle school level, just to teach the future leaders of Long Beach that this is this is not okay behavior. And and to maybe call upon the adults in the room who are breaking the rules to say, you know what, that's not okay. Kind of like our kids do sometimes. If we're picking up the phone while we're driving, they'll call out bad behavior and we want kids to understand that. But I think the work that you've done has been amazing. And the initial research that you did to get us to this point has been fantastic. And I just want to thank you. I know there's a lot of discussion to be had tonight. I also know that Chief Luna has shared with me that the attention of the police department toward this particular issue is going to be enhanced leading up to 4th of July from this point forward. So I want to thank you. Ken. And with that, Mr. Mayor, I have no additional comments. Thank you. Speaker 2: Could I say one more thing before? Hello. I could say one more thing. Our committee is in the process right now of putting together recommendations for 2021, and we look forward to presenting them to the City Council in late August or early September. Council meeting. So I just wanted to make all of you aware of the work that we're doing on that. Speaker 4: Thank you. Let me go to the coolest Councilman Pierce. Speaker 1: Thank you, Mayor. And thank you, Councilmember Price. And to your team that's been doing work. I, I did reach out to see if you were going to do this. And so I'm glad to be a part of this item. I have questions and I think I'm going to save for for the next item. That way we can have them all in context, but really appreciate what you guys are doing and really appreciate just doing the education component. I think that there's a lot more that we we can do, but also recognizing how difficult this situation is to manage. So I'll say my comments for the next one. Thank you so much. Speaker 4: Councilman. Your anger. Speaker 2: Thank you. And thank you, Susie. Speaker 6: For bringing this forward. I know we're all districts are trying to do their part in trying to control fireworks. And, you know, actually, they're they're explosive devices now. And there are some fireworks out there that I. Yet the margin of being called a firework. The explosive devices, anyway. All that to say is that CD1. Mary said there has been four years of ice. Mary Andrews and myself were hosting a town hall meeting this coming Tuesday, June 30th at 7 p.m. to invite the community to talk about the fireworks and where the city is doing in terms of trying to address the issues. And you're absolutely correct. The fireworks, it appears, are getting worse and worse every year and much more violent. My my wife was on Facebook and she heard earlier today that one of our neighbors lost her dog to a heart attack because of the grief and the panic that that dog was experiencing. And I make sure that I always bring in my dogs early enough before it really gets going to like shield them from all the noise inside. So please. Those are two in the community that are listening to us. Please tell your neighbors that fireworks are illegal in Long Beach. Thank you. Speaker 4: I mean, thank you. Any public comment on this item? Madam Clerk? Speaker 0: Yes. Speaker 5: We have one public comment from Cameron Berger. Your time starts now. Speaker 2: Hi. I'm just appreciative of the fact that everyone is pushing for education and I think the push for firework education is really important. I am a little disturbed to keep hearing that the police are going to continue to be involved in the enforcement of firework laws. I lived in Long Beach for three years now and reminding the public that fireworks are illegal has clearly not worked. I think that the city should probably also push its efforts to educate high school students rather than just elementary school students, since they're the ones lighting the firework. Not elementary school students, but in the city should focus more on education and less on enforcing the firework ordinances to the police. Thank you. And I yield my time. Black Lives Matter. Speaker 5: Thank you. That concludes public comment for this item. Speaker 4: Okay. Rule cover, please. Speaker 0: District one. District one. Speaker 1: I am. Speaker 0: District two. I. District three. District three. District four. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: I. I. Speaker 0: I. District six. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: District seven. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: District eight. Speaker 4: Hi. Speaker 0: District nine. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 0: Motion carries. Speaker 4: Thank you. Item 25, which is also fireworks related.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to receive and file a report from the Long Beach Fire Department on the status of illegal firework outreach, education, and enforcement plans, and a presentation from the Third Council District Committee on illegal fireworks.

LongBeachCC

LongBeachCC_06232020_20-0603

Speaker 4: Thank you. Item 25, which is also fireworks related. Speaker 0: Communication from Councilman Austin, Councilwoman Zendejas, Vice Mayor Andrews, Councilmember Richardson. Recommendation to request recommendations of the illegal explosives and Fireworks Action Plan to address the illegal use of fireworks and explosives in Long Beach. Speaker 4: Councilman Austin. Speaker 6: Sir. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And I'd just like to just just frame the issue. While the illegal use of fireworks is a recurrent issue, each year, this year it's been mentioned, seems to be significantly amplified and based on media reports that the surge in illegal fireworks and explosions complaints is being experienced not only here in Long Beach , but in cities across the country. The activity seemed to have started much earlier this year with greater frequency and a greater number of loud explosive devices nightly. And like many of my colleagues on the council, I not only experience these nightly disruptions in my neighborhood. I've spoken with many residents and heard from many residents in my district and throughout the city that they are. Asking the city to do more to address the problem. I'd like to thank my colleagues, council members and they House Vice Mayor Andrews and Councilmember Richardson for signing on to this item really at the last minute. This was a supplemental item as well as Councilmember Price and the council members who brought this item, previous item to the agenda on fireworks. It deserves our attention as a council. This is an issue that impacts many of us, all of us, especially those who are veterans or others who suffer from PTSD. Families with small children, pets, pet owners. I've heard from many of you, but it affects us all. And there's no easy answers here. A week ago, I held a virtual town hall on the issue of. Legal fireworks with our city prosecutor Doug Halbert, North Division Police Commander Anthony Lopez. We had a very productive discussion and I received many constructive suggestions, suggestions from the community, and I've taken a look at some of them as well as best practices in other cities. With that information, we put together this a legal explosives fireworks action plan to support our education campaign and current enforcement efforts with additional tools to curtail the activity. Is that versus the virtual town hall and bringing this item forward. Our city prosecutor has already, as mentioned, established a public portal for residents to report and submit evidence of illegal firework activities directly to the city prosecutor's office and website of the city prosecutor. However, dot com backslash fireworks that are illegal is also started sending letters to property owners where illegal. And I want to clarify that property owners, residents, anybody who is a dweller in a household can be cited. And he's going to send these to these individuals where these these households, where where illegal fireworks are being charged and given notice the storage or discharge of fireworks. That property is against the law and constitutes a public notice. I would like to thank the city prosecutor, however, for taking these immediate steps. While we won't be able to eliminate the problem of illegal fireworks altogether and immediately with additional education and concrete actions, I believe we can take steps forward here to really make a difference for our city. So we put forth seven our request on this item, and I'm certainly open to hear from my colleagues about potential amendments to this. But number one, we request the city attorney to draft an ordinance that would include a person who owns rents, leases or otherwise, has possession of the premises as the responsible party for the illegal use, discharged possession, storage or sale of fireworks on the premises. Number two, we request the city attorney and city manager to report back to the city council with options for increasing the penalties for anyone cited or arrested for firework violations. Number three, we request the city attorney and city manager to report back to the City Council on the feasibility of including an administrative citation process for legal firework use to allow additional enforcement capacity in our city. Number four. Request the city manager to assess the feasibility of establishing an online portal or go Long Beach app feature for residents to submit video evidence of firework violations for referral to city prosecutor. Five request the city manager assess the feasibility of utilizing open data or crowdsourcing to create a publicly accessible heat map of incidents of illegal fireworks and explosives in Long Beach. Number six Request of City Manager Assess the feasibility of establishing a fireworks hotline for residents to report illegal fireworks and explosives. And lastly, number seven, request the city manager provide an update on public education efforts this year that all fireworks are illegal in Long Beach. I think some of this is done and is also in line with what we are already doing. But we want to send a strong message to anyone out there that that fireworks are illegal. I would appreciate my colleagues and support on this item. I know it's very important to all of our constituents. Thank you very much. Speaker 2: My next councilwoman. Jeanine, you're up next. Speaker 1: Somebody else can. Somebody that's on the item can second it. That's fine. I can go at the end. Speaker 2: But I wasn't there. Right. Fine. Okay. Fine. This is I like to say, you know, in this one person I wouldn't appreciate out, you know, for bringing in the other, you know, our colleagues that got on with this excellent idea. And there's no doubt that in the last 75 years I've been here, this is the worst year for fireworks. You know, I like some questions before we get started here. You know, do we have a, you know, a report on the most commonly reported locations for fireworks? But. Speaker 7: I'm sorry. Can you repeat the question, please? Speaker 2: We have a report. What's the most common, you know, reported locations for fireworks. Speaker 7: So we can ask our police department and our director of Disaster Preparedness Communications, Reggie Harrison, to give some anecdotal response to that. I think the item is asking us to kind of come back with a heat map where we would provide some data, but we can provide some just anecdotal evidence. I do believe we're seeing them throughout the city right now, but I'll turn it to them to ask or to give additional detail. Speaker 3: The Vice Mayor being joined by chief of police Robert Luna. As the city manager mentioned, we are and as a report indicated, we have seen highs in calls for service regarding fireworks already exceeding what we received during the same time period last year. My most recent report indicates that we're up by 25% over the same period of time last year in terms of the number of calls for services that we're receiving. And they are they're being called from all over the city. We haven't found a concentrated area that I'm aware of at this point. It seems like they're pretty well distributed throughout many neighborhoods in Long Beach and also not just in Long Beach, but nationwide as well. We're seeing lots of reports as indicating that this issue is record setting across the country. So it's not just an isolated alarm beach issue. Speaker 7: Uh, if I could add to that. Robert Luna here. Good evening, Vice Mayor and members of the City Council. We've heard our community loud and clear. I've spoken to many of you in the last week, two weeks. And I know that our community is very frustrated with this significant nuisance from the police department perspective. We are in the process of putting maps together, and they're for the purposes of giving them to our officers. So they're armed with that in the field and they can go out and identify specific addresses or locations where it's a continuous challenge for us. I saw one today where we had three addresses, specifically in one of the police divisions. And the officers are directed to go out there and spend more time. The last couple of weeks have been a little difficult. We've been preoccupied with we're now at 60 protest. So as those hopefully will slow down a bit, we can go out there. But for anyone in the public who's listening to me, please, it is a reminder that fireworks are illegal in this city. We want you to be respectful to your neighbors. I live here in the city and it's very difficult to sleep at night, as many people have described it. And I've got to tell you specifically in this environment, it's very difficult for our officers to go out and want to give citations for this violation. It is $1,000. We don't want to give citations, although we've given out several dozen of them already, and we don't want to give out any more. So we want you to stop doing this. But that being said, we are going to be putting out additional officers primarily focused on this activity. And if you're caught, you're going to get cited. And it's really expensive. So please stop. Speaker 2: Thank you. I really am that cheap because I'm really looking forward to report coming back with locations and numbers of citations. You know better to use in don't know drama for you know the enforcement so but but what I really would like to thank you know residents can again who's keeping me on my toes every single boom she she may not know it but B she'd be in a lab right up she's right up the street from each other. And I am convinced that together we are going to find out who is keeping instead in all these so we can get these things taken care at night. So with that, I want to thank everyone. And so the next that will be missed is the data. You coming up, please. Speaker 1: Thank you, Vice Mayor. ANDREWS First of all, I wanted to thank our staff for for giving this item the much needed attention that it's been a need for these past couple of weeks. I know that with COVID 19 present here, we haven't been able to give as much attention to this to this issue as we as we would have liked to. But, yes, I am I am a resident of the downtown area here in Long Beach, and I am am witness to every night having to hear the you know, the these fireworks are illegal and they're illegal for a reason. So I appreciate all my residents for trying to try to chime in and letting us know where the problem is and stuff. So they're all over our district. So I really appreciate Councilmember Austin for taking the lead on this on this problem that, you know, that we're all facing right now. It's very important that we you know. That we realize that this really affects those most vulnerable, which are our seniors, our children, and especially our pets. And it's very, very heartbreaking to feel like your your your hands are tied, because by the time that, you know, the officers come out to where the site was, there's nobody there anymore. So it's very hard to track and actually hard to enforce it, even though it is a misdemeanor here in Long Beach. So with that said, I'm so excited about the new portal that our prosecutor has launched today that will enable us to actually submit the videos, the the locations of where we're hearing them and pictures. But I just want to tell all our residents, not only in the first District but everywhere to yes, please do report those and any instances onto this portal, but always remember that your safety comes first. That's one of the things that I think is the most scary from these illegal fireworks, is that, you know, the innocent people that are not setting them off are are the ones that are being hurt by it. I've known people getting burnt in their back by them, you know, with them not even being close to someone, setting them off. So we and I, it's just so scary to see that and to put, you know, innocent people in harm's way . So, again, if if if you're out there, you're listening. Please don't don't do these fireworks. Please don't just think of those other people that you might hurt and you know, it's just not right. So thank you very much again, council member Austin for for bringing this item forward. Speaker 2: Yes, Councilwoman Mungo. Councilwoman Mungo, are you there? Speaker 1: Yes. Thank you, Vice Mayor. A couple of quick questions. We talked a little bit about the fee of $1,000 fine, but the individuals that we're talking about are literally buying thousands of dollars in fireworks. Lighting them on. Right. So there is a fine is very meaningful too. So my question would be to city staff, what can we do to force add to the. Along the lines of 40 hours of community service, you're keeping people up and ruining their sleep. Let's find something that's more important to you than money. If you're obviously willing to let your money on fire, what else can we do? Speaker 7: So yes. So it's currently a misdemeanor. We've looked into this and whether or not we can raise the fee, I believe that would require some state law changes in terms of other sentences. That tends to be up to the city prosecutor on what he can sentence under. Perhaps a chief when I can expound on that. Currently, as Mr. Modica stated, Councilwoman Mango, it is a misdemeanor and the punishment or the fine can go up to $1,000. So you basically get a misdemeanor citation for $1,000. If the judge, when you go to court, if he keeps it at that, he or she keeps it at that amount. Speaker 1: Is there an administrative fine that we could impose instead of 40 hours of community service? Because, again, fireworks are expensive. And if you're willing to light tons of fireworks on fire, you're literally lighting your money on fire. So to me, that saying $1,000, no, no big deal. So what other alternatives as a city could we pass legislation, either local legislation that says, okay, well, in Long Beach, it's an administrative fine and we're going to do 40 hours of community service. Or 60. I'm open to a lot of suggestions. Speaker 7: Yeah, I hear your frustration and that's a level of frustration. A lot of us and I see us as a community. I will absolutely sit down with the city attorney and the city prosecutor to see what further options we may have. Speaker 1: And then can you tell me about the Coordination Council member Richardson and I, when we're on Facebook and talking with community members, talk a lot about, um, we work with our own commanders, but we have some challenges on our borders from cities who are contract cities and may not be contracting for as much service or are patrolled by another agency. And specifically, I've worked 4th of July as a sheriff's deputy in the city of Carson, and I'm aware of what they're going through. But, um, for a city to get serious, no matter what city it is, they need to have adequate staffing. Because if they don't, all of the Long Beach residents who are in border cities are really just. Garage with the fireworks that are just adjacent to them because the sounds are so loud and the sound carries so clearly. What are we doing to cooperate with our partners at Signal Hill, Los Alamitos, SEAL Beach and the L.A. County Sheriff's Department, which covers Lakewood, Lakewood, Hawaiian Gardens, Bellflower and Paramount. Speaker 7: One of the advantages we have here in the city, our own city, is that we have our own police department. So when a community speaks, all of you speak to me and speak to me very loud and clear. So we're able to put resources on this challenge. I'm just going to be brief and say that other cities around us, specifically county agencies, don't show the same level of interest that we do. Speaker 1: Okay. You know, there was not. You have. And you've mentioned that the increases in calls is up 25%. Do you think that that is a total number of reported? Which would be great. Or is it location? Because one of the things I was invited to a Facebook group called Against the Fireworks. And I had originally thought it was going. Speaker 7: Uh, Councilwoman Mango. The the dispatches or the calls for service are up. Speaker 1: I know we could probably turn it into something like that. Speaker 7: Can't remember. We lost two there for about 20 seconds, can you? Speaker 1: Or are we getting more locations from your gut? Speaker 7: So, Councilmember, we lost you for about 20 seconds. Can you repeat the question again, please? Councilmember Can you hear us? Councilmember Mongo. Speaker 2: Fine. I think we lost it. We're going to go and come here. Speaker 1: But you said the council vice mayor. Vice mayor. Speaker 2: Okay. Go ahead. Speaker 1: Mr. Harrison, were you able to tell me if it was 25% increase in locations or calls? Because what we need is a large number of residents participating in the crowd sourcing to identify and narrow down the locations to send in our officers. Speaker 7: Councilwoman Mungo Robert Luna here again. The numbers that were given out, calls for service, an increase in calls for service that we are receiving both into dispatch and then obviously that our police officers are handling. In regards if I you did cut out there for a second, I think you asked if there were reports taken on something like this and know there are calls for service that we go back to and then our systems can draw from that calls for service for things like heat maps and addresses that our officers are paying more attention to, to try and stop the use of the illegal fireworks. I'm hoping that answers your question, but you did cut out there for a second, so I want to make sure I did answer your question. Speaker 1: Thank you, Chief. I was working towards figuring out if we were to set aside a task force in every region of the city to crowdsource where the explosions are coming from, then maybe the police officers could be more successful. I know there's nothing more frustrating than to show up to a location based on a call report, but to find out that that's not the location. Fireworks they echo the sound can't always be identified depending on what region of the city or district of the city you're coming from. So I was just trying to figure out if we could work some kind of crowdsourcing. With our neighbors. And then lastly. There was a discussion two years ago about evidence and how a person needs to do a private person's arrest to enforce that. They saw the lighting of the firework versus a police officer seeing the lighting of the firework. Have we made any progress as a city or any with our legislation to allow the prosecution of. People lighting off fireworks that are caught on film. Speaker 7: Let me try and answer that the best I can. Currently, it's a misdemeanor, and if the officer observes it, they can cite for the violation if they didn't see it. But one of our community members sees it. They can do a private citizen's arrest. And Councilmember, this is Tom. The program that the city prosecutor is launching is exactly that. So he is launching a website where residents can upload their videos and upload their pictures. They can put in suspect suspect descriptions, they can give actual locations and they can say, here is the criminal activity that I witnessed. And then the prosecutor will send letters to the property owner whose property it is, because that is against the law, not to create a nuisance on your property. And then that can be followed up on that will requires, you know, some identifying information. So the more information the community has to provide the prosecutor, the better on specific individuals that are performing specific criminal acts. So it is another tool that we're glad to have added to the arsenal. Speaker 1: I appreciate that. Councilmember Odinga and I were talking earlier. I know in my district we have some individuals who are not necessarily associated with the House. So, for instance, a group of neighbors see the individual. Adjacent to the park, lighting off fireworks. But they've never seen him in the neighborhood before, so they're not sure which household he belongs to. What about the videoing of a particular person not associated with a residence? The backpack lighters, I guess, is what we're kind of calling them. Speaker 7: Yeah. And those pictures or videos can be turned over through the city prosecutor to the police department, and we can investigate it to see if we can make a connection and be able to identify them. So that is absolutely a possibility. Speaker 1: And, Mr. Halbert, it will be it'll be available for sharing with our adjacent cities and the district attorney's office. Speaker 7: I will have to ask that question. I think he's using it for our specific, you know, what's in his jurisdiction to be able to send the letters to for those go to private property owners. So, you know, that is one of the things that council has to look at. Last time was holding the private property owner more responsible. We had investigated the admin site process, which can do that, but it also requires a lot of work and some additional costs. The prosecution prosecutor can do that under existing laws, and we'd be happy to talk to our neighboring cities if they'd like more information on that. Speaker 1: Wonderful. Thank you. We have to get a better handle on this. I mean, every night everyone knows I have three dogs and a veteran and a 20 month old, 19 month old at home. And as I lay in bed, when she wakes up in the middle of the night with the mortars going off and for years the dogs have been terrorized. But nothing like this year. This year, and I've talked to some of our officers, they are working their hardest. It is just very, very difficult to get a handle on all of this with the resources. So we have to come up with better solutions. So thank you for all that you're doing and thank you for continuing to listen to the community. And a big thank you to Councilmember Austin for your listening session last week. I know a lot of our neighbors really appreciate that and the committee that Councilman Price put forward, because those are all avenues where we can brainstorm and come up with solutions. A lot of people say, well, what are other cities doing? And I haven't been able to find a city that does any of it better than us yet. But I'm still listening and willing to adopt any other creative ideas that come from any other cities. Thank you. Speaker 2: Thank you. That, of course, when asked would you said. Speaker 3: That Vice Mayor wanted to take a minute and chime in on this? I think the city council has every year taken this on. And, you know, I think Councilman Austin for for putting this platform for us to all sort of jump in and share our thoughts and ideas here every year it's been it's been bad. And every year it seems like it's gotten worse. Every year we have an agenda item or two about it. This year, it's clearly worse than ever or people are also paying attention to this moment. So I think it causes us to discuss the complexity of the problem and let people understand just how big this issue is. It's a problem across the L.A. region. There's 88 cities here in L.A. County, all with different rules. We're all piled up right next to each other. You're North Long Beach, reported by Paramount, Bellflower and Lakewood all have different degrees of of the problem and different laws around the problem. And when long because but we're all right next to each other. And so you can you can walk right across our border by safe and sane, so you can buy illegal fireworks online. So people are frustrated. Residents are frustrated, but they are organizing. And I applaud their organizing. Hamilton Association My district's been very, very vocal. Every every neighborhood North Long Beach deals with this every single night. I say this lot to them when they visit. A part of it is I just try to help them understand that, hey, I rest my head north Long Beach every night right there with you. I raised the last five, last five years, two newborns that have been disturbed all night. We have to do a lot to keep my dog from, like, tearing up, tearing at the house. And so so we get it. We're frustrated about it. I think the legal fireworks Facebook group has done some good organizing. I know that. I'm concerned with what I've heard about some of the non productive responses to this. More specifically, what I'm hearing about vigilante patrol groups, I want to just say that it's important that our residents have confidence that that we are being proactive on this issue. And we are letting folks know that, you know, this is not a moment for any sort of vigilante justice. So I wanted to strongly discourage what I've been seeing out there, the talks about vigilantism. I also want to want to say that, you know, I think that we can spend a lot of time talking about solutions and what we're going to do. But I think we need to do more to check in on the welfare of our most vulnerable residents. So so for example, I spoke with the VA U.S. vets just here recently about just just today and over the last few days about creating a space for veterans with PTSD in different areas of town, veterans who are going to have a difficult time allow them to come to a safe space where there's counseling, maybe music, if it stays open til 12 or 1:00, maybe there's maybe there's you know, there's pizza, there's music, there's counseling. Allow them to be in a safe space so they can receive some therapy and be in a really safe space around them. I would like to personally just offer Highland Park for this. And I want to also in Councilman, I would include this in the motion. I want to offer my one time District nine funds to help if this going out in park and I hope that others can. I know the V.A. has some of this already, but in North Beach, we don't have anything like this. So I want to I want to add up to $5,000 for my one time to help get a program like this going to help folks just have a safe space. And I want to just pause there. Tom, would you mind responding to that request? Speaker 7: Sure. So thank you, Councilmember. So we'd be happy to take a look at that, especially if that's a service that an existing group already provides and if we're able to host it here in Long Beach. We would this year need to be checking it with the health order to make sure that it fits under that. Typically, gatherings are not prohibited or prohibited are not allowed. But counseling services, there are some exemptions for some specific treatment and counseling services. So if you want to add that to the motion, we'd be happy to look at what can be done either this year or in the future. Speaker 3: Absolutely. And what and what I understand, it's it's it's exactly what you described, what we what we discussed. It's really about counseling and therapy. And, you know, we want to utilize that exemption to the to the order to handle that. We have a venue, social hall out in part. We have funding. So that's what I want to I want to see happen. And we're talking about maybe the week leading up to the 4th of July and maybe the week after, because we know it's going to get worse. And then it doesn't just stop it, you know, it begins to smooth out. So that's the week I'm really concerned. Those two weeks are what I'm really concerned about. So the other thing that I want to mention is that I know that we have a lot of focus on suppression, and I know that that's important. But I really want to have some questions about upstream. How are these things coming into our community? Chief, are you able to speak to, number one, how we know that the very, very loud devices, the very loud explosive devices that are coming to. You have an idea on the scale on how they're coming in and our capacity to limit that ability for them to come in. Speaker 7: Yes, sir, Councilman. When we've made arrest in the past and we've made several arrests in the past, generally people are selling them. They're selling them on the Internet, and they're getting them from either the state of Arizona or the state of Nevada, and they're bringing them in in quantities. So that is extremely difficult to enforce. But that does it. That never stops us from from doing what we do. And so we're talking a lot about giving citations or seeing violations out in the street, which is important. But we're also going to be on a very aggressive campaign to try and stop a lot of this activity on the Internet. And I'll leave it at that. Speaker 3: Right? Right. So so that said, I know that, you know, we can we can do these things, but really, it's it's difficult without having a clear front door on where these things are coming in the community. And given our past work in L.A. County of different regulatory framework, really the statewide solution. So I want to also add to this this motion a recommendation for the city to advocate for a statewide ban. I think a statewide ban would supersede so the county would be able to do with this rogue charter city. So the state would have to do this in order for us to have one consistent law across the region to allow us to enforce them in a more strategic way. And so I want to include that as well. Speaker 6: I'll accept that as a friendly. Speaker 3: Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. I was going to keep going. I got I got maybe one more. And I also mentioned my support for the data and the heat map. You know, I said that publicly. We've talked about this. It's included in the item. I think it's about really being transparent regarding how massive this issue is. We also need to be transparent. Transparent in the way our city prioritized, prioritizes responses. What I hear from folks, again, is that they don't necessarily feel heard that the city is responding. So, so so my my my thought here is that. When we rollout, when we identify whatever data we have, we also should be able to look at some response data and how we prioritize it and maybe think about and think about maybe some strategies on response that sort of could be targeted and there may be some innovative ways to do it. But I really want to see the data of the calls and the relationship to the response. I'm supportive of the ideas that that that the prosecutor to hold property owners accountable. These are discussions we've talked about with with respect to if a liquor store has certain activities that happen there, motels have certain activities happening in there. The property owner also is accountable to the impact they have on the broader neighborhood. And if we know that there are certain properties that are, you know, a problem, then, you know, I think that's something we we certainly need to look at. I think that makes sense. On Monday, I'm going to the city prosecutor joining joining me on a District nine town hall. I think that would be a good time to say it. 530 on Monday, a virtual town hall. That information is coming out in email, but the city prosecutor is going to join us to talk about this concept as well. So a lot of these meetings are happening across the city. So I want the ninth district to know that theirs is coming up on Monday. I think that's all I have. And just to sort of account, thank you for accepting the friendly councilman. I want to just be clear cause I didn't hear a second I cued up, so I want to be on the record second in this as well. And and, Councilman, you accept that that part I want to add some of my one times to help get this pilot program on as well. You guys you guys get that as well, councilman. Speaker 6: The one times. I mean, that's something that I think you can do independent of this this item and set that up in your district. I mean, no, I don't know that that has to be a part of a citywide thing. I mean, you want to do it at Highland Park. You want to use your district nine one times. You know, I'm not sure because I don't want anything to prohibit this moving forward. Is that is that that's a wrinkle? I think that might be a bit of a challenge. Um, so, so. Speaker 7: So councilmember if I can jump in there, we don't need the one times in there. It's good to get enough to hear that the councilmember wants to do that. I would like some direction from the entire council that we should be focusing on creating a new program in the next couple, in the next week essentially, and working with the VA so that we would requests to be part of the motion to get council direction. And the one times we can follow up the actual dollar amount, we'll follow up separately. Speaker 6: Okay. I guess I can accept that idea. Speaker 3: Okay. But how do you guys want to do it. Is is good. I just think we need to be ready. And it's the 4th of July help support our readiness. Yes. Speaker 6: I agree. And several residents have actually brought that idea forward as well. And so I appreciate you including it. Thank you. Speaker 2: Thank you very much. Congressman, just an got a one year. Speaker 1: Thank you very that. So I, I support the direction that this is going. I, I it's not lost on me, though, that we are in a moment when we are talking about what kind of responses our community wants to see. And it's not lost on me that we have kind of two different groups that are asking us for changes. One of them is asking for more police presence and one of them is asking us for less. So I really love getting the prosecutor involved and talking about a statewide strategy, talking about where we can kind of stop the inflow of this. And some of my constituents have shared with me photos of, you know, our grocery stores or Ralphs or Vons and our targets that are selling some of the smaller fireworks that are selling them nonetheless. And so, Tom, could you share with everyone what they should be doing if they see that at a store right now? Speaker 7: So if the question is if illegal fireworks are being sold at stores, they are not allowed to be sold at stores in Long Beach. So Lakewood does allow what are called safe and sane, but you may not sell those pretty municipal code in Long Beach, and that's a crime that should be reported. Speaker 1: Right. And they can still report that through the new website that that Doug Halbert is doing. Correct. Speaker 7: I think we'd prefer those to be reported in to you dispatch order. You can get them to their council office and we'll follow up from both a code enforcement business license perspective and also a criminal perspective with PD. Speaker 1: Okay, so we mentioned dispatch. One of the other concerns that's been brought up to me by several constituents is when they call dispatch, because this is a lower level crime and they don't feel like they're getting the best response. So I just want to make sure that I say publicly for all my constituents that have reached out so that the chief or whoever's in charge of dispatch can make sure that there's proper training happening on how to respond to those calls. I know it must be frustrating because the whole city is blowing up at the same time, so I can't imagine being a dispatcher at that time. That must be irritating. Speaker 3: We appreciate we appreciate that, councilmember. And you're exactly right. Dispatchers are extremely busy with fireworks calls. I've indicated earlier that we've already seen a dramatic increase in the number of calls over last year, but they are responsible for entering those calls for service as they receive them. Often we get multiple calls for the same incident. So they do try to do some screening of those so that we limit the number of duplicates that might be in the system. But it is it's it's an extremely busy time for the dispatchers as it is for law enforcement officers out in the field trying to respond to those as well. We look forward to working with the prosecutor's office, with the new portal that he is introducing, as well as the police department is establishing email addresses as well, where we will be referring those callers who indicate that they have video or pictures to to share. We will be utilizing that technology and when referring callers to that. Speaker 1: Thank you for that. And I think that the. The collaborative effort is important because as already noted through the rest of the conversation, what's happening in neighborhoods is somebody calls the police because somebody is doing fireworks. Maybe they get there in time and then the police go and talk to the people. The police don't see them, so they can't cite them. The neighbor maybe sees them. But my neighbors don't want to file against somebody that's not doing fireworks because they don't want somebody to know where they live. And so there's a real fear that many people have about doing an arrest that way. And that, for me, is why I think working with the prosecutor, working at the state level is so important. And I hope that maybe you guys can continue to have creative ideas about how community members can share information, but that doesn't put them at risk. And. Does not mean that we have officers coming out to basically just shoot off some people when there's not a citation happening or there could be a situation of an increased anxiety there. And then the last question I had on enforcement with this is. Do we know what the surrounding finds are around the city outside of Long Beach? I've heard some subsidies are 2000 or 3000. And it's just curious. We have that data. Speaker 7: This is Tom. To my knowledge, it's it's regulated by the state, so it's a misdemeanor with a maximum of $1,000. So if there is anyone that has seen a city with something higher, we'd be very interested in that. Our research to date shows that this is not a city spying that set the maximum set by state law. Speaker 1: Great. And I know that was mentioned earlier. I just wanted to make sure we tease that out one more time. And then for enforcement, I mean, it seems like fire is a responsible party because they if there is a fire caused by these guys. I'm just wondering if there's any other role for any other departments to play. So I would ask that question of the team as you guys are working on this. And the last thing I'll say is, if there's a way for the for the alert Long Beach, for there to be a notice, to go out through that alert about how to file complaints on fireworks, I think that would be really helpful to make sure that the city is is playing a key role in educating people on the right steps to take. I know that in the past we've done things like sending postcards or putting something in people's bills, and I know that's really expensive, but I would hope that after the program is finalized that we can send that information out. Thank you. Speaker 7: And the alert Long Beach is scheduled by the by the public affairs team, and that's scheduled for Friday to go out to announce the new program and how you can help us track through data where fireworks are happening and to get specific complaints about properties to the city prosecutor. Speaker 1: Can I ask one more question? What we're talking about this on. There was some chat a while back whenever we started the COVID crisis and trying to get information about the DMV playing a role in connecting people who have driver's licenses in the city of Long Beach to the city of Long Beach's alert Long Beach, is that something that's happened or could potentially happen to make sure that we're getting contact with more people? Speaker 7: I don't think we've quite heard that in terms of the DMV's role. We get it through a firm and we basically have everybody's land line in our database, and then we ask people to opt in through cell phones. So if there's another way to get additional numbers that we can expand our reach, we'd be interested in looking at that. Speaker 1: Okay. I think that's all. Speaker 2: Thank you. Thank you. This is the government. And they have. Speaker 1: Thank you, Vice Mayor. I just was queuing up because I had thought that I had thickened on that motion a bit earlier, but not sure if that was captured. Speaker 2: And nice of you to come to Austin. Speaker 6: Thank you. I think we've. We really had a great conversation and I really appreciate the feedback from all of my colleagues and it's a very important item. Again, you know, I will acknowledge that this is a unique time and an odd issue to be in talking about enforcement. But, you know, we do live in a society made up of laws. And this is about being a good neighbor. This is about, you know, respecting your know, your neighbor and the community as a whole and understanding that these aren't these aren't safe. The same fireworks that we're talking about necessarily, although all fireworks are illegal, these are explosives. These are very disruptive to the quality of life, but also to the mental health of many of our our neighbors and residents. And so let's keep that in mind as we move forward. Appreciate the conversation. And I look forward to hopefully some productive results out of this. Thank you. Speaker 2: Because when I stood up to come in. Speaker 4: Thank you. Speaker 0: There's public comment for this item. I believe there are eight callers on the line. Speaker 5: First up is Seagram's. Your time starts now. Seagrams, are you there? Hello. Next speaker is. And Sheryl. Your time starts now. Speaker 1: Thank you. My name is. I live my name. I'm Cheryl. I live in District two. First off, I just want to start by saying, as was just said a little bit ago, we are not talking about safe and sane folks here. We're talking about dangerous explosives that are legal statewide. Some of them, the eighties and up are illegal on a federal level. So we're not talking about little baby fireworks. We're talking about things are dangerous. They set fires. They're dangerous to be near. I've had my back patio scoured by firewood from my neighbor two doors over the days and education are nice and all that, but a lot of these people are shooting these off. No, they're shooting off illegal fireworks. They know they're breaking the law and they don't care because they know they won't be caught, because they know that even when when police come out to their doors, unless they've seen it happening, nothing will happen to them. They just deny that they've done it and continue to do it as soon as the police leave. My neighbors do that. My neighbor did it just the other night when I called the cops on them. They let them off as soon as the cops left. In fact, those same neighbors I confronted a few weeks ago about firing off fireworks and mentioned that it terrifies my dog. Not only did they basically just tell me to go f off, but they told me that they hope my dogs died and became very intimidating to me. I'm a spy to middle aged woman, and even though I have a very fiery personality, having to confront people, putting off fireworks is dangerous for me. These people don't care that it's illegal, which means that they don't care if I'm asking them to stop because my dogs are scared or because kids. Speaker 2: Are scared or. Speaker 1: That they're scared, they basically just slip their fingers off of this and continue to do it. And if we try to say anything more to them, they become belligerent and confrontational and intimidating and threatening to us. One of the things that I have a problem with is that I've we've actually in my neighborhood in Rose Park had police that we've called out who are down the street from fireworks going off that we had given them addresses for. And they aren't doing anything. They just are. You're chatting with somebody they just took a report from when there's fireworks literally a half a block away that both me and a friend of mine at separate time pointed out to an officer. And he was like, Yeah, yeah, I'm going to be there in a minute. By the time he got there, there was a huge fight breaking out among people. So the fireworks are now forgotten. When we called in the same addresses over and over again, and I personally called in one address literally every single night for three weeks. It took that much of me calling and other people calling on the same address over and over and over again for the police to actually finally do what they should have been doing, which is waiting down the block. A friend of mine witnessed it happen, waiting down the block until these people saw the fireworks again and bussing them for it. Finally, thank God, because that particular address has been keeping me up night after night after night. We need to. Speaker 5: Thank you for your comment. Next up, we have Sheryl Simmons. Your time starts now. Speaker 1: Thank you. Thank you. Mayor Garcia and city council members who have heard our pleas and have shown. Speaker 2: Up. Speaker 1: Positive action in the last week with regards to the illegal explosive problems happening throughout our city. My name is Cheryl Sanchez Simmons. And on behalf of District two, I urge the passing of the agenda item 25. That is it as it is a good beginning to stopping these illegal explosives. I would also like to ask that Councilwoman Pierce have an open dialog with the residents in District two. Councilman Austin recently held a town hall on this issue for the residents in District nine. This would be productive for all of us that live in the area to come up with ideas and solutions to stop the bombardment here in District two. Thank you, city prosecutor Doug Halbert for giving us a tool to use to report those offenders directly to the city. I am hoping that law enforcement now begins to take this problem seriously and does not continue to turn a blind eye when they see the offenders shooting off murders like they have been seen doing in this past week. I would also continue to suggest an anonymous hotline that people can leave addresses and not fear retaliation. Just a reminder that the Facebook group Long Beach against illegal fireworks with over 1500 members has gathered data and does have a map of. Speaker 2: Where these explosives are being detonated. Please keep the dialog. Speaker 1: Open with the residents of Long Beach on this issue as it takes a community. Speaker 2: To help solve this problem. Speaker 1: I am still willing to be part of a resident task force, along with city leaders, to help come up with solutions to this problem. Thank you. Speaker 5: Thank you. Next up, we have Claudia Vega. Your time starts now. Speaker 1: Hi. I am a concerned resident of District nine. The reckless use of fireworks in our community have become a danger to ourselves and our property. A few years ago, my parents home caught on fire. And just last year, our neighbor's backyard went up in flames on 4th of July. My elderly parents cannot leave their home the days leading up to the 4th of July and fear of their home catching on fire again. No one should live in the fear. We find ourselves calling the police constantly on these offenders, but nothing is really done. The police have dropped by at the moment. They turn the corner. The explosions can begin again. As long as there are no consequences for these people, the fireworks will continue. We have to start enforcing the fines and increasing fines and or jail time. Otherwise, they will continue knowing that there are no real consequences. And just as a side note, Lakewood does have a fine of $2,000 a day. Just increase that apparently this year. We have to start making examples out of these offenders by by making them by enforcing the fines so that they receive the message that Long Beach will no longer tolerate this. Residents are putting their safety underline down the people that are terrorizing communities themselves. What we need is more police in our neighborhoods, especially District nine, that has always been neglected and deprived. These people using these explosive devices have no regard to other people's property. Last year we had a group of people lighting them up right next to our own garage. The police were called, but never came. My husband had to go outside and confront the group himself and take matters into his own hands. This can create an unsafe situation, which is why we need our calls to be taken more seriously. I've heard several testimonies from residents that are 911 calls are not being taken seriously. There have also been several fires here in our district that have probably been caused by illegal fireworks recently in the Deep Pass Park area. There was also a young man who recently lost his hand while lighting up this explosive. If it wasn't for a Facebook page, I mean, I would have never heard of this incident. We have to take these tragedies as opportunities to educate the public. When this happens in our neighborhood, the people we know, it's easier for us to relate. We need to do more. Some of the things some residents have discussed as possible solutions are to increase the fines and to impose them to use the Long Beach alert tax to continuously remind residents of illegal fireworks. We have also heard of the use of drones and other studies. And we need we need more police on bikes in our neighborhoods. Thank you for your time. Speaker 5: Thank you. Next up is Jamie Larsen. Your time starts now. Speaker 1: Thank you very much, Mayor Garcia, and the city council people this evening. I think there's been some really, really great feedback here and many of you have really had your thumb on the pulse of what's going on. I think that we can hear in everyone's voice and everyone's concerned and something that I would like to suggest and would be more than happy to for as far as the residents to help organize, is that it's a bit difficult to try to organize chaos in chaos, and I think it will realistic. We're going to understand that this is going to go through Labor Day. It did last year. And there seems to be a resolve in Long Beach this time of year. But it's like, yeah, well, it kind of happens this time of year. So how about when it calms down in the timeframe that it's not happening? Let's keep the momentum going. And I'd love to know how we as residents, all of these suggestions are great, but they're in midst of a panic. And so I love to keep the momentum going and find out exactly how we can pass these things. So the 2021 is our goal because I don't want to be a downer, but we're in this right now, and this fight is difficult for the police. It's difficult for our elected officials and obviously for our residents. So we could come up with suggestions and then have a better idea next year of how to do it. Like maybe a hotline that doesn't take up of dispatchers time, something that's more specific that we get when we know what's coming or that we know what's happening. A councilman earlier asked, and forgive me, I don't remember your name about surrounding areas. Pasadena. Just as an example, if you are caught with fireworks in your car, your car is immediately impounded. For anyone dealing with fireworks, you may spend up to a year in jail and the fines go up to $50,000. So there are different amounts that are around there. Another suggestion that I thought that we could work on throughout the year is everybody understands that when they go through a construction zone, if you are caught speeding, it's double the fine. So maybe we keep the thousand dollar fine from October to May and then June through September. It is a ridiculously high fine because I hate to say it, but fear changes people and having to pay a lot of money and the fear of being put in jail, that is unfortunately what creates change when we're talking about the situation. Drinking and driving became $20,000 and would literally ruin your life. And that's when things started to change. It's sad, but it's true. So my thoughts on this and just understanding more about it is I love to have a future meeting with more questions. I have a few more about the portal, so I'd love for that not to just sort of end with the summer and I am in District six, so I would be more than happy to help organize any district that wants to speak throughout the year and make sure that we're really well organized. And we don't just sort of forget this after Labor Day. But again, I want to thank our police department and our elected officials, because the Facebook page became 1500 people in less than a year. And I think. Speaker 5: Next we have Kathleen. S Your time starts now. Speaker 1: Hi. My name is Kathleen Shane. I live in District eight. I wanted to first thank you, Austin, for the meeting on June 15th and the action plan that you put together and Doug Hopper for the portal for us to report issues with fireworks. Jamie did mention about the drones and the cameras. I wanted to add that to see if that's something that's feasible. Also, our our the task force that we have for the four officers, are they on patrol on bikes or cars? And in addition, I just wanted to comment on some of the items that were brought up by council members. One of them was PTSD for the vets. But there's also a lot of people that do suffer with PTSD, not just veterans. So I wanted to know if that would open up to other people that do suffer from PTSD. Also, I agree with the California statewide. We need to look at the California laws. I am looking at one right now where it shows that there are misdemeanors for illegal fireworks and also felonies for illegal. Speaker 2: Fireworks for quantity. Speaker 1: I feel that that's where we need to address. Also, I wanted to. Talk about if we do the California state wide mandate, try to implement some laws regarding that, would that be able to have. Speaker 2: Checkpoints. Speaker 1: For people coming into our state that are coming. Speaker 2: From. Speaker 1: States that are high volume of purchasing these items? And I think that is all I wanted to say. Thank you. And I wanted to thank the city council and everybody for their passion. Speaker 2: Regarding this issue. Speaker 5: Thank you. Next, we have Samantha Hardy. Your time starts now. Speaker 1: Hello, City Council. My name is Samantha Hardy, and I live in District seven of Long Beach. And I just have to say that something really needs to be done with these fireworks. I've lived in this district my whole life, and it has never been this bad. I hear all these signs that say fireworks are illegal in Long Beach, but you wouldn't be able to tell that if you came to my neighborhood. And I'm going to comment this in sort of a personal sort of a personal level right now. My mom's high blood pressure is through the roof with all these fireworks. And my uncle's going to be coming home in the next few days after having a triple bypass so he won't be really able to take them either. I've had to endure these fireworks and explosions through my whole ear surgery recovery process. And let's not forget about our furry friends that live not only in this house, but in all the other houses that are absolutely terrified. I've spoken to many of my neighbors and they're upset about this situation. My mom and I call every night and it seems like nothing is done. I'm part of the group on Facebook that's trying to help stop this. But when we're met with dial tones or operators who just don't care, then we kind of feel helpless. These explosions go on for hours and they are terrorizing our neighborhood. Something needs to be done because it's been going on since March and it will continue to go on. As a teacher, I know that sometimes teaching can only do so much, and these people who are firing off fireworks every night need more than a talking to or a warning. Thank you very much for your time. Speaker 5: Thank you. Our last speaker is Seagram. Your time starts now. See Graham. Speaker 1: Yes. Listen, my mom's on call every day. Hi. Is this sort of agenda item 25? Speaker 5: Yes. Speaker 1: I think it's absolutely disgraceful. My name is Caitlyn and I live in District three. I think it's absolutely disgraceful that you are continually continuing to criminalize people. We are calling for defunding of the police of liberty. And she. Instead of walking in the streets calling you to do council members, you have a constituency, you have a people to hear and you public people to act on behalf of. We are the people and we are asking you to defund the police. This measure on fireworks is absolutely ridiculous for the penalize and criminalize people. Shame on all of you. Shame on each one of you. And the price especially. Shame on you as my district comp person. This is absurd. We need to have a total restructuring of the things that are going on in the city. I yield my time. Speaker 5: Thank you. And that concludes public comment for this item. Speaker 4: Thank you. Let's go ahead and take a roll call vote then on this item, please. Speaker 0: District one. I district to. I'm district three. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District or. Speaker 2: My. Speaker 0: District by district six. Speaker 4: Five. Speaker 0: District seven. District seven. District eight. Speaker 6: Hi. Speaker 0: District nine. Speaker 3: Hi. Speaker 0: Motion carries. Speaker 4: Okay. Thank you. Move carries on item 25. So now we're going to be moving on to item number 26, please.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to request the following recommendations of the Illegal Explosives and Fireworks Action Plan to address the illegal use of fireworks and explosives in Long Beach: 1) Request City Attorney to draft an ordinance that would include a person who owns, rents, leases or otherwise has possession of a premises as a responsible party for the illegal use, discharge, possession, storage or sale of fireworks on the premises; 2) Request City Attorney and City Manager to report back to the City Council with options for increasing the penalties for anyone cited or arrested for fireworks violations; 3) Request City Attorney and City Manager to report back to the City Council on the feasibility of including an administrative citation process for illegal fireworks use, to allow for additional enforcement capability in Long Beach; 4) Request City Manager to assess the feasibility of establishing an online portal or GoLongBeach app feature for residents to submit video evidence of fireworks violations for referral to the City Prosecutor; 5) Request City Man

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Speaker 4: Okay. Thank you. Move carries on item 25. So now we're going to be moving on to item number 26, please. Speaker 0: Communication from City Attorney. Recommendation to direct City Attorney to prepare an ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code to require that residential and commercial rent deferred due to COVID 19 impacts be repaid according to a schedule citywide. Speaker 4: Okay. Think we're going to have a report from the city attorney. Speaker 7: First mayor, members of the council, Rich Anthony. You might be having some technical difficulties. This item was brought back to the council, requested us to come back and present the council with options for the repayment of the rent deferred due to COVID 19 impacts and according to a payment schedule tonight for your consideration. The item presents four options or three options, and obviously the Council can and are various other options that are available. We are here to answer questions and take your comment. Thank you. Speaker 4: Okay. Thank you. We're going to go ahead and go to the council of council. I'm sorry. City attorney Rich Anthony on the line now, by any chance. Speaker 7: Richard, are you on the line? Speaker 2: Yeah. I'm sorry. Can you hear me? This is Rick. Anthony, can you hear me? Speaker 4: Yeah, we can hear you now. Speaker 2: Okay, I apologize. I was having muting trouble, but Charlie summarized it well. I just wanted to remind counsel that you asked me to bring this back on May 26. We originally we're going to bring it back in July. It keeps coming back a little bit earlier because I do think is it important? It is important for both landlords and tenants to see if there's going to be a repayment schedule. I think they need as much time as possible to know that in order to plan for the future. With that, I stand by to answer any questions, which I'm sure there will be a fair amount during discussion. Thanks. Speaker 4: Thank you, Mr. Anthony. All right. I have Councilmember Richardson. Speaker 3: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So in the discussion around moratorium extension, there was a lot of discussion about really the need to help support people, make sure that they don't get have this large balloon payment at the end of the repayment period that city council put forward. I think the council made the right decision to give people up to a year to catch up on their rent. And I think the concern is if people are already struggling. And when they you know, when they begin to pay full rent on August 1st, it's going to be it may be difficult to make some of those back up payments. You know, by proposing a repayment plan that could inadvertently trigger evictions, I don't think that that was the goal of the city council either. I think this is a moment where we just have to think about what the problem is and how best we can help people solve their problem. If we want to help people, I think we should address the fact that. When come August 1st, when people are paying full rent, when the moratorium period is over, those people are really struggling. We should really help them. We should target our resources to help them with the back rate so that they don't have a problem in the future. So the idea here is that the purpose here is we don't want to lose sight of the point is to help people. This program should not be something that inadvertently triggers evictions for anyone. It should be voluntary. It should be incentivized. I'm not interested in putting forth a policy that triggers more evictions. Money should be our resources should be targeted at helping renters get out of the hole during the pandemic. For that said, I think I think the solution here is to take our rental assistance fund and look at ways that we can target that to help people make up their back rent. It's very limited resources. It's only $5 million. There's potential to add more. It was only $5 million here. There's 300,000 people in the city that live in a real household. That money is going to go very, very fast. If you think about the universe of people who are paying the rent in August. Let's say they paid 50% or 70% in the past and they're going to need to be caught up. That funding will go a long way to help support them get out of the hole. And that's the way we should be thinking about it. Targeted resources to help people get out of the hole. So what I have in mind is sort of a matching program that can help match dollar for dollar. Somebody helps make a payment to the back rent and the city can come in and match. Obviously the details of the program would need to be shaped up. But to be clear, what I'm not interested in is a policy that triggers evictions, but rather right now are programs to incentivize people through matching, to pay back whatever they can in the city will help them get out of that hole. So I have a motion I move that we receive and file a report from the city attorney and direct the city attorney to take no further action at this time regarding repayment schedules or benchmarks. In addition, in order to address potential failures to pay that deferred rent and evictions resulting therefrom, we direct the city manager to propose a program for City Council consideration at a future meeting date which could allocate current and future federal and state rental assistance funds to the payment of deferred rent during the moratorium period that the City Council has established. This program should be limited to repayment of rent. That's deferred pursuant to our moratorium. It should provide a dollar for dollar match. It should be available to any tenant who can document the reverse impacts from COVID, the people who are behind on their rent from that period of time and to the extent of the funding sources, allow, not just those who are I mean, this should be open to anybody who sort of has back rent, because I think our dollars go further that way and we can actually help people get out of the hole. That is my motion, and I'm happy to accept any questions or clarity that folks might have. Thank you. Speaker 4: Okay. The that's the motion. Is there there a second to have a long list ahead of me up. Speaker 1: Councilmember Pierce. 1/2. Speaker 4: Okay. Well, let me go down the list, Councilmember, your. I have one person in between. Vice Mayor Andres. Speaker 2: Okay. Yes. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Mayor. First of all, you know, I think it's it's really unfortunate that we are once again debating people's livelihood. Where you are, Kenneth Orlando. It is unfortunate that it takes government involvement to sort out. Just because at the end of the day, we're not going to reach an agreement that makes everyone happy. My district, which is the sixth District, has a large population of people who left. And it's also one of the communities have struggled with their basic needs since COVID. There's not a single tenant I have spoken to when asked for rent rental assistance that is unwilling to pay rent. It is the same premise where they reach out. They want us to help them pay their rent. I believe that if we do not establish a repayment plan, our community is going to fall into a great debt . They will not be able to come out of. I do not think they remember. I do not think that as a member, it is our role to establish a specific a specific repayment plan, because every household is different and every household income and spending needs are different. I received about 90 emails in support of a repayment plan and about 45 against the repayment plan. And I want to see where this conversation goes tonight. And I really want us as a city to use dollars and resources available to help people get their rent paid all across the board. And I'd like to hear some more dialog before speaking some more. And I want to make sure that everyone would qualify for this program regardless of income. I believe this program should apply to anyone who owned that, who owes back do rent because the corporate customers in Washington. Do you see that as your motion? Speaker 3: Absolutely. Look, it's limited resources. I think targeted at people who are behind will go a lot further, especially if it's a matching and sort of just putting it out broadly to 300,000 people who live a real household across the city. They will get more bang for our buck and actually help, which is the point, help people out of the hole. Yes, sir. Mayor. Speaker 2: Thank you. Speaker 4: Thank you. Next up is Councilman Pierce. Speaker 1: Thank you, Mayor. I want to thank Councilmember Richardson for his motion. I think that it is in alignment with what we see the needs to be in our community. I was happy to bring forward the item that this stemmed from, which was a 12 month delay and being able to support people that we told there's a moratorium . We told them there's a moratorium to evict you, pay what you can, because we, the government told them you can't go to work. We the government told them, you need to stay home. Stay home. I cannot support anything that we then turn around and create a mechanism that would affect tenants for doing what we told them that they could do. And so I just want to get on the record. Two questions with Rich Anthony. If there was a repayment section and I know that's not the motion on the floor, but I want to just ask the question if there was a repayment option and a schedule, would tenants be at risk of being evicted if , say, they paid their full rent but they didn't pay the full amount that that payment plan had included? Speaker 2: Yes. Let me make sure that you all can hear me. You can, right? Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 2: Yes. Good. Yes. So if I understand your question correctly, Council Member Pearce, if you were to adopt a benchmark payment requirement, any one of the three outlined in the letter or something else which required tenants to pay a certain percentage. You know, as we move through the upcoming year, then yes, the if they failed to make that payment, the idea would be that they would then be subject to eviction even if they were current on their regular rental payments. The benchmark system in other cities that have adopted it is meant to to require the tenant to pay. But of course, as you said, that's not the motion that's on the floor right now. Speaker 1: Thank you. And my my other question is what we have right now, if we receive and file this today. When the 12 month period ends and there are tenants that cannot pay their full rent, they can then be evicted at that end of that 12 month period. Speaker 2: That's right. As of August 1st, 2021. That's right. Speaker 1: Right. So I understand that the conversation with some of the landlords has been wanting to understand when they would get paid. There's a relationship that landlords and tenants have. I've been a renter my entire life. I know the relationship. Well, if there's an issue, you call your landlord. Sometimes you don't call your landlord because you're scared. Right now, I'm spent as a renter. I don't know if I'm the only renter on this on this council, but I know I'm a renter, a single mom that rent an apartment in my district. The cheapest thing I can find for a two bedroom with $800. And I know that my landlord, since I have not been paying for rent because I am not consulting, in addition to being a councilwoman, he is here every single day. He is here. Fixing the roof, fixing a window, tapping on my door to ask if everything is okay. He is here more than he's ever been in the three years I've lived here. And while he's not saying anything that's threatening to me, it makes me very anxious. And it has meant that I've put off other bills to make sure that I spend whatever I can on my rent. And so the idea that tenants are going to wait to pay a balloon payment is something that we have fear of. But that has not been demonstrated. And I think that there's some numbers out there. About 80% of tenants are paying their full rent. And so I would hate for us to create a mechanism to evict anybody for any reason that's not already law. And so with that, I just wanted to make sure I had those facts on the on the record. People can't be evicted if they don't pay their rent based on what we have now. But that period is 12 months later. So thank you, Councilmember Richardson, for making the motion. I really hope that we can move on and get to this other program that you've outlined, which I think is a fantastic program that I fully support and look forward to having that discussion when the time is appropriate. Thank you. Speaker 4: Count twins. And they have. Speaker 1: Mayor for and thank you, Councilmember Richardson, for doing this this motion. I, too, have been conflicted on this repayment plan. I definitely do not want to see our. Renters, you know? Be faced with the possibility of being evicted due to not being able to match the rent repayment plan. But I also don't want to see our property owners lose out on the rent that they that they so rightfully deserve. I know that we're in a special times right now, that we're during COVID. And like Councilmember Pearce said, you know, we did ask all everyone to please stay at home to, you know, restrain from going to work. Everybody closed down. So, you know, it's it is kind of unfair if we kind of like jump and put a repayment plan and ask them to do it here like this when we know that they're facing uncertain times ahead. So I think that by filing this report, receiving, receiving and filing this report is the right direction to go to as we explore a little bit more on how things are going to be in the next couple of months. I think this is the right direction. But I'd also like to see. And I'm hopeful, you know, too, that a lot of the tenants like myself, I'm also a renter. And I also fear of not being able to pay rent, you know, at times. But. You know, i1i myself know that rent to me is a priority and I want to assume that it is for all of those of the renters as well, and that, you know, those renters are not going to try to not pay rent because rent is something that they really want to do as it is for me , because, you know, to have a safe place to live. So I again, I do think that this might be the right thing to do right at this moment. So I encourage my colleagues to support this at this moment. Speaker 4: Thank you, Councilmember Ranga. Counseling for your anger. I think you're muted. Council member. Think your muted. Speaker 6: You hear me now? Speaker 4: Yes. Speaker 6: Oh, geez. Okay. For some reason near me, I think that the two council members who are renters set the story straight. They're the ones that had the experience and they lived it. There's a lot of moving parts. And this item here that I can't agree with of the biggest one, of course, being COVID 19 and the direction that it's taking. When we look at whether people are going to be going back to work or not or when they go back to work or not, it's a matter of how many. Speaker 2: Hours are going to go back to. Speaker 6: Work and what and even if they have a job. Speaker 2: Waiting for them. Speaker 6: So I think the sad in the way it's being presented today is not an item that I can support. So I'm going to be supporting the of the receiving file with the additional comments that the Councilmember reached to put in in terms of looking into some kind of matching program that we might be able to to assist renters with. So I'll be supportive of the motion. Thank you. Speaker 4: Thank you, Councilman Austin. Speaker 6: Thank you. And I have a couple questions regarding the receiver, not file motion, but I'll also make a few comments. No, I think the spirit of what? We as a council understanding these really unprecedented times and challenges that we have been presented, that have been presented to our constituents, our residents throughout the city, renters, property owners, business owners, small businesses. This is we were we were we were we've been faced with really unprecedented decisions. Right. And the. Much of what we did was all in good faith. It was all to help people or support families to provide economic relief. We passed the package hastily. Right. And we with the intent of getting it right. And I think for the most part, it has worked out. But then there were the unintended. I don't think it was ever intended that the eviction moratorium would what mean, you know, a French rent vacation or free rent because there's no free mortgage . There's there's a system there's an economic system that has been disrupted. And. I do. And I think the intent of what's creating the Long Beach Cares program, the rental assistance program that we passed just a week ago or two weeks ago, was intended to do justice to help people catch up on their rent and allows for up to $1,000 a month for three months. And so I'm not sure exactly if we received a file. Are we looking to create the same program for the same intent or. Or what? So I'm a little confused about that part. I'm okay with putting this item right, because I think it gives us a little time to to work it out and to work the details out. But we are in as smart and efficient with the resources and helping the folks that. Speaker 4: Councilman Austin. I think we lost you. Speaker 6: And a landlord and I think the city council and I've heard it. Well, now appreciate what you said of council members. And they have. I appreciate and I encourage good faith between those parties. Right. I would say that the vast majority of renters and landlords are going to work it out and should have the ability to work work it out. And so what is proposed here is very prescriptive. I we have four options on this notion that are very prescriptive. That. Could. Essentially, if it doesn't work, we create an unintended consequence. But I also would say that. We look forward. A year from now and someone is three months behind on their rent. Are we still looking at the same? To do what they in terms of potential eviction because they are behind on their rent. I don't know that answer, but I certainly do not want to. Contributed to anyone being evicted or losing their housing as a result of this this economic. Chaos that we're in that. With no fault of anybody. Not. Not the fault of the renter. Not the fault of the. The landlord, a property owner and really not the fault of the city. I think we're all trying to to to work to get to a good place. And so I guess my question to Councilmember Richardson, in terms of the receiver file, what can you. Can you tell us again what the direction. Absolutely. Where we want to go, because this is not written down up, by the way. You know, we're just kind of interested. Speaker 3: So so, councilman, thank you for allowing me to clarify. So and thinking about a way to structure what a voluntary program would look like that didn't trigger evictions, but could incentivize people to make payments by matching it. I spoke with Rich Anthony about the appropriate action that we can provide so that he understood it. And so I think so. I think I structured it based on that discussion. I think it would be helpful if we just hear from Rich on how he understands the request. It's it's it is what we have in front of us. The ordinance we have in front of us is specifically related to a repayment plan. And whatever repayment plan we do, if people default, that triggers the eviction. So the appropriate action, whoever the appropriate action is to not do it within ordinance but within, within the program. Charlie Great. Speaker 2: Sure. So just to clarify, there's not an ordinance before you right now. What was before you was the direction to give the city attorney direction to adopt an ordinance which would amend 8.1? I'm hearing the motion loud and clear. That's not what is on the table now. But in order to. Councilmember Richardson, I think what you were trying to do is without imposing a strict commitment schedule, you were trying to address what you see as a potential problem, which I think Al just also noted, which is there may in fact, be a year from now. A lot of tenants out there may not, but there may be a lot of tenants that have not been able to repay their deferred rent and come more or less a year from now, a little more than that. They're not going to be able to pay all the deferred rent that they need to. And there may be a bit of an eviction crisis occurring in July of 2021. In an effort to address that, Councilmember Richardson is directing city staff. I'll be working with city staff, but primarily the city manager, to see about establishing a program very similar to the program that this council approved two weeks ago. Rental assistance. But it would be a little different. I think it would be a it would be a stand alone program. The way I see it. People would be eligible for both programs. They could apply for both. And tenants may in fact, qualify for both. It would be limited very specifically to only city dollars would only be given to tenants to pay their deferred rent, rent that they had not paid, and that accrued between March 4th. And assuming no extension of this moratorium July 31st of this year, whatever that dollar amount is, the city would have this program and would pay up to half of that dollar amount, presuming that the tenant pays the other half. So so because this was admittedly this was not agenda on tonight's agenda because we didn't know it would come. And that is why we're discussing the program now. But we'd have to bring this back. We got to give staff a little bit of time to think about how it would work to identify any potential problems. Although I've been we've been thinking about that for a while now, and I don't think there are. And then we would bring this back for formal approval and establishment by the council, you know, as soon as we can, and we will highlight any sort of direction that we need at that time. Speaker 7: And this is tell me if I can make a quick question to the maker of the motion. I need to understand is this Instead of the $5 Million program, which we have $5 million for taking a portion of that or some of it, I just need to know if we hit pause on that program because we don't have any other dollars allocated for any type of new tenant program at this time. So some direction on that would be helpful. Speaker 3: Sure. And I don't think you should cancel the program. I think you should look at some of the resources that indicated that program and figure out what portion to be targeted for this. And then and then as additional CARES Act funding comes in, we should we should increase it. To be clear. I'm not. What I'm saying is it's a repayment program as opposed to a structure repayment plan or a repayment program. And that program incentivizes matching. That's what I'm saying. So I think you can take some time and then bring it back. Speaker 7: Okay. So given that then, because really the portion of the program, we would take a short break before we implement that program to evaluate this should the motion move forward. Speaker 4: Thank you, Mr.. Let me let me let me keep going forward. Speaker 6: I'm not. I'm not. That was the question. Clarifying question. May I just. I do have the floor. Speaker 4: I. I was giving I was giving you a back and forth. Okay. So let me just keep moving forward. So, Councilman Austin. Speaker 6: So I guess my my question for the city manager is, I know we've received some more relief from the county. Could there be funds in that to go toward this in addition to the Long Beach care program that we have? And then secondly, I know. Councilmember Richardson We are also working on getting money in the Heroes Act potentially from DC to help with some of the economic relief work that we want to do. I would say earmark or contingency or for that for this type of program, because what we're also looking at is we don't necessarily have to have it today. We sounds like we have some time to to work out a replacement plan for for those who are in arrears. So those are my comments. I'm really interested to hear the discussion from my colleagues on this. This is this is I think it's encouraging. I, I want to. I don't feel so comfortable with an ordinance at this point to to mandate the repayment. I do like the idea of a program. I like the incentive incentivizing repayment. And I think this council should be in a place where we're encouraging folks to continue that good faith relationship between and it's a landlords. Thanks. Speaker 4: Thank you, Councilman. I have concern from Vice Mayor Andrews. Actually Vice mayor, do they have. I have two people that haven't spoken yet. So let me go to them and they'll come back around just for a second round. Captain for Superman. Speaker 2: Thank you. I have a question on clarification on an issue and maybe be making this step. I think I heard two different things, and that is let's let's talk about first things first. Would at the sunset of the eviction moratorium, what is the date that typically renters would pay their first rent? Would that be August one? Yeah. This is rich council member Super nine. Yeah, I think that's the way it would work. The as the ordinance currently written sunsets on July 31st. I mean, I think everyone on the call probably knows 90% or more of residential rent's due on the first of the month and that that will be due on August 1st. Regular rent not the deferred rent, but regular rent. I think it's safe to assume what we do in the vast majority of cases the day after the sunset. Okay. So could you take a guess at then? Well, I think I brought this point up at a previous meeting, but I think it's a very important point. So I'll reiterated. Um, if that rent payment is missed, is the penalty that the back rent is due at that time. Yes. So if that if that rent payment is missed. After a three day notice to pay her quit is is delivered to the tenant. Then what we want to make sure is if if the if an unlawful detainer is moving forward legitimately based on August 1st rent or any rent thereafter, the landlord has the right to include in this lawsuit the repayment of all deferred rent at that time. So I don't think it's right to say if if the rent payment is missed on August 1st, all deferred rent is immediately due. The tenant still has the opportunity to go through the three day notice to pay or quit procedure. Okay. So for the sake of argument on on let's say August 7th that that would kick in and that. Yeah, that's right. If they failed if they failed to come current on their August rent in response to the three day notice to quit, then everything would be due August rent and also the deferred rent. Okay. And also, Mr. Anthony, you couldn't possibly speculate on when an eviction would physically actually take place in that scenario. I could always speculate on something, but given that currently the Judicial Council, the court says, kept at least unlawful detainers closed, youth courts are closed. I don't think that they will be open by August. But whenever they do reopen and this is a bit of speculation, I don't have direct experience, but I do think unlawful detainer actions usually take 5 to 8 weeks to get to completion. I may be off on that and I welcome comments from other members of the Council who may have different opinions. Okay. Thank you. The other question I'd like to ask staff is the number of 80% of renters are paying rent. Do we have any opinion from any data on that, from staff? Speaker 7: Linda Tatum will take a shot at that question. Speaker 0: I'm. Councilman, I'm not sure where that number comes from. We know that there are many that aren't paying, but we don't have a really good, accurate data source that we could give you that would really be based on actual data. So it's completely anecdotal. Speaker 2: Okay. So just to summarize my position here, I'm very concerned about that August one date and I'm equally concerned about the balloon payment, which I think everyone is. So I'll hold any further comments for now. Thank you. Speaker 4: Thank you, Councilwoman Pryce. Speaker 1: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And I share I mean, from the very beginning, I have shared very publicly that I am concerned about the concept of the balloon payment. And when we offer things like. Rental assistance, but we don't have mortgage assistance. Then the burdens that we're creating are falling on the shoulders of only one entity in the circle that is involved with housing. And I and I definitely concerned about that. I know that the repayment option is not a popular one. I'm hearing that from folks to me, and I've shared this with with everyone, I think on the council as a as a commercial tenant, I know that for us, the balloon payments is going to be nearly impossible to meet. So we've talked a lot about a partial payment structure that would work. And to Councilman Austin's point, you know, working with your landlord is always the best way to do it and always the best way to ensure that you don't fall into a situation that the city can't really mandate, that we can't really mandate people to meet and confer on a payment plan. If we could, I think that's something that we would have thought about a long time ago. So the repayment plan is really an opportunity or an effort to try to be fair to all of the entities that are involved in the housing cycle, the housing provider, as well as the person who's occupying the home, the tenant. And I think what we I think we've done a lot to help tenants, and I think it's great. Certainly nobody on this council wants to see people get evicted. Nobody no councilmember wants that. But what we are trying to do is to be fair to the folks that aren't getting any mortgage relief. And for anyone out there who thinks banks are offering relief left and right, you're absolutely wrong. That's not happening. It's not happening for commercial properties and it's not happening for residential properties, at least not on a large scale. And certainly that's because the government can't intervene and force that as we can with the eviction moratorium for tenants. So I would like to see a payment plan, but I also agree that we don't want to do anything that subjects people to earlier eviction. Because if they can't if they can meet their balloon payment, that they're not going to be subject to eviction. But if they can't meet their balloon payment and it's unlikely they're even going to be able to make the partial payment, then that's going to subject them to earlier eviction. And nobody wants to see that. My concern I like the idea of the incentivizing and the matching. I really do like that idea. I think that is a great way to look at it and it's a great way to offer incentives for people to pay. And they wouldn't get evicted, but the landlord would still get a partial payment. The concerns I have with that is one I will say that I don't like the fact that we're leaving it open. Councilman Richardson, I think you and I've been on the council long enough that we know when we are receiving five with they bring it back at some future date. We're basically kicking it out with no expectation that it ever come back. I would like to offer as a friendly that we set a time for it to come back, whether it's 30 days or 60 days, to have staff report back on what funding is available and what the limitations on that funding might be. The state and federal dollars and county dollars that we're getting to help with rental assistance do come with some restrictions. And some of those restrictions, for example, there's income based qualification. So I'd like to get a better understanding of if we're going to do a repayment incentive program or partial payment incentive program. Are there moneys that we can utilize that have less restrictions attached to them so that tenants throughout the city can benefit from it because they may have a higher income in other parts of the city, but they're still tenants and they're still facing the same problems as tenants throughout all of the city. So if their rent is, let's say, you know, if they're if their income is is similar to someone living in a cheaper apartment, but they're paying more of their income to rent. But their incomes about the same, then they're really not going to be able to qualify. And that puts them in a very difficult situation. They've chosen to pay more of their income to live in a more expensive housing unit, but yet they're not qualified. They're not getting qualified for any sort of rental assistance because they don't make enough money. And so I worry about that category of people. And so I'd like to see what options are available. I certainly do not want to cut the current tenant assistance programs that we have, the $5 million that we have, a place that has worked so hard to get that program up and running. I'd like to see that program up and running as soon as possible. So I don't want that program to pause. But I would like us to come back in 30 days or 60 days and evaluate what additional funding is available, whether there is any funding or any revenue source that we can tap into that's nontraditional, that might help for this sort of program, you know, a back to work type program, maybe it's not even. Earmarked for housing specifically, but to help people get back on their feet on some sort of a stimulus program that might amount that we can utilize to help residents get back on their feet. So my friendly would be I'd like to have it come back, not necessarily with a date certain, but, you know, a month certain. And I would hope that you would be amenable to that. Speaker 3: Absolutely. So when so Rich Anthony mentioned that, I think you mentioned the date of July 14th. And my conversation with him earlier just simply just comes down to how some staff can. And, you know, look at the program. Get the details on the color of the money, what restrictions? All of those are important for us to understand. We can do and we want to leverage additional funds as well. I think there are some opportunities. But like you, I want to be urgent about this. I think people need help and we should help them as quickly as we can. So I think I think 30 days should be plenty of time. But sooner if we can get this back, the date that that rich man, I think that I would prefer. But I think 30 days is 20. Speaker 1: Oh. Speaker 2: I'm sorry to interrupt. I would just. This is rich. I'm a little worried that I was being aggressive on that date, given that I'm not the one that's going to be doing most of the work. It's going to be city staffer. And I think council. Council member Austin made a good point. I don't think that it's that time critical. I don't mean to dismiss Councilmember Price. And your point, Councilman Richardson. Let's make sure it comes back. I get it. But since tenants are going to have until July 31st, 2021 to pay. There's a lot of time during which we could establish a program and during which they can take advantage of that program. So. Is there a is there a council meeting on July 21st and maybe we bring it back in early August? I definitely want to make sure Tom and city staff have input into when they feel comfortable bringing it back. Speaker 7: So this is done. So yeah, we do agree we should come back in about 30 days rather than 60. While the city attorney is right about there's not time from the ordinance perspective. A time crunch there is on the money that we would be able to access for this. The Federal Cares Act money needs to be out the door spent reimbursed everything done by the end of December. That's incredibly fast. So to be able to use any of that money, we need to make some decisions on it fairly soon. So we would commit to coming back within 30 days, giving you the options for the $5 million or what we could do with that, how we would move that program forward and any additional federal cares act or other revenues that you may want to dedicate. Speaker 3: I think that's fine. I accept that. And just be clear, we're talking about the program. I know that. We're not talking about the ordinance. I know you mentioned ordinance. Speaker 7: Sorry, I'm talking about the program. Yes, sir. Speaker 3: I just want to be clear. We're talking about the program. But, Councilwoman, I fully accept that. Absolutely. Speaker 1: Yeah. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. And Tom or Mr. Modica. You know, as you and your team are evaluating funding sources, really, I know you guys are really good at being creative, but this repayment program is different. It's creative, and maybe there's some category it falls into that's not specifically housing, but allows us to be a little bit creative with, you know, incentivizing people, getting back on their feet or something like that, and also trying to see, I hope that I was able to articulate the concerns I have about it being income based because there are people who do 40 or 50% or even higher percent of their salary to rent so that they can live in a different neighborhood, so that they can be in a different school district or whatever the case may be. So I want to make sure that we're trying to help as many tenants as possible. And of course, there are landlords, too, who aren't getting any mortgage relief. Speaker 4: Okay. Thank you. Next up is. Council member Mungo. No. Speaker 1: Q can you hear me? Wonderful. Thank you. I think a lot of the concerns mentioned tonight, in no way was the council looking to set up runners to have a big balloon payment at the end. And we always talked about finding a way to help them get there. And the reason that balloon payments are not. Really allowed anymore in the credit industry is because people don't typically have the ability to get to a point where they have that much cash on hand to make those balloon payments. So we want to have a win for everyone tonight. We want to make sure to focus on the back rent owed. I guess I just have two things. It's easy to say that we want to. Forgive rent. And the challenge comes with the finding who's going to eventually pay for that? I was talking to one of my colleagues today about a woman in my district who literally hasn't had any income, zero income, but her Social Security, which is very, very low because it was her husband's who passed away. She's been getting food from a local church and she doesn't have any income coming in except for the food from the local church. And her husband's passed away. Has the Social Security to pay for her caretakers and to pay for her living expenses. And. And as you get older, if you have caretakers and those things, they're very expensive. And those caretakers will not allow her to pay late. And so the home that she grew up in, that she now uses as a rental and has not been paying their their rent. So we're not talking always about some big corporation. We're literally talking about our neighbors who also need to eat. And so any way to put forward a program. So I'm going to just kind of delineate a couple of things. So the $5.3 million that we talked about last week, I first want to think two weeks ago, Councilmember Austin, for starting us down that path. And one of the things that I talked about was stretching that money and instead of up to 100% of rent, that it would be 50% of rent. And I love the idea of using it as matching, and I think that that is a huge component and that really was kind of thrown around. But I know that we are all working so hard to. Fine solutions so quickly. We haven't been able to work through all the details I agree with. The idea that there isn't as much urgency now, because we do know that they have longer to pay, but there's still neighbors at home who need some certainty on when they can pay things back. So this neighbor that I mentioned is in her late seventies and she took out a credit card cash advance to make her payments. She needs to kind of figure out when she's going to be able to pay those things back. So I'm a big thank you to the city staff who are willing to make a commitment to getting that back to us in 30 days. I'd also like to say that we need real data on what is outstanding, and so I'd like to see the city staff pull together with our I.T. team, some kind of portal where a landlord can enter limited information about what is outstanding from them. You can go on and say, I have two units and I have one tenant who's three months behind on rent to the tune of 1800 a month. And I have another tenant who's behind on rent, but they've been paying 70%. I think we as a city need to know what that looks like because we need to kind of track that as we go, because we as a city need to prevent a mass eviction status across our city. In August, what is it, July 31st of 2021. We need to look at where those numbers are lining up so that we can prepare ourselves and put in additional programs as necessary. So I'd love to see some kind of portal if Councilmember Richardson's amenable to adding that to his motion or the city staff to explore what options they might have to collect that data for us. Speaker 3: Absolutely. We should we should explore it. I think I think more broadly, we need to be thinking as we approach July of 2021 about a strategy that. Well, this could be one of the larger things I think you're thinking correctly in that we don't want mass evictions at that point. So there should be a whole host of evaluate absolutely them. Speaker 1: And then I think asking the question, too, there are a lot of people who haven't gone back to work yet and they do have rent due just around the corner. And so I think for landlords to also give that information on where they've made exceptions, what they've done to accommodate renters and whether they did have a COVID reason or not, just for us to have that is important and then for us as a city to really think it out. The program was supposed to start on June 29th. That's six days from now. And we don't have another council member between now and meeting between now and then. Mr. Modica, what is your plan with if the motion on the floor passes? What are your initial thoughts on when we could regroup in terms of what kind of information you've already sent out regarding the program as it was or. What that would now look like. Speaker 7: Ask Linda Tatum to respond to that. Speaker 0: Councilwoman Mango We have been very aggressive in terms of starting to publicize and put the information and the information documents. We've gotten a really robust response to this from the public who are saying we're ready to go and we have committed that we would have the application forms and other information about the program up on the website on the 29th for the the rental assistance program that the council approved a couple of weeks ago. So if you direct us to continue that effort tonight, we would certainly just get that information up and just restructure the program based upon the direction. And as I understand it, I think the clarification is that we would need to understand that you want us to continue with the prior rental assistance program, but just use a portion of that fund funds, the 5.3 million to dedicate to this program that we're talking about tonight. So that's the direction that we would need, whether we put the one on hold or continue with the one and funded at a certain level and dedicated a portion of the funds that have already been committed to that program and divert those to this new program. Speaker 1: So I don't think it's a diversion. I really think it is a prioritization. So I think you open the portal and again, I can hear from my colleagues, you open the portal and people apply and we can use the data of all the applicants and how far behind they are. All the different components for us to determine from a policy perspective where the most need is and where the city can forgive or not forgive. Brant Pay on behalf of the tenants. That makes the best impact on our economy as a whole to be able to lift up neighbors and make sure that they get to stay in their homes. So that would be my recommendation. I think that even if it's still opened on the 29th without clear direction on how much any one person is going to get, I think you kind of talk about the possibilities of up to $3,000 of rent matching or or prepayment for you. And then you'll have the data in in there for us to determine. And I kind of said that at the last meeting, too. And I think this is really just an enhancement of a great program really authored by Councilmember Alston and for us to and have now sat on it for a week and said two weeks and said, okay, let's leverage that money as the matching, let's do up to the 50% of rent owed a couple of those sides of it. So we can see how far that money can stretch and how much of an impact it can make. But other than that great work of Councilmember Richardson, Councilmember Austin and Mr. Anthony, I know you've worked on this tirelessly, and I know my council colleagues who really discussed this program over the last few weeks. I know that we wish we could forgive rent, but forgiveness is really not making it disappear. It's really taking from one and giving to another. And in some of those cases, some of our most vulnerable senior citizens are kind of living on that income, and you can't really differentiate how you pull those people apart. We want to make sure not to have our senior citizens without care, food or or housing. So I'd thank you all to your work on this. I'm really excited to see an opportunity for renters to be incentivized to both pay back a little bit of that back rent and for the city to step in with these funds to kind of pay off part of it for them. Speaker 4: Vice Mayor Landrieu's. Speaker 2: No, I'm fine. Thank you very much, man. Speaker 4: Consumer superpower. Speaker 2: Thank you. I just want to back what Councilmember Mungo said, and it looks to me and maybe staff can respond that if this comes back on the 14th, can we be up and running by August one? So if we if we leave the end of June. Program in place. Our program in place. Um. Tenants can access that money. And then if this program gets going, um, is August one too early a date to get that moving? Speaker 0: I let me respond to that. I think it would be helpful to just clarify that the the the prior rental assistance program, the criteria for that were very specific in terms of the income qualification and the other criteria in the documents that you would need to be eligible for that program. The program you're talking about tonight for the rent deferral, that program, in my opinion, and we're still we'll still spend some time to look at it over the next 30 days would potentially have a different set of criteria because it would come from a different funding source. And that's why I was asking you to consider maybe having these as two separate programs rather than melding them, because they come from different sources and they have different criteria for qualification. And that makes it really challenging to meld them together and try to really efficiently and fairly implement them when they're melded together under the scenario that was just described. So I would and the program that you previously approved was scheduled to be rolled out on the 29th. And given that if we don't come back with the the details of the program you just talked about for another 30 days, that truly would delay the implementation of the rental assistance program. So I'm some clarification about the goals would help and I would encourage you to consider them as two separate programs because of the different funding sources. Speaker 2: Okay. Well, I was I was playing off of Stacey Mungo's comment. So if I like to respond to what I just said, but again, I want to reiterate that August 8th one is a great concern to me. And what I failed to mention is August one is just the first milestone that rent will be have tenants want to pay their rent on time every month after that? That is correct, Mr. Anthony. I believe that I might have overemphasized August one, but that's just the start date. Any month after that, rent. Rent is late. The same consequences will kick in. Speaker 1: Thank you, Mr. Zubrin. I do agree that there is some confusion because, Ms.. Tatum, we cannot continue to create separate programs to a taxpayer, to a renter, to a landlord. It is one program. It needs to be a11 door. They don't know the differences of what type of funding it is. Speaker 0: They the applicant would not, but the the city staff would. And we would certainly put all of the details of each one of the programs. And I what I'm hearing is that a any one household could be eligible potentially for two programs unless you direct us to qualify them for one or the other of the programs. And there is clearly some overlap because the rental assistance program that you approved last week, a person who has deferred rent would likewise be eligible for that program, even under assuming that they met the income guidelines. Everything you talked about tonight, they could potentially be eligible for the rental assistance program you already provided. But I'm hearing that you're really concerned and you want to focus additional funds on those who exclusively have deferred rent. So there there's there's a difference in both of those those qualifications for the program, which is why a more distinction, a greater distinction between the programs would be helpful in terms of administration. But I hear you loud and clear. You're saying we could probably just get the application and see which one of those programs they would would qualify for. And if you're okay with that, we can certainly study that and roll out the rental assistance program on the schedule we had already provided because the funding wouldn't all go away immediately. I think we could work something out where we move forward on the one and yet still maintain some of those funds for for the new program and continue to look for additional program program funds. Speaker 7: And this is Tom. I jump in here a little bit, so I think we just need some clear direction. There's definitely two different ways we can go. So we've got $5 million set aside for a program. We're ready to go. You're asking us to do something different, which is to kind of either either modify that money to extend to this kind of new a program or to create two separate programs. We can certainly go out and look for more money we only have right now. We know we have the $5 million in hand. So that's kind of what I'm looking for direction from from the either the maker of the motion or others and we, you know, just should we try to do both or should we create one new program? That's what we're looking for. Speaker 1: Okay. Speaker 4: Okay. So this is this is the Mary. Nobody's had a chance to speak. I want to I want to just clarify, and I think I'm hearing everyone's comments. And, Councilman Margaret, you have additional comments also. Speaker 1: Well, I really appreciate Mr. Modica comment, but I think that what we're talking about is an enhancement with some of the suggestions made last week, because when Mr. Richardson states up to 50% matching, there are certain tenants that would then be what I think we would use the word prioritized because they were marching down that path, but because they wouldn't have that same kind of requirement. So I think that they should consider my recommendation to the maker of the motion is that they would continue to take in applications, but that we don't necessarily tell anyone who's been awarded an application until at least we get a report back from the Development Services Department on the 14th. So we as a city can make sure that it's headed in the right direction. That would be my only comment and thank you for all that. The considerations to both Mr. Medications. Speaker 4: Tatum Great. I'm going to make a brief, brief clarifications and then we'll move on. I think actually. Then I've got Councilman Austin and we're going to move up. Just to clarify, I think I know a lot of people, including Councilman Austin and others, worked on the original program. I think we want to keep the original program in place, is what I'm hearing. So the original program stays in place. We have funding already set aside for that program that moves forward and we have a timeline set up for that. In addition to that, we are expanding this kind of this program that we have to also do this kind of rental repayment assistance program. That's a matching program of which we're going to look for additional dollars to supplement that program if and over the course of the next few weeks, you know, staff, you come forward and say , hey, we think, you know, we found some new dollars here or we think that there's some some dollars maybe, you know, some limited dollars from the original program that can move into the other one. I think we'll wait to hear from you. But I think what I'm hearing is we want to move forward with the original program and keep that going. Then we now we have a new program as proposed tonight that we're going to look for additional funds. That program is going to come back to the council for approval. And it will essentially be one rental assistance bucket of which there's different kind of programmatic ways of of of people getting assistance. So that's the way I'm hearing things. And hopefully we can get to a vote. Councilman Austin. Speaker 3: I think I was cued up. Speaker 6: Thank. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I am pleased with the direction this is going in. I appreciate your clarification. I did want to just express my my desire and hope that the council will support moving forward with the right care Long Beach Cares program, the rental assistance program that we already have in place. I'm supportive of this. We've seen and we can commit to doing that and also look at how we can enhance options for for helping people pay their rent and helping landlords get their rent as well. I think everybody wins with the proposal on the table. And if we can take just a little bit more time to work that out and also hopefully identify new resources from other sources, this could make the program even more robust and beneficial to the more so. Those are my comments. I hope we can stay the course here. Speaker 4: Okay. Think I'm going to go to public comment unless, Councilman Richardson, do you have do you have additional comments before we do have a comment and vote? As a Richardson. Speaker 3: Here. I am sorry. I was a supporter of that in this direction. I think I think a lot of the last. A lot of discussion, just confused a lot of folks. I think we wanted to be very, very clear here. We already have a program in the works. I think that program, people are expecting to get assistance. We don't want to take anything off the table that we've already put on the table to them. What we're saying is we need to develop a program to help with back rent. Where the color of money comes from. Steph's going to need some time to evaluate that. What the funding levels are, staff's going to have to evaluate, and there's going to have to be additional funding as well. So Steph has some flexibility come back with a few options for the city council to consider. But this motion is about saying let's not do rental assistance. It says we can maybe look at, you know, figuring out how our dollars can stretch this massive matching concept and truly incentivize people to make those, you know, to make payments as best as they can. So so those are my comments. Thank you. Speaker 4: Yeah. View it as an expansion of what we were already doing. So we're not going back on what the program was and expanding it in a different way. So let's go to public comment. Madam Clerk. Speaker 0: We have 13 public comments. Speaker 5: Our first comments from Tanya Jimenez, your colleague. Your time starts now. Speaker 1: Hi. This is Tania menendez, District seven. This item is important. Landlords do not provide a valuable service to society. They are parasites that hoard housing, stock and profit off the backs of others. Requiring tenants to pay back rent without taking into account the continuing pandemic and inability of many times to pay is not logical. It does not serve the people it serves to evict tenants and free up housing stock to put for sale back on the market. I heard about this. It only serves landlords and property owners. It serves to increase the city's overall homelessness rate, something you are going to want to reduce. If you need it to live, it should be free. This includes housing, water, food and health care. And this goes specifically. Speaker 2: To the councilman. Speaker 1: That says she hopes renters are not trying to get out of paying their rent to the councilman who said there should be no free rent because there's no free mortgage. And so the councilwoman who called landlords housing providers point blank, period, housing is a human right. Housing should be free. Keep your landlord assistance and repayment plan. Black women and black families in particular are the most rent burden in Long Beach and are at the most risk of eviction, followed by families headed by indigenous peoples and people of color. I urge you all to cancel the repayment plan and forgive him. People over profit should be the bottom line. Always. My time. Speaker 5: Thank you for your comment. Next we have. And you said De la Cruz a better. Speaker 1: Starts now. Hi, I'm from District one. So today, me and other residents, I want to ask for all of you to vote no on the repayment plan. First of all, I think it's ridiculous and there's a special plan to move forward with the renters, which are the ones who need protection from the landlords. This is the price. So how dare you support a measure that would help you as a landlord? This is not about personal gain. It's about the people involved and the 59.8% of renters. And then protection. There would be that 59.8%. Our economy is still not functioning and reopen and with little openings have taken place. COBRA 19 infection rates have skyrocketed and landlords want to sit there like royalty until long time resident that you should have a plan or a safety net or that x amount months is plenty of time to pay back to rent. People do not have the money right now to pay what's already ridiculously high rent. Working class people both a lot of these are nationwide have been bearing the brunt of government response to COVID 19, from the city dragging its feet to provide widespread testing to offering the least possible help to thousands of workers who were thrown out of their job and don't have the wait a month. Rents are growing overhead. The proposed rate rise with the payment plan will leave thousands of citizens of our village at risk for eviction or failure to pay rent. The fact that sentences of this city are being subjected to pressure to this pressure is criminal, especially when members of our city council are a landlord themselves, indirectly profiting from the very plan they are proposing to pass. The real issue here is that rent should have been forgiven in the first place. You guys have filed 5.3 million, I believe I heard. Dollars. Speaker 5: Thank you for your comment. Next, we have Seagram. Your time starts now. Speaker 1: Y'all are going to be hearing from me and my fellow community members now and in the future, because we are listening. We are tuning in and listening. We are taking note. We are mobilizing. And we are angry. You need to hear our words. I'm looking at you because I know that you are a landlord, a landlord in our community, and you will benefit directly from this measure. It is in your personal interest to pass this measure. But as a member of your district, I say I demand that you vote no on this measure. We need to cancel rent completely. Cancel it, cancel repayment, cancel it all. We are in a new time. Corporate capitalism has failed the people and only benefited property owners. Well. Speaker 5: Thank you for your comment. Next, we have Daniel Kelson. Speaker 2: Thank you. Thank you. Mayor and city council members. I'm a longstanding homeowner and I do not rent, nor do I own properties for rent. I therefore speak with no conflict of interest on this measure. But as a concerned citizen, the push by rental property owners for an ordinance scheduling this rapid to pay back of rent is mathematically challenged, economically irresponsible and civically reprehensible. For those renters lucky enough to have been out of work and that missed payments for only three months, this proposal amounts to an inhumane 25% rent increase to pay back dismissed once in a 12 month period. Many more people are still suffering in this economic and public health crisis. With the unemployment rate in Long Beach hovering around 20% and more months of rent still paying that back in a 12 month schedule is an even more dramatic increase in their housing burden. So just because the proposed table sounds simple doesn't make it humane or even feasible. A large number of Long Beach residents who are housing stressed, a population skewed toward people of color and the working poor would be devastated by such an ordinance whose sole aim must be seen really as a roundabout way to produce more evictions when rent payback schedules cannot be met. Now is not the time for landlords to be talking about clawing back funds that may never make it into the hands of the tenants. I just defended the property owners. Consider that this is the sort of measure appropriate at this time. Thank you for your time. Speaker 5: Thank you for your comment. Next, we have Elsa tongue. Your time starts now. Speaker 1: Hi, this is Ailsa Chang from Long Beach Forward. I'm going to read some excerpts from the letter that our executive director, Dr. Christine Pettit, submitted today. We at Long Beach Forward stand in strong solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement here in Long Beach and around the world. We strongly oppose item 26 to mandate and ill conceived one size fits all deferred rent repayment schedule for all tenants. This proposal, especially during a global pandemic with mass unemployment, is patently anti-black, anti-immigrant, anti-poor and anti small business, and, if passed, will lead to mass evictions, growing homelessness and shuttered small businesses. 63% of black women and 60% of all women of color in Long Beach are rent burdened. These women and their families, meaning children, will be the first to be evicted from their homes and onto the streets. Under this proposal, black residents are already grossly, disproportionately represented in L.A. County's unhoused population. Long Beach must reject any and all policies that would add one more black body to the violence of homelessness. Vote no on the repayment schedule and instead cancel rent and cancel mortgages to provide real relief in our renter majority city. I yield back. Speaker 5: Thank you. Next, we have Fred Sutton. Your time starts now. Speaker 2: Honorable Mayor City Council Fred Sutton on behalf of the California Department of Association. Appreciate your time and your deliberation on this very important issue. Housing providers continue to act with compassion towards those who face related hardships to the coronavirus as the economy reopens and an increasing number of employees return to work. We asked council to insert a payment standard to help residents pay rent that has been deferred. It is in no one's interests to have large payments outstanding in a year from now. This policy should be simple, regular, and give everyone time to understand their financial obligations. It makes sense and helps avoid mass evictions. It is not mutually exclusive what Councilmember Richardson is talking about in his motion. You can insert a payment plan and have renter assistance. Fulfill those that are unable to meet some of those installments that are continuing to struggle. The you can vote for an installment plan and assistance to come back and figure out how to pay some of those installment payments at a later date. This should move forward in some capacity today. We understand what everyone is facing, but housing providers need some relief as well as there has been no assistance through the CARES Act . Coming to housing providers and utility costs are going up, maintenance is going up and income is not coming in from these units. It's fair and equitable to find a payment plan solution going forward and using assistance loans to fill those gaps. Appreciate your time and consideration. Thank you. Speaker 5: Thank you. Next, we have Jen, Victor and Ensign. Speaker 2: Honorable Counsel. My name is Jan Victor Anderson. I am an immigrant from the Philippines and grew up in Long Beach, and I'm currently an organizer with Eastside Communities, located on two four, four eight Santa Fe Avenue. Speaker 1: 90810. Speaker 2: Before I speak to item 26, the city needs to ensure that the public comment feature on the city website follows the Language Access Policy Protocol as it currently is only accessible in English. This means needed Tagalog speakers like me, monolingual Spanish speakers will not be able to participate in our city meetings as it. Speaker 1: Relates to the repayment plan. Thank you for your leadership. Speaker 2: Councilmember Richardson and the other Council members in support of Receive. Speaker 1: And filed a repayment plan and no to. Speaker 2: Any ordinance because any repayment plan will. Speaker 1: Only lead. Speaker 2: To eviction in organizing. Speaker 1: With working. Speaker 2: Class black brown residents during the COVID 19 pandemic. This repayment plan is going to be an added stressor creep on abilities for many in our community to be evicted. This is not speak to the moment of the pandemic where residents are facing lack of work hours and lacking financial resources. Many residents are relying on city services and community groups to cover their food and other mutual aid. But this repayment plan contradicts the spirit of the eviction moratorium past weeks ago to protect those most vulnerable so that we don't create a bigger homelessness issue. Speaker 1: Usually, Lufkin did research. Speaker 2: Estimating 120,000 households in Ohtani will be at risk of homelessness because of this pandemic. Speaker 1: Thank you for this motion file and receive it. Speaker 2: Let's not revisit the repayment plan. Cancel the rent council mortgage and find ways to protect and support the most vulnerable in Alberta and keep our home. Thank you. Speaker 5: Next, you have Jordan when you've time starts now. Speaker 2: Hi there. My name's Jordan Win. I'm a second district resident. I stand firmly against the original item, and I thank Councilmember Richardson for introducing the substitute and I am in support of that, as well as the council members that are standing behind Richardson's motion in Long Beach. We need to stop pitting families against each other. There have been mom and pop examples that have been given out time and time again. What about this one situation? What about this one situation? It's disrespectful to suggest that one family's income is a deserved or God given right of another. This is not about transferring rents between residents. We need to make sure that people have the ability to pay for their housing, and that means camping rent and canceling mortgages for everybody. We have to stop pretending that COVID 19 is disappearing. It's not just still here. It is increasing. The economy isn't going to snap back on July 31st. All of a sudden, people aren't going to suddenly be reemployed. Once again, people are going to be on the hunt for jobs. Truth to suggest that we need to have some sort of uniform repayment plan is ludicrous, and it is truly out of touch and out of sight. People who have who have a consistent roof over their heads, who even if they weren't able to pay for their mortgage, they could sell their house. Do they have wealth? Renters don't have that luxury. They end up on the street. Two thirds of our homeless population this year are experiencing it for the first time. That point directly to housing and affordability in a severely rent burdened community. I ask you to receive and file the original item and don't bring it for your comment. Speaker 5: Next, we have Joshua Christian. Speaker 2: Leaving the remaining members of the council to the Joshua Christian eviction defense attorney with the Legal Aid Foundation in Long Beach. I want to thank all of you for speaking really clearly about what was a pretty misguided item on the agenda tonight. Councilwoman Pierce, you cannot it clearly out of the gate. Thank you very much and thanks for supporting the motion on the floor. I hope we can go home just with this arbitrary repayment plan policy put to bed entirely. I think that the motion that we're discussing is actually a perfect example of why setting up arbitrary levers to eviction is ineffective and inappropriate at the time. 12 months form a grand kids breathing room to households to get back on their feet, the different economic sectors to recover at different rates, and to local legislatures to be creative and come up with plans like the one that we'll hear about in a few weeks. Jim mentioned there are 120,000 people expected to be homeless during the next year because of this crisis, and that's with a 12 month rent deferment plan. So I think what was originally on the agenda tonight was going to make that a lot worse at a much faster rate. And I hope that the repayment program that we come back to consider is something that will be much more constructive and supportive for the Long Beach renters. So thank you very much. Thanks to city staff as well. Speaker 5: Thank you. Next, we have Keith Kennedy. Your time starts now. Speaker 2: Yes. My name is Keith Kennedy and president of the Smart Property Owners Alliance, also known as BOA. We support a pay back option that establishes that deferred rent obligations be paid back in one vehicle installments over a one year period of time starting August 1st of 2020. Having said that, I'd like to ask the mayor and city council members if they would be using the 5.3 million C, D, b g funds approved three weeks ago for this new program. We would support a matching payment plan. However, it should not be tied to income. Since the reason for the deferment was not based on income, I'd like to request that this come back to City Council for July 14th. Also, it's important to remember that housing providers are not in the business of evictions. It's expensive and disruptive. With that in mind, banks are not so kind and generous of many of our housing providers, of which some are elderly and may be suffering from ownership and security as concerns for meeting their contractual obligations without a structured payback period are mounting. With the likely extension of the federal unemployment benefits, along with employers opening up, it may become less of an issue. Speaker 5: Thank you. Next, we have Mike Parkinson. Your time starts now. Mike Mitchinson. Speaker 2: I'm sorry. Good evening, Mayor and council members. My name is Mike Murchison and I supported Councilmember Orphan's push for a rental assistance program. But there was one caveat to that had to do with an 80% income level for area median incomes. And we all know that doesn't apply to all tenants in Miami. So certainly all landlords are not going to benefit. I want you to keep that in mind with this rental assistance program. If you have the same type of program and you're using that 5.3, you're not going to be benefiting all tenants and all landlords of that 5.3 million. I do encourage you to follow up quickly with what I told you about using those monies prior to December. So 30 day response time seems appropriate. Finally, clarify on evictions. The Judicial Council for the State of California has already gone on record as saying there's going to be no unlawful detainers until the start of that process or 90 days, 90 days after the governor declares the eviction moratorium over. We're not talking about evictions right now. We're talking way, way down the road. I hope that you guys can find programs that don't have these restrictions that contends and landlords can benefit at the same time. Thank you very much. Speaker 5: Thank you. Next, we have Norberto Lopez. Your time starts now. Speaker 2: Hello, council and mayor, you know that people are tired of their showing up in the streets and they're against the street because they have no other option. They fight for their home now while they're in there or they're going to have to fight for it on the outside. With instability of the nature of the police are out and that people are tired of being told that they are going to have to pay back the rent and you try to dictate how they should pay back the rent. That's not the way to go. Right. And then the landlord rents talking about that. They're compassionate that we have you know, we have tended to be threatened with gun violence and that they're going to go get shot by their landlord. That's not compassion. And I get the apartment association emails and, you know, my parties are saying that Judicial Council this and that. But, you know, the apartment association fighting to also repeal that. What? If there are units back to get rid of all the lower income folks out of Long Beach. We already saw the first wave of gentrification hit the first district and folks are moving over to a nice district. That's why I appreciate the ones that are standing up for the people, putting people over profit, not profit over people. And, you know, all these private meetings that are happening like we. Need, right? I am not like, you know, people are standing up and they're going to continue to show up and they've got to take off the street. They will take off the street. And we've seen it. And, you know, you know, the police aren't going to help because the people are tired and they're going to continue fighting. Are you on my side? Speaker 5: Thank you. Next, we have Tiffany Davey. Your time starts now. Speaker 1: Hi. Good evening. Speaker 2: Council Mayor and all citizens listening. I strongly oppose the original item. Support definitely was even fail as well as hoped to see an extension statewide. Given the fact that we are still in a global pandemic with no real I mean, even these July 31st dates seem quite arbitrary as we're about to segway into the next item when we're talking about systemic racism being a public health crisis. Considering the all of the numbers going back, I mean, before this crisis existed and now what it's really brought to light. I also support it in that same note towards the possible aggression. Speaker 1: Of this moment. Speaker 2: Similar to the ads that we saw during the No on Rent Control campaign that depicted 1937 almost word for word KKK ads that were endorsed by many small property owners and such. So not to revisit that as we're also seeing different types of other potential tools of future hate crimes. Again, we're in a. Speaker 1: Pandemic, and. Speaker 2: If we move forward, the next item would be acknowledging that we're also in a public health crisis long overdue to acknowledge. So with that, especially hearing the audio from the gun violence video past anti-harassment or. Speaker 5: Thank you for your comment that concludes public comment for this item. Speaker 4: Okay. Thank you for public comment and roll call. Vote, please. Speaker 0: District one, district two. I District three. I used it for. Speaker 4: I. Speaker 0: District five. I District six. Speaker 4: Five. Speaker 0: District seven. Speaker 2: II. Speaker 0: District eight. Speaker 6: Hi. Speaker 0: District nine. Speaker 3: Hi. Speaker 0: Ocean carries. Speaker 4: Thank you. Okay. We're going to go ahead and go through the next. So six or seven items should go rather quick. Kelly I know there's got to be some discussion on, I think on item 27 from from a couple of council members. So let me let me go ahead and go through the next few. I'd have to go rather quickly and we'll get to oh 27 item 17.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to direct City Attorney to prepare an ordinance amending Chapter 8.100 of the Long Beach Municipal Code to require that residential and commercial rent deferred due to COVID-19 impacts be repaid according to a schedule. (Citywide)

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Speaker 4: So let me let me go ahead and go through the next few. I'd have to go rather quickly and we'll get to oh 27 item 17. Speaker 0: Report from Health and Human Services Recommendation to work contractor Volunteers of America to provide operational services for the year round shelter Atlantic Avenue Bridge Community in an annual contract amount not to exceed 2,080,500 for a one year period. District nine. Speaker 4: Can I get. I got a motion. Can I get a second, please? Speaker 3: We just wanted a quick, quick update on this. Speaker 4: Okay. Quick update, please. Speaker 7: Thank you. Kelly Collopy will give that update. Kerry. I don't think we can hear you. Speaker 4: With coffee there. Okay. Why don't you go to public? Let's go to public comment. Speaker 1: Can you hear me now, sir? Sorry. Can you hear me? Speaker 4: Go ahead and call me. Speaker 1: Yeah. So, uh, this item is to award a contract to Volunteers of America for. Speaker 2: A period of one year with an option to extend for three years. Speaker 1: We went through an RFP process and Volunteers of America. Speaker 2: Was the winner of that process. Speaker 1: The current facility, all major. Speaker 2: Construction, will be completed by July one, and then we'll be. Speaker 1: Working on utilities and furniture. So sometime during. Speaker 2: June, July, the buildings will be the. Speaker 1: Buildings will be fully ready. Speaker 2: We then give the. Speaker 1: Provider. Speaker 2: About 60 to 90 days to really. Speaker 1: Make sure that they have all the staffing. Speaker 2: That everything is in place and that they're ready to open. Given that the contract is. Speaker 1: Being. Speaker 2: You know, there were this is going through council now. They should be. Speaker 1: Able to begin planning and working. Speaker 2: During this month and into early. Speaker 1: Into early July. So we are we're looking forward to them moving in. They had a very. Speaker 2: Impressive proposal and that's my report for them. Open for comment. Speaker 4: Kate. There's emotion. And a second. Any public comment? Speaker 0: Yes. There's one public comment. Speaker 5: Tanya Manus, your time starts now. Speaker 1: Putting in councilors. Punishment is, again, a little less emotional time. So per this year's homeless count, 2034 of Long Beach residents are experiencing homelessness. This is a 7% increase from last year. I find it appalling that a city as large as ours, where leaders consistently claim we are ahead of the curve and innovative, innovative, we have not considered a policy that would reduce homelessness significantly. The first policy, Seasonal Shelter, is an outreach conducted by the city's health department, as well as the Hart team are Band-Aids. Providing individuals experiencing homelessness with housing, as well as robust health care, including mental health support and drugs, alcohol rehabilitation and career and educational assistance. Will do more than a shelter or outreach ever could to reduce homelessness. There are also preventative measures you as a council could do to reduce homelessness. Like ensuring residents have access to affordable, accessible and quality housing. And implementing strong tenant protection policies. Now, Council Mayor, I know you might be thinking where would the money come to provide permanent supportive housing to individuals experiencing homelessness when we're facing a budget deficit? The answer is simple. Define LGBT and invest in your communities. There is no moral justification for such an overinflated police budget, for the high degree of militarization, or for their blatant disregard for the safety, health and lives of our residents. While there are over 2000 individuals in our inner city that do not have a place to call home, do right by your residents, defund CPD, invest in your communities. Thank you. Speaker 4: Thank you, Richardson. Speaker 3: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Just wanted to say this. Is this a big moment for residents? I wondered who would be the operator for the year round municipal shelter. And now they know. Volunteers for America, a great organization. With a great proposal. We look forward to being open this summer and moving forward with getting to the next stage of planning the comprehensive campus. Thank you. Speaker 4: Councilman Austin I'm sorry customers in Dallas you're you're the second give any comments. Speaker 1: Thank you, Mayor. I'm just really happy again that that this is happening and sooner than we expected. So it's really great to hear this good news. Speaker 4: Thank you, Katherine Austin. Speaker 6: Yes, this is a long time coming. And I'm encouraged to hear that this program, Project Shelter, will be open very soon. And with Volunteers of America, certainly a very reputable organization to help run it. I did have a question for our health director, Kelly regards in regards to the current temporary shelter that is at the North Library . Will those will that shift into the Atlantic Farms shelter? Or is that what is the plan. Speaker 2: Yeah. Speaker 1: So that shelter right now is extended. The, the, the county runs that program and they. Speaker 2: Have extended that shelter for three months until September. So they will continue to be housed there at that time. They will will. Speaker 1: Those that are in that the gap between when the new winter shelter program. Speaker 2: Opens, we would be able to shift into the shelter or other shelters within the city of Long Beach as many of the shelters are reopening. Speaker 1: There will there every year there is a winter shelter program starting in. Speaker 2: December. Speaker 1: And it's up to the county to determine whether they'll. Speaker 2: Extend that between the end of September. Speaker 1: And. Speaker 2: The beginning of December, again for next for next year's winter shelter program. Speaker 6: Okay. Appreciate the heads up. We'll be talking more about that. And we certainly support to have this item. Speaker 2: Great. Thank you. Speaker 4: Catherine Ringa. Speaker 6: Thank you, Mayor. This is one of those issues that, you know, I've brought up before in terms of the health department and all the great work it does and the work it does with grants and outside funding. Speaker 2: I know this is a year round program. Speaker 6: It's for 2 million for one year with possible. Speaker 2: Extensions of up to three years. So what happens at the end of three years? Speaker 1: The funding and the funding that we've worked with, with the county is when we. Speaker 2: Agreed to move forward with the shelter the county committed to to fund the shelter. Speaker 1: We committed to provide a shelter for ten years, and they're. Speaker 2: Committed to working with. Speaker 1: Us to fund that shelter. Speaker 2: The issue. Speaker 1: Around the provider. Speaker 2: Is it allows for. Speaker 1: The provider and then we. Speaker 2: Can we can RFP. It could be the same provider. It could be a different one. After a total of four years in space. Speaker 6: Okay. Well, the reason I say is because I'm still very much in favor of we need to institutionalize our health department. And a lot of these services should be institutionalized and funded without having to go out for. Speaker 7: Grants every. Speaker 6: X number of years. But I'm very supportive of the of the motion, and I will. Speaker 2: Be voting for it. Thank you. Speaker 1: You could count on the. Speaker 4: Roll call vote, please. Speaker 0: District one. I district to. Speaker 1: My. Speaker 0: District three i district for. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: District five. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District six. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: District seven. Speaker 6: I. I. Speaker 0: District nine. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 0: Motion carries.

Contract

Recommendation to adopt Specifications to RFP No. HE20-050 and award a contract to Volunteers of America of Los Angeles, of Los Angeles, CA, to provide operational services for the Year-Round Shelter, Atlantic Avenue Bridge Community (ABC), in an annual contract amount not to exceed $2,080,500, for a one-year period, with the option to extend the agreement for three additional one-year periods, at the discretion of the City Manager; authorize City Manager, or designee, to execute all necessary documents to enter into the contract, including any necessary amendments; Authorize City Manager, or designee, to execute an agreement, and all necessary documents and any subsequent amendments, including amending the terms or changing the amount of the award, with the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority (LAHSA), to accept and expend grant funding, in an amount not to exceed $2,079,000, for the operation of the Year-Round Shelter, Atlantic Avenue Bridge Community (ABC), for a one-year period estimated to begin on July 1, 2020, with the option to extend the agreement for three additional

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Speaker 3: I. Speaker 4: At a 19. Speaker 0: Report from Human Resources Recommendation to purchase property insurance and earthquake insurance citywide. Speaker 4: Washington. A second police. The motion by council embarrassments are going to compromise in the House. Is there any public comment? Speaker 0: There's no public comment on this item. Speaker 4: A roll call vote. Speaker 0: District one. I'm District two. I. District three. I. District four. Speaker 4: II. Speaker 0: District five II. District six. First District seven. District seven. District eight. Speaker 6: All right. Speaker 0: Thank you. Yep. Yep. Speaker 6: All right. Thank you. Speaker 0: District eight. District nine. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 0: Motion carries.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to authorize City Manager, or designee, to purchase property insurance for City buildings, contents, and vehicles through the Alliant Insurance Services’ Property Insurance Program (APIP), for a total premium amount not to exceed $1,922,935, and to approve the purchase of Earthquake insurance (Difference in Conditions Coverage) at a premium amount not to exceed $160,000 with the Insurance Company of The West, for the period of July 1, 2020 to July 1, 2021. (Citywide)

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Speaker 4: Thank you. Next up is Adam 19. I'm sorry, Adam 20. Speaker 0: Or from Human Resources recommendation to purchase access municipal liability insurance and airport liability insurance citywide. Speaker 4: Get a motion in a second. Most of my friends and they ask me to add a second, please. Speaker 1: I motioned Robert for. Speaker 4: I don't have anything on this one. I have one on the last one. Speaker 1: I said it's for the customer. Speaker 4: Pierce is a second accept report, please. Speaker 7: Jolene Richardson will give the staff sergeant a comment. Speaker 4: No staff report, public comment. Speaker 0: There is no public comment for item 20. Speaker 4: We can't recall. Speaker 1: Yeah. Maybe my text isn't coming through, but my text says I'd like a staff report on this item, please. Speaker 4: Oh, I'm sorry. Because earlier early you had said you only wanted to start for corporate 18 of the three. So that's why I thought you meant. Speaker 1: I sent a text and then. Speaker 4: You changed it. Okay, that's fine. So let me go ahead and get a short staff report. Speaker 7: Joleen Richardson. Speaker 1: Thank you. Honorable Mayor and City Council. So the city annually purchases excess municipal liability, airport liability, aircraft liability and whole insurance, underground. Speaker 0: Storage, tank liability, drone insurance. Speaker 1: And marine insurance. Speaker 0: To cover exposures arising from the city operations. Speaker 1: Coverage is being obtained through the city's casualty broker record life insurance services. This year's policy for Excess Municipal Liability Insurance will provide. Speaker 0: Coverage limits. Speaker 1: Of 40 million excess of a 10 million self-insurance retention for all city departments, including the police department, due to historical claims. Speaker 0: Frequency and severity. Speaker 1: The 2019 excess liability liabilities were challenging with a hardening of the market, lack of carrier capacity and increases. The city purchased $30 million in limits versus the historical 45 million. City risk management staff is working with the city's broker, Alliant Insurance. Speaker 0: Services, to secure options to get the city closer to the. Speaker 1: 45 million limit that has historically been purchased. Coverage for eminent domain, medical malpractise and pollution contamination will continue to be excluded from this policy. However, the policy does include 30 million in coverage for unfair unemployment practices, employee benefits, liability and public officials. Errors and omissions. The city also purchases airport liability coverage. The city received a price indication from the insurance carrier National Union Fire Insurance offering limits of 3 million and a premium not to exceed 93,000, which is an increase of approximately 1.5% from the expiring policy. This policy does not have a deductible and the city does not self-insure any of the airport risks covered under. Policy. The policy includes extended coverage for international domestic. Speaker 0: Terror acts under the Terrorism Risk. Speaker 1: Insurance Act. The policy also covers personal injury malpractise auto and employee employers liability. The city maintains limits of 50 million and aircraft liability and health insurance, also through National Union Fire Insurance, subject to. Speaker 0: A 31,400 deductible. Speaker 1: When the helicopters in motion on the police department's €2. Speaker 0: Copters. Speaker 1: The Renault premium price indication will not exceed 48,000, approximately a 21% increase. The city is also recommending drone coverage through the National Aviation Liability Program, and it costs not to exceed 5000 to protect the city from liability related to drone operations. Lastly, the city operates vessels that service the coast, including the port, the recommended purchase which will provide liability coverage on the boats and includes Jones Act coverage which limits of $10 million subject to a 2500 deductible. In addition, actual physical damage to the coverage boats. Speaker 0: Is provided subject to varying. Speaker 1: Deductibles depending upon the value of each boat. Renault premium price indicated will not exceed 2280 $1,000. If there's any questions to answer. Speaker 4: Captain Pierce, can we go to vote now? If you have questions. Speaker 1: Thank you so much. The reason why I asked for a staff report was we had a lot of conversations about the impacts of some of our lawsuits that we've had. And I just wanted to be able to understand it from the staff's perspective. If lawsuits that we've had over the lifetime of of being the city of Long Beach have impacted our premiums. And if Tom can speak to that just briefly and then we can go to a vote. Speaker 7: Yes. In the past, probably five, ten years, just about every local government has seen an increase in claims. And so that does put a strain on the insurance market. We're not alone in this, but our general liability has gone up in terms of the price that you pay and also the insurance that you're able to receive. So we were able to get insurance this year, which is a very good thing, and we strongly recommend this policy in front of you. Speaker 4: Any other questions, Councilwoman? Speaker 1: That's all. Thank you. Speaker 4: Okay. Rock over. Speaker 0: District one. I'm District two. District three. District three. District four. Speaker 2: All right. Speaker 0: District five, I. District six. Speaker 2: All right. Speaker 0: District seven. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: District eight. District nine. Speaker 3: All right. All right. Speaker 0: Motion carries.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to authorize City Manager, or designee, to purchase, through Alliant Insurance Services, the following insurance policies: Excess Municipal Liability insurance, at a total premium amount not to exceed $3,000,000, with multiple carriers including, but not limited to, Gemini Insurance Company, Hallmark Specialty, Hiscox, Allied World and Navigators, for a 12-month period, from July 1, 2020 to July 1, 2021; Airport Liability insurance at a premium not to exceed $93,000 from National Union Insurance Company; Aircraft Liability and Hull insurance for police helicopters at a premium not to exceed $48,000 from National Union Insurance Company; Underground Storage Tank insurance at a premium not to exceed $30,000 from Liberty Surplus Lines; Drone Coverage at a premium not to exceed $5,000 from the National Aviation Liability Program; and, Marine insurance from International Marine Underwriters (IMU) at a premium not to exceed $281,000, for a total aggregate cost of the liability renewal premiums not to exceed $665,000, for the period of July 1, 2020 to July 1, 2021 for all lia

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Speaker 4: I'm 21, please. Speaker 0: Report from Long Beach Airport. Recommendation to award a contract to Sally Miller Kohn Contracting Company for the Taxiway de Rehabilitation for a total amount not to exceed 6,223,745 District five. Speaker 4: I'm going to mention in a second. Of most significance from boring to any public comment. Speaker 0: There's one public comment for this item. Speaker 5: Dave Shukla. Your time begins now. Speaker 2: Hello. This is Dave Chappelle. I just walked away from city hall because it's chilly and I go to the bathroom, but black lives matter. And with this item, if you compare the process. The open bid process for the contract. They're fighting with the one that's coming right after it. You can see a market different. In how we prioritize certain types of work, certain types of local knowledge within our own department, as well as within the local economy. As I understand it, the actual construction engineering work. Or this item would not be terribly complicated. It's something that we could benefit from. A local firm learning how. And there's got to be a better process, got to be a better process for supporting our local economy in this moment. And for the record, I'd just like to ask the city clerk, what's the function of this public comment? Because they just switched to before the council discussion. But for a couple of years and we just had earlier today they were after, you know, the council had its deliberations. I'd like to see the public's input prior to their council. People making decisions on their. Thank you and BlackLivesMatter. Speaker 5: Thank you. That concludes public comment for this item. Speaker 4: We'll cover. Speaker 0: District one, i. District two. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: I. District for. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District five. I. Speaker 0: District six. I'm seven. Speaker 6: I. Speaker 0: District eight. Speaker 6: I. Speaker 0: District nine. High ocean carries.

Contract

Recommendation to adopt Plans and Specifications No. R-7136 and award a contract to Sully-Miller Contracting Company, of Brea, CA, for the Taxiway D Rehabilitation between Runway 8L-26R and Taxiway J at the Long Beach Airport, in the amount of $5,657,950, with a 10 percent contingency in the amount of $565,795, for a total amount not to exceed $6,223,745; authorize City Manager, or designee, to execute all documents necessary to enter into the contract, including any necessary amendments; Increase appropriations in the Airport Fund Group in the Airport Department by $7,798,525, offset by grant revenue and funds available; and Adopt Categorical Exemption CE-18-185. (District 5)

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Speaker 4: Okay. Next item. Speaker 0: Or from Public Works recommendation to increase appropriations in the Capital Project Fund Group and the Public Works Department by 2,000,800. Offset by measure are funds for the Shoreline Drive Realignment Project Districts one and two. Speaker 4: There is a motion. Can I get a second? Speaker 2: Yes. Speaker 4: If there's emotion, there's emotion by. Well, let me let me have. Councilman Zendaya's motion has this because it's in her district and the second by Councilman Mungo. Mr. Mark, I think you wanted to make a staff report or a short one. Speaker 7: I do. So this is really an incredible project that's been under way for several years. We're getting additional funding. It's going to really re-envision how we come into the downtown area and also double the size of the park. But primarily, I just want to comment that this is Craig Beck's very last council meeting. So he is here. This is his last item that he'll ever do. So I just wanted to make sure that the council knew that we are going to miss Craig incredibly here at the city. He has a long, storied career here in Long Beach. He's been a true public servant and he's been a good friend. So we will miss Craig. And thank you very much. Speaker 4: The motion is by consumers and I'm going to make them the second by consumer appears in part of the project is also in the second district. Let me let me just add let me add a couple of things. So one is what I think I want to think and Craig back Beckham will have a chance to a few things at the end. But Mr. Burke, you've been a great partner on on this project. And I believe part of this includes the additional money for the Shoemaker piece of the realignment. Is that correct? Mayor. No, this money is really specifically aligned for the Shoreline Drive realignment. This is the alignment is only for the Shoreline Drive piece. Okay. But it's still the Metro money, correct? Yes. Measure R. Okay. Okay. Great. Great. Great. Okay. Good. Thank you. Did you have Councilman Mongo that you have queued up to give any comments on this? Speaker 1: I just wanted to think, Mr. Beck, when I heard it was a public works item I queued up for, sorry, I didn't know it was in districts one and two. Mr. Beck, you have been a warrior in helping residents focus funding on street repair, park repair and the things that are important to them. This is just another example of that. And thank you for all that you do. And. Cheers to a very relaxing retirement. Speaker 4: Thanks, Mary Andrews. Speaker 2: Yes, Mr. Banks, I tell you, I just wanted to say you've been a guru, as no one has been able to do it the way you have. I just wanted to let you know, big guy. So whatever you do and wherever you goin, I give you all the best. But don't forget that last project I talked to you about. Good luck, big guy. Whatever you do. Speaker 4: But thank you. And I know a couple of folks are going to say some some remarks at the end for Mr. Beck. So, Craig, stick around there. And I think is there any public comment on this? Speaker 0: No. There's no public comment on this item. Speaker 4: Roll call vote, please. Speaker 0: District one. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District two. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District three. Speaker 1: High District or. Speaker 2: High. Speaker 0: High High. District six. District six. Speaker 2: All right. Speaker 0: District seven. Speaker 7: I. Speaker 0: District eight. District nine. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 0: Motion carries.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to increase appropriations in the Capital Projects Fund Group in the Public Works Department by $2,800,000, offset by Measure R funds from the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, for the Shoreline Drive Realignment Project; and Increase appropriations in the Capital Projects Fund Group in the Public Works Department by $2,800,000, offset by a transfer of Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority Measure R funds from the Capital Project Grant Fund. (Districts 1,2)

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Speaker 4: Right. And next one, I'm 24, please. Speaker 0: Communication from City Attorney Recommendation to Declare Ordinance Amending the Long Beach Municipal Code related to short term rentals. Read and adopted as read citywide. Speaker 4: Okay. Okay. Councilmember Pearce, is there a second? Second. Speaker 1: Back to the second. Oh. Speaker 4: Okay. Can I get any public comment, please? Speaker 0: There is no public comment on this item. Speaker 4: Okay. Then we'll we're going to go to a roll call vote. Unless anybody wants to add anything else. Councilman Pearce. Speaker 1: No, thank you. Speaker 4: Roll call. Vote. Speaker 0: District one I. District two i. District three, i. District four. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District six. District seven. Speaker 6: I. Speaker 0: District eight. Speaker 6: II. Speaker 0: District nine. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 0: Motion carries.

Ordinance

Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code by adding Chapter 5.77, related to short-term rentals, read and adopted as read. (Citywide)

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Speaker 0: Motion carries. Speaker 4: Item 2711. Speaker 0: Communication from city attorney recommendation to adopt a resolution acknowledging racism as a public health crisis and establishing a framework for reconciliation citywide. Speaker 4: Gave a motion by Councilmember Richardson and a second by Councilmember Pearce. We got a public comment, please. Speaker 0: There's one public comment for this item. Speaker 5: Dave Shukla, your time begins now. Speaker 2: Oh. Hello. Sorry. The bloody bishop. This is a very important item. It. Yeah. I mean, I can't stress that enough as someone who the only enemy he has is a hundred years of carbon trapped in the. It's kind of easy to attract content. But for everyone's lived experience right now, there are all the decisions that were made tonight, made from a place of lack of knowledge about how they'll affect certain groups more than others. And a lot of the unintended consequences that we hear about from public policy discussions, we need to kind of fill that in in the 21st century . We need to kind of look at the data that we have so many different events, but but specifically on how certain groups of people. How you have their freedoms as a result of keeping other people unfree. That's not what this country should be about. Thank you very much. Black Lives Matter. Speaker 5: Thank you. That concludes public comment for this item. Speaker 4: Councilman Richardson, you want to speak to the motion there? Speaker 3: A few thoughts on that. Some are just some changes here. So first, I want to just acknowledge Vice Mayor Andrews, Councilman Austin and Councilwoman Pierce, who all signed on to the initial recommendation that started this on this framework reconciliation path. We've had two meetings, the last meeting, and it's one in 55 people in the listening session. I think it was in terms of listening sessions go, it was incredibly powerful and the things that we heard, what folks opened up and shared. I don't think has ever there's ever been a forum on the record for that to ever have happened, and that's incredibly important. I think the events that are taking place in our country with respect to racial injustice, it's an important moment for me. You know, for me personally and for a lot of the members of this council. Typically, when we pass a resolution, these are ceremonial moments and some of them means different, significant things. I think the fact that, one, our city council is unanimously declaring racial inequity as a public health crisis is important, and that makes me proud as a city. Secondly, it's important that we started off this process of this framework by acknowledging and so the original the original resolution that was proposed did things like acknowledge police violence in America and within our city. And it allowed us to acknowledge that so that we could, you know, start in the same place in terms of moving forward into listening, into convening and into catalyzing action. I know that traditionally in our process and this is I'm speaking for the public to understand this process, a lot of times we bring a resolution, we'll bring a draft, city attorney will make edits that draft, and it comes back to the council to make edits to the draft . So I know that there were pieces in here that were that were that were removed. That's the process. And we tonight, the council has the ability to put that back in again. These resolutions, you know, they they really sort of help reflect the statement that the council is trying to make. So and so I know that I've had the conversation with the city attorney and the city prosecutor about reinstating some of that language. I know that Councilwoman Pearce wants to speak to some of that, too. So we want to make sure that that language is is restored. I think it's also important for this moment in history that the resolution also proclaimed that Black Lives Matter. I think that's important. That is reflected consistent with, you know, this moment in history. And when our city looks back at this moment in history, we want to make sure that we acknowledge this movement for black lives and the role that is playing here. So that's it. That's my emotion. And I want to hear some of the feedback from the second. Speaker 4: Councilman Pearce. Speaker 1: Thank you and thank you so much for speaking to that. And yes, historically, whenever we bring items to the Council for a vote, a resolution, we ask the city attorney to draft it. And this resolution was drafted quickly and put as an example. And so I want to speak to the statistics that are that I'd like to put back into this, and I want to highlight that all the statistics that I'm going to suggest putting back in are numbers that our city has provided us, either through PD or through our Office of Equity in the Health Department. And so I will have this all written up and sent back to you, Mr. Parkins, with the exact language that was given to me by the Office of Equity. And so the original item was getting out. I'll go through it quickly because I know that you have it, but 13% of Long Beach is population, is African-American. Black residents and those who identify as mixed race, it's greater barriers and finding unemployment, employment and having a higher than average unemployment rate of 12.2%. Black workers tend to face higher unemployment rates regardless of education level. A nearly 33% black residents in Long Beach continue to have the highest poverty rates compared to other racial and ethnic groups . One quarter of black residents in Long Beach are homeowners, the lowest rate compared to other racial and ethnic groups. Black women have the highest rate of rent burden, which is defined by paying more than 30% of your rent of your income on rent. Black women are paying 63% of their income. Black residents have higher mortality rates compared to other racial and ethnic groups due to education, economic housing, segregation, as well as environmental racism. African-Americans in Long Beach have the highest rate of hospitalization for heart disease, diabetes, asthma compared to other races and ethnicities. Black residents are hospitalized for asthma 9.4 times more than whites. The long, the longest life expectancy has a gap of 17 years, depending on where you live in the city. One quarter of very low birthrate babies are born to African-American mothers in 40. Let me see. I wanna make sure I include only the stats. That 44%. So this is a number that did come from our city as well. 44% of those arrested by a Long Beach police department for cannabis enforcement were black, even though they were represented 13% of the population. And then the other two statistics, which are the only ones that we have right now, which speaks to the need for us to make a commitment to transparency, data and access for the public that we have around our police force. As of today, I know that there are numbers that are from the past. But today in Long Beach, when we passed this resolution, the facts are that in five years, from 2015 to 2019, there was 191 uses of force complaints filed against the Long Beach police officers, including 21 complaints in 2019. That number is significantly lower than the other years. In seven years, from 2014 to 2020, the city spent $31 million and alleged police excessive force. Settled lawsuits since 2014. And so I think that what Councilmember Richardson said was correct, that the resolution the city is making today is a statement saying that we are the responsible party for the structural racism that exists in our city, that includes health disparities, the climate gap, unemployment dependency discrepancy and police violence. Last night I listened to the public safety reconciliation session. I read the comments and I've talked to my constituents. They want a resolution that means something. They want an acknowledgment, a genuine acknowledgment and reflection on the current state of the city of Long Beach. It's with that that I ask that we include these statistics provided by the Health Department on the black state, on the state of Black Long Beach, and to include the current state of police in our city by including these statistics I've laid out. So thank you, Councilmember Richardson, and I hope to count on everyone's support for that. Speaker 4: Okay. Very. Any public comment, please? Speaker 0: We did public comment. Dave Shukla already spoke on this item. Speaker 4: Right. Then roll call vote. Speaker 0: District one. Speaker 1: Upstairs I. Speaker 0: District to. I. District three. I. District four. Speaker 4: I. Speaker 0: District five. District six. District six. Speaker 1: What is he going to achieve by putting that? Speaker 0: District six. District seven. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: District eight. Speaker 6: Hi. Speaker 0: District nine. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 0: Ocean carries. Speaker 4: Okay. We're going to go ahead now and close the council meeting. We have a couple of announcements. Let me start with customary Ringo.

Resolution

Recommendation to adopt resolution acknowledging Racism as a Public Health Crisis and establishing a Framework for Reconciliation. (Citywide)

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Speaker 0: Thank you, Madam Court. That concludes I'm 21. To item 14, please. Next. Speaker 1: Communication for Mayor Garcia, Councilwoman Zendejas. Councilmember Pierce. Vice Mayor Andrews. Councilmember Richardson. Recommendation to request city manager to establish a rebuild Long Beach Relief Fund to assist Long Beach small businesses with repair and loss recovery from damages sustained during the evening of May 31st, 2020. Speaker 0: Thank you, Madam Court. I want to just first mention, this is not this is often something that a lot of us have been discussing council members, business associations, different philanthropic groups out there. There's a lot of interest in how we really support the businesses that were affected on May the 31st. We know that businesses were affected in different ways. Some may have been vandalized, whether it was graffiti or etching on a glass or even a broken window, which were, you know, smaller acts, obviously, of vandalism to much more extreme types of damage. I mean, you saw obviously in some cases, storefronts having major damage. You saw in some cases major looting that happened in some of these businesses where much of the inventory was gone. And in one case in particular, you saw a major fire that really destroyed one business, both the structure and the what was inside. And so what this motion is asking for us today is just to look comprehensively at creating a new fund to really assist all of these businesses. I think as a city, we have to be committed to every single business that was affected on May the 31st. They all deserve our support. They all are having been invested here in Long Beach, and I want to make sure that they all have support from the city in some way. Now, we know, obviously, that these are these recovery programs can be complex, where we know that a lot of these businesses, for example, will have different types of insurance programs that cover much of their cost. Others may not have the same access or may have a high deductible. Others may just have storefront damage. Their needs need some support with storefront. I also heard from some businesses, for example, in Cambodia, Town and North Long Beach, that they just wanted that want support with costs that they had to put to protect their business, to put up a plywood, which wouldn't be more than a few hundred dollars. So there's a variety of types of support. And while I know there are some really great efforts happening in some of our business corridors, some of our business improvement district, in fact, have set up their own funds. And there have been some philanthropic efforts as well. Those we support, those need to continue. But this is a city effort and this effort is, I think, us putting our commitment on the table that we're going to help all of these businesses. I know that there is a list that's being put together by economic development and working with all the bids and the businesses to see what is out there and who and who we can support. But this is can really also be a combination of resources. I think first and foremost, we're talking about grants. And so we're looking at staff to identify resources that we have for direct grants from the city. We're looking at loan programs, obviously donations. It's all laid out in the recommendation, but we want to make sure that the community gets support that they need to restart quickly and open up. And so just thank you for that. I know that obviously we have a lot of support for this item. I'm from from the council and we appreciate that. And I want to turn this over for to make the motion. And Vice Mayor Andrews just cued up first. So Vice Mayor Andrews. Vice Mayor Andrews. Speaker 3: Yes. Yes. Thank you, man. Thank you very much. You know, first of all, I want to thank you for leading this discussion. You know, you know, having lived through three major, you know, protests in the city of Long Beach, this is unfortunately not for the first time I see the sixth District broken and looting. I have faith that we are resilient. Resilient and together we are strong beach. You know, I'm proud to have already begun working with diplomacy ship Dallas Small Business Repair. And anything we can do to levy assistance is greatly appreciated. And I want to thank you, gentlemen, for leading this. Speaker 0: Vice mayor with that emotion also. Yes. Okay. Can I get a second, please? On on that motion. Speaker 3: Okay. Speaker 0: Okay. I just needed to go into the queue system, please. Second by Castro. Richardson. Castro? Richardson. Any comments? Speaker 3: Sure. Yeah. Use my kids in the background. So. So. A couple of things. So first, I believe that this is this is really a chance to acknowledge that a lot of our programs really haven't worked for some of the businesses that were impacted on these corridors. Know some of the shopping centers that were hit. We've gone out and done outreach to see if they would like to improve some of their signs or some of their windows with the, uh, some of the CDBG funding that's out there. And it's hard to get their attention. Folks are busy. I think this is an opportunity to say, you know, why we have everyone's attention last and the last can be fixed. A lot of these things can be replaced. But how can we get get the captive audience of these businesses and help them improve some of their signs and some of their windows? Paint the buildings. It'll go a long way for the corridor, but what I'm really hoping for is out of this program, we can address some of the some of these buildings that their windows are broken. But they haven't been able to tap into the resources that we have for them already. So while we have their attention, we should really take advantage of this opportunity to improve some of these corridors. And with that, I'll second the motion. Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilmember. Councilman Pearce. Speaker 2: Yeah, I totally support this effort. I just want to say how much I appreciate having your leadership on it. We had a agenda, something similar last week and pulled it because we know that if the whole city is really working on it and if you're focusing on it, that these businesses are going to be able to benefit so much more. There's a lot, like you mentioned, businesses that have small graffiti and things like that. And so we'll make sure that our District two team is reaching out to the businesses in our district and connecting them with economic development. And many of the bids are listening. You know, I hope that they outreach, too, and that we can have a wider effort than just having another fund in the city that might not be tapped. Because I know sometimes that tends to be one of the challenges. So appreciate this item. Speaker 0: Thank you. It's a member, Councilman Austin. Speaker 3: I fully support the item. I think all of my sentiments have already been expressed. Thank you all council members for bringing this forward. I think this is a welcome gesture from the city of Long Beach. My my only concern is how we prioritize the resources or maybe possibly limited resources we have to to support businesses and what we can do to develop, you know, I guess a a a system of that that is fair for for everyone to participate. So those are my comments. I look forward to support it. Thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilman. And that's. Speaker 2: Thank you, Mayor. First of all, thank you very much for letting me join you on this item. I know that the First District was hit very, very hard. But thank you to your team for putting this item together and working really hard on this to support our small businesses here. You know, these small businesses were already struggling before COVID. And, you know, this this destruction that happened just made things even worse after COVID hit. So I think it's really important that we show our small businesses that we care about them and we really want them to thrive in our in our city. And by providing not only opportunities to to to micro loans is a good thing, but I think that even better than that is providing them with opportunities for grants. And I'm very happy to be able to be maneuvering some resources to be able to cover grants for those in in in need right now for the small businesses . And I will be together with my office working on putting together a little workshop so that all the businesses that were affected citywide, you don't have to be in the first district. But we're working on putting that together so that everybody knows the step by step thing, you know, that they will be needing to take in order to take advantage of these opportunities. And I look forward to supporting this item. Speaker 0: Thank you. Next up is I think that it's everyone on the list here to speak. So, Madam Kirk, any public comment? Speaker 1: There's one public comment for this item. Speaker 4: Victor. Lucy, you have 3 minutes. Speaker 3: You all just spent all that time about looting, about throwing up businesses. But the major issue is. That the city of Long Beach does not respect Black Lives Matter. Spent all this time deliberating about small businesses, small businesses looting. Why were the people out in the streets? Because OB and the police are brutalizing us. And y'all don't hear the message. Countless citizens spoke to God about the terrorism of the Arab, how we want to defund the police. But you also spent all this time whining about small business, this small business that. I understand why all this happened. Get to the root of the problem. The root of the problem is too much money goes to our big PD. We are going to be fun to elbow deep. Are you of my time? Thank you. I want to. Speaker 0: Go ahead and call the roll call. Vote, please. Speaker 1: District one. District two, my district three. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District four. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 1: District five. District five. I. I. District six. Speaker 3: Hi. Speaker 1: District seven. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District eight. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 1: District nine. My motion carries.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to request City Manager to establish a Rebuild Long Beach Relief Fund to assist Long Beach small businesses with repair and loss recovery from damages sustained during the evening of May 31, 2020; public funding shall be allocated in a way that maximizes benefits paid to businesses, and to partner with private programs.

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Speaker 0: Thank you. Item number six, please. Speaker 1: Communication from Council on Mango Councilwoman Zendejas, Councilman super novice Mary Andrews recommendation to discuss and enact related strategic planning initiatives with youth sports leagues in preparation for re-opening our parks to youth sports activities. Speaker 2: Thank you. I appreciate everyone who signed on to this item. As many know, our youth sports programs are many nonprofit organizations and some are many businesses. They employ people who are coaches or referees, and they also have many, many volunteers and parents that participate in keeping the kids out and about and engaged in athletics, which keeps them healthy and strong. So we need to have a focus on ensuring that we are prepared to take on the challenge ahead of allowing multiple sports who are typically spread over a year to really prepare to come back and potentially play simultaneously. An example of this is some of our sports fields overlap each other and we wouldn't be able to in some facilities throughout the city, host both soccer and baseball at the same time. But there are adjustments that can be made throughout the city to make those types of things possible. So when and if sports can come back, we are prepared to give all youth the opportunity to get out there and practice their skills so as they move through and participate in their school sports, they have those knowledge, skills and abilities and talents to really help them through and keep them engaged in their schoolwork. So I really appreciate the youth sports directors that have reached out with you on better understanding your goals. And I think it's important to have a formal process where Parks and Rec really sits with the directors and casting directors that know and understand the complexities that can come about as we roll out the new requirements, which organizations are really prepared to do to meet that challenge and for them to be able to share ideas with people that aren't yet getting that kind of guidance from their national association? Speaker 1: Councilman Supernormal. Speaker 3: Thank you. And if that was the motion, I'd like to second the motion and just add to it that I fully support this and thank Councilmember Mongo for bringing it forward. We have the good fortune of having some baseball leagues in the fourth district, Durant Park Post, Long Beach League, Whaley Post, Long Beach Pro Baseball, and then where the North has a number of volleyball teams. Our council district has invested a lot into these facilities. We support them tremendously, and we'd really like to see them get going once again. Also to reiterate what Councilman Mungo stated, and that is these organizations can bring their own protocols to the table. So let's make sure we we listen to them as we move forward. Thank you. Speaker 1: Councilman Price. Speaker 2: Thank you so much. I appreciate I appreciate bringing this item forward. And I have kids who are in their youth programs in the city, both the city sponsored ones and also club ones. And I really do think we need to sit down and figure out how to work on protocols that make participation in these activities safe and feasible for our youth. I can say that as a parent of two children who have been out of school now for since March and entering into the summer, there is a lot of downtime for them. And I think team sports and sports activities that we're able to reintegrate into our daily lives will assist them tremendously in getting outdoors, exercising, staying healthy, making good choices, interacting with people outside of the technology world that they're most of them are operating in. And so anything that we can do as a city to help partner with these organizations to allow for safe reopening and participation, I would support and I appreciate Cassell and Mongo bringing this item forward. Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilwoman. Councilmember Austin. Speaker 3: Thank you. I just want to add my my my support to this item. Obviously, youth sports are extremely important and I really think it's part of the DNA of this city. So when we get back to functionality, we should have a plan to ensure that that our youth are safe, their parents are safe, and that they are having an enriched activity, whatever sport they are playing, either super active sports or not. And so I think there are also a lot of national organizations that are connected to many of these sports organizations that they can draw upon information as well. Our staff can draw upon information as well. But I do like the idea of working with local youth organizations, sports organizations throughout the city to to be engaged in the process, at least as as important stakeholders in the process. So congratulations. I really like this item and plan on supporting it. Speaker 0: Council member Adam Quirk. Any public comment? Speaker 1: Yes. We do have public comment on this item. Speaker 4: Joel Davis. Um, you have 3 minutes. Speaker 3: I may regret not to thank you for hearing this agenda item and allow it. My name is Joel. There's a current president of one of our youth organizations. We provide baseball to our youth athletes. I'm here speaking on behalf of multiple youth, baseball and softball leagues in the city limits. First, I'd like to acknowledge and show my sincere appreciation for the city Long Beach, the Health Department, and Parks and Rec Department. The magnitude of handling a pandemic, it's incalculable, and I believe we are all doing a great job at that. So thank you. I would also like to specifically acknowledge our Parks and Rec staff. They've done a tremendous job keeping us informed and prepared to get back to the field and the kids given. Recently, a task force of Long Beach baseball and softball presidents developed a plan that would allow for baseball and softball to resume and operate safely within all current published city health guidelines. Additionally, each league has submitted site specific safety resumption plans for each park and facility plan. Our reports show that baseball and softball, by its nature, along with these guidelines, is the ultimate social distancing sport. We also recognize that there are priorities to the reopening of the economy. We unfortunately do the necessary way to reopen slowly to provide for safety. We are having this conversation at the end of our traditional seasons. We are asking that a definitive decision is made for our traditional spring sports who are still holding on. In fact, based on polling, 75% of our parents who were surveyed that they would have their youth athletes play over the summer and or the fall. If it is not until the fall, the parks will see a significant impact. We ask that IT solutions develop that provides all athletes of all sports in Long Beach the opportunity to play the game they love as soon as the UK is granted. We are aware that this will cause not only a large impact on our parks, but the staff to oversee them. The park's facilities are already highly utilized and this will cause further complications. For example, Hartwell Park is home to five baseball leagues and three soccer leagues, one of which is an adult league. We believe there are ways to decrease the impact and are willing to be a part of that discussion. These leagues serve youth from all over the city. We hope that as a city we can work together to find solutions. We are ready and willing to participate in preparing a strategic plan that will get our youth back to the sport they love and are willing to work collaboratively between the youth sports organizations and the Parks and Rec staff to find creative ways to make that happen. We were at that point. A hard decision needs to be made regarding the remaining time over the summer. We could play before fall. Sports are set to begin. If the decision is no, then we are ready to work towards a plan for the fall and the future season . We do hope there is time to play and we are ready and willing and we do have a plan set in place to prove that. Thank you again for your time and thank you for your service. Speaker 4: Thank you. Next we have Victor Boosie. You have 3. Speaker 3: Minutes. Oh, I get it. So right now. I keep saying to do find from the Long Beach Police Department that means policing is not the answer to our schools and communities pressing needs, including jobs, housing, homelessness, health and immigration. We want to divest from the police and redirect the resources so that black, indigenous and people of color can live successful lives, reimagine community safety without police terror, and grounded in restorative justice and black empowerment. Idea of my time. Speaker 4: Thank you. That's the end of public comment for this item. Speaker 0: Thank you. Councilman's in the house. Speaker 2: Yes. Thank you, Mayor. First of all, I wanted to thank Councilmember Longo for bringing this item. I think it's incredibly important that our kids have much safe, much needed safe access to these recreational opportunities as possible, especially right now. I also think that it's very important for us to consider how impactful this could be for so many families that have limited access to childcare due to COVID 19. I'm so happy to support this item that has the chance to improve the lives of so many residents in this way. In addition to what my colleagues have said, I think it's also important that when city staff is working with with the leagues to create this opportunity, that they really consider equity and how this impacts the kids across our city. I'm thinking specifically of the neighborhoods on the West Side and the downtown and central Long Beach that could really benefit from this kind of programing. So I'd just like to ask staff to please keep those residents in mind when you're working on items like this. I'd also like to just really quickly use this opportunity to remind our community that as we continue to reopen in ways that are safe, we are still seeing a lot of COVID 19 transmission in Long Beach. Our hospitalizations especially have increased over the last four weeks. While we feel comfortable taking these steps safely. This is this is all dependent on each one of us continuing to take all the precautions we need to in order to protect the most vulnerable members of our community. Thank you again, Councilmember, for bringing this item forward, and I am happy to support this item. Speaker 0: Thank you. I have Councilwoman Mango. Let me let me go first, then I'll go back. Go ahead, Councilman. Councilman Mongo. Okay. I don't hear Councilwoman Mongo. Let me let me make a comment and then I'll go back to Councilwoman Mongo. She can need her phone there. Maybe. I'm Mr. Modica. Are you there? I want to. I want to make sure also, because I think a lot of us have heard about youth sports and about obviously the enormous need for them city wide, but also just the unknown for parents. It's so hard to kind of plan. Obviously, summers and leagues and and schedules without knowing and having kind of definitive answers. The right. Now, as of today, the decision on whether a kind of organized sport league is going to happen is up to the state of California. Is that correct? Speaker 5: Yes, that's correct. Speaker 0: And so I know I've had a couple of questions and folks reach out and say, hey, Long Beach should allow some of these leagues like soccer or baseball or others. And what we've shared is what we know, obviously, with the health department has shared with us, which is they are not legally permissible right now under the state's health orders. And that doesn't mean, by the way, that that can change. You know, we've been we've been advocating for the state to give us clarity so that we would get an idea about what's ahead. Because there hasn't there has been very little clarity on kind of on on sports and youth sports. Is that right, Mr. Modica? Speaker 5: Yes. So under the current stay at home order from the governor, team sports of any kind is not allowed. So they're still prohibiting gatherings which include team sports. Just last week, they released some guidance on camps in summer camps. So if there are very small group camps, we just got some clarity that those can operate as long as they're small staff ratios, small groups that don't interact with other groups. You know, these are things like four two, one, 621 and in some cases up to 10 to 1. So that's currently allowed, but not youth sports. And we think this item is going to be helpful so that we have a chance to talk to all of our youth sports so that if and when we get that, go ahead and and we can do it safely with our health officers direction, we would be able to move forward. Speaker 0: Great. Thanks so much for that. That's great. Thank you. And Councilman Mongo on yet? Speaker 2: Yes, I was here in my speaking just so I could hear you, but you couldn't hear me. Thank you. I just want to again thank my cosigners. I appreciate Rosalind Sunday House's comments. And in preparing the item, we were thinking about the whole city and preparing the city wide. We're really fortunate to have such a collaboration among our leaders. And then I also just wanted to give a big thank you to everyone on the city team who did what I believe to be a remarkable job in blending our summer engagement programs from the drop in and the standard camp. For this to be a blended program where more of our our our participants citywide can be involved on a more reasonable basis. So bringing the the melding and merging of those two programs, I really think was innovative. And I know that it's hard to find a silver lining in such difficult times of COVID. And so these are these ideas that are coming in from the staff and the community and can really change the way we provide government. And I think that this is a great example of that. Also encourage our team sports to think through that. And again, I think my cosigners and all my councilmembers are supporting. Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilwoman. We're going to go ahead and go to a vote. Roll Call. Speaker 1: District one. I district to. At District three. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District four. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District five. I. District six. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District seven. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District eight. District nine. High ocean carries. Speaker 0: Thank you. Moving on to the next item that motion carries, that was item. Now we're going to go to item ten. Madam Kirk, did you have an announcement before we go? Item ten.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to request City Manager, or designee, to work with the Long Beach Health Officer and the Parks, Recreation and Marine Department to conduct outreach, draft safety protocols, and discuss and enact related strategic planning initiatives with youth sports leagues in preparation for reopening our parks to youth sports activities as allowable by the State and City health orders within 60 days.

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Speaker 0: Thank you. Moving on to the next item that motion carries, that was item. Now we're going to go to item ten. Madam Kirk, did you have an announcement before we go? Item ten. Speaker 1: This is a reminder to all the public speakers. Please stay on topic to the item that you are addressing. We will be cutting off public speakers who are not speaking on the topic or the item that they have signed up to speak on. Thank you. Speaker 0: Okay, please. Item ten. Speaker 1: Communication from City Attorney Recommendation to declare ordinance amending Title five of the Long Beach Municipal Code related to short term rentals. Read the first time and lead over to the next regular meeting of the City Council for Final Reading and adopt a resolution to submit the ordinance amendments to the California Coastal Commission citywide. Speaker 5: Thank. Thank you, Mayor. This is city attorney Charlie Parker, and I will turn it over to Monica Kalina, deputy city attorney for the staff report. Speaker 2: Good evening. At sample recall this matter is before you on January 19th and again on May 19th of this year for the City Council's direction on May 19th, we have prepared a further revised ordinance regarding regulations on short term rental. Under the revised ordinance, all unhosted as cars would be prohibited citywide, although hosted ACR would be permitted subject to the regulations contained in the ordinance as directed by Council. City staff will work with hosting platforms and other regulatory agencies, including the city's health department, to develop cleaning and sanitizing protocols specific to the operations of NCR, with an emphasis on standards for Unhosted speakers, should the Council later amend the ordinance to permit such operations as per the direction of Council? Unhosted ACR will be prohibited for at least six months and will remain prohibited until city staff present the report to the Council to reconsider amending the ordinance to permit the operation of Unhosted, ACR and Council requests and approves such amendment. It is important to note that the provisions related to the petition process to prohibit Unhosted esprits within a census group have been completely removed from the proposed ordinance because Unhosted speakers would no longer be authorized at this time. It should also be noted that unlike most ordinances adopted by the Council, which become effective in 30 days, this ordinance will not become effective for 120 days, which will give staff the time necessary to develop appropriate administrative guidelines to ensure a smooth rollout of the new regulations. Although not specified in the ordinance, any operation of a hosted ACR would be subject to all relevant Long Beach, COVID 19 health orders and any related protocols, as is currently the case with other business activities in the city. Finally, as with all ordinances that have city wide effect, this ordinance will not become effective in the coastal zone areas of the city until it is first certified by the Coastal Commission as being compliant with the city's local coastal program. Thank you. And that concludes my report and we are available for questions. Speaker 0: Thank you. I have emotion. Councilmember Pierce, I think you're going to have Councilman Price. It's either the second or the second. Got some repairs? Speaker 2: Thank you. I want to thank staff for their work on this. I know that it's been several years. I appreciate that the process. Speaker 1: Is has been laid out, as you mentioned. Speaker 2: That this would come back in six months, that the staff could come back to the council with the report and at that time evaluate whether or not to an unhosted. And I also want to clarify that I've had conversations with city staff today around the health orders and recognize that those health orders are temporary and recognize that the city staff supports this motion today so that they can be able to move forward to bring on the consultants and start the hard work that we've been waiting on. So I really appreciate everyone's efforts and I ask for a yes vote today. Thank you. Price point. Q I support this item as well. I do have an email from a constituent that I wanted to get further clarification on, and it involves large scale special events. I think we discussed it in the January meeting. Tom Massa, Deputy City Attorney, to clarify for us a little bit of what her understanding is of what the ordinance would allow in terms of large scale special events. Speaker 5: Councilmember. Speaker 2: This is I believe we have staff from development services on the line for that question. Speaker 5: Yes. Lisa Powell Development Services will answer the question. Speaker 1: Good evening. Members of the council. Yes, the. Speaker 2: Um. Currently, there are the large scale. Speaker 1: Events, but those events will be won't occur until the ordinance becomes effective. And there are guidelines are the health health protocols and guidelines will allow such events. Speaker 2: Okay. But that's going to be the second phase, which would come after six months when we have a discussion on the topic about on posted, correct? Speaker 1: No, it would come after the four months when the ordinance becomes effective, as long as the health protocols and all of those sorts of things are put out by the health department would allow such events. Speaker 2: Okay. And can you describe for me a little bit what what those events would look like? What are the parameters of such events? Speaker 1: So those events will be required to get what is called an occasional event permit. They would have to describe the event, how many people they anticipate having, and they would be tracked as to the limit of how often that they could occur. Speaker 2: And would there be a discretionary process as to the granting of permits for each of those events? Speaker 1: At this point in time, very visioning that that occasional event permit process will follow the same process that is used for occasional events that go on on public property. And and this is Linda Tatum. I just wanted to weigh in and describe that process slightly. That is, that process is issued its through the special events in the city manager's office, but it's also reviewed by the business license office and it's brought it to other departments such as development services. My understanding also the police department, so that based upon the nature of the event, appropriate security or precautions or conditions put in place to ensure that there is no negative or to minimize any potential public impacts. Speaker 2: So is there any noticing requirement for that? Ms.. Speaker 1: Tatum There is no noticing requirement, but those are what we call the ops. They are limited to six events per year per address. Speaker 2: Okay. And so those EPS would be granted if all of the departments that are reviewing it recommend they be grants granted under the circumstances. Speaker 1: Yes, they all get to weigh in and it is required that they be that all of the concerns that those various department reviews recommend are appropriately addressed. Speaker 2: Okay. Because my concern is obviously and I share this with a constituent who reached out to me special events in residential neighborhoods where there's a lot of density and parking impacts that I'm sure this is not what's envisioned in this provision. But if you read the four corners of it, it doesn't preclude EPS in specific neighborhoods, for example. So I just want to make sure that obviously the intent of this is to minimize impacts on residential communities, the intent of all of this legislation that we've talked about at length. And so that that would be something that would be taken into account as part of the intent of allowing staffers in the city. Speaker 1: That is correct. Speaker 2: Okay. Thank you. I support moving forward tonight. Thank you. And I second things about you. Speaker 0: Next up on the list is Concern Mango. Speaker 2: Yes, I appreciate the discussion. I heard Councilman Pierce's comment related to the governor's order. I just thought it was important to kind of outline what that order is and staff are. Is your understanding of the governor's order that he believes or the state believes that? Unhosted. Short term rentals are actually safer than hosted. Therefore, the unhosted are currently allowed and hosted are not. Speaker 5: This is Tommy. So correct. The current health order does not allow for hosted stars where somebody is in your home and there's the ability to interact and touch items that the person would also touch. It is currently allowing for unhosted. That just came out. We also do see changes to the health order regularly. So this is the first one that we've seen on this year and I would expect that to adapt and change over the next couple of months, if not earlier than that. Speaker 2: So this just kind of goes to my previous point that I didn't feel that the comments made by Councilman Pearce last meeting really aligned with what I had understood with the health concerns. Specifically, I mentioned that a lot of the short term rental platforms have requirements and guidance for cleaning. And while hotels also of requirements and guidance for cleaning, the difference, I feel, at least in my reading of the information, is that if a short term rental unit deemed by those rules, they would be suspended from the platform. And we don't currently inspect on a room by room basis, city wide the standards. And while I recognize that a lot of the major brands have those standards rolling out, we really rely on community members to inform us when businesses aren't abiding by the coronavirus initiative. And I know, Mr. Modica, you and I spoke earlier in the week about a couple of reports of violations. And it's always important to remind the community when hearing items like this that if they know of violations to the ground virus standards, that there's a number that they can call 562570. Which one is it, Mr. Mullica? Speaker 5: It is 2633. That's 5702633 is the code enforcement task force. Speaker 2: And expression is once this is approved by council, does this need to go to another commissioner body or is it a go once development services is. Speaker 3: Comfortable? Speaker 1: Once the ordinance is approved by the city council, the next step is that four month period for staff to begin the implementation procedures and to bring the consultant online. But the next step is that the because the item is or it requires an amendment to the city's local coastal program. This entire packet would have to go to the Coastal Commission for for review and approval. Speaker 2: And what is the wait time on something like that. Speaker 1: The the time period for council to respond. It varies anywhere from three months to 12 months. It really depends upon the council's. The Coastal Commission's staffing at any point in time. However, what staff would propose to do would be to submit it to the Coastal Commission immediately after council's ratification, so that during that four month period, while staff is ramping up, preparing the administrative regulations and getting the consultant on board, we will have already submitted it to the coastal so that so that there we don't waste additional time or we get at least a four month lead time for the council to review it and get back to the city. Speaker 2: Ms. TAYLOR. But we need to then go back to the Coastal Commission again. If the Council decides to expand this to. And hosted in the fall? Speaker 1: That is correct. Any time we change any of the city's zoning code provisions that would apply in the coastal zone, they do need to be ratified by the Coastal Commission. Speaker 2: Okay. So I feel like the wording and dancing around of the way in which this has taken place in terms of using the stay at home order to kind of state that that was the reasoning behind going with hosted and hosted. All of that to me just doesn't seem like really in alignment with the current. Data that's coming from the state. And so I would hope that we would then reconsider and join them together, even if it meant starting both of them six months from now instead. Because what I see now is an additional staffing process and an additional delay that will happen in going to the Coastal Commission twice. So that would be my thoughts on the item. And so I'm not supportive of the way that it is today. I'm just from a procedural reason. I think that it doesn't it also strips neighbors of income that they've relied upon for quite some time. And the two neighbors that I talked to, that coast stars in in our communities, they are on hosted stars and that helps them pay their mortgage and when they're not there. And so that that's just a concern for me that we're taking away the income of people in our communities during the time when they've needed this kind of income to kind of get them through. Well, business is not that great. One of them specifically is an employee of the convention center, and it doesn't have any hours right now. And so it's it's just a big concern that we're taking away people's income and approving a C.R. clause that's not even currently allowable by the state. So I wish it could have gone a different way. Again, I support Councilman Price's. Information related to what we can do to restrict and ensure that the communities are safe and that these are good players. And we've talked to do that for months and months. It's just unfortunate that we've split it this way. So I won't be supporting Adam tonight. Speaker 0: Thank you. Councilmember Price. Speaker 2: Thank you, Mr. Meyer. Mr. Miller, I appreciate those comments. Councilwoman Mango, a couple of things on that. This is an issue that, like you, many of us have worked really hard on involving our residents and trying to get feedback. We're trying to do the way it's I don't know the wording it use. But look, this way, I think is what you said. The way the reason for this is because we are trying to support the numerous residents who have hosted stars and many of them are seniors, and they depend upon the income that they get from renting out a room or renting out a back house or renting out some portion of their property as a hosted ACR. We're trying to support them and we're trying to support them while we explore the options and the practices and procedures and work with the providers to hone in and figure out what works best for our city in terms of future enforcement. So I do support moving forward with that piece of it. As a council member who represents the coastal district, I know I can speak for myself and Councilmember Pearce. The fact that it has to go to Coastal Commission for ratification is not at all a concern that I have or I think Councilmember Pearce has. Coastal commissioners focus has always been access to the coastal zones. So us allowing additional access through additional short term stays and hotels and anything that allows for access in the coastal zone is not going to be an issue that I anticipate. We're going to get a lot of resistance from, from the Coastal Commission and I don't expect the process to be so burdensome that we have an efficiency argument to make because of the nature of the task in regards to this particular ratification request. So, you know, sometimes when we're talking about working with Coastal Commission and getting approval from Coastal Commission, we want to make sure that we're efficient in our ask so that we include as much as we can in the ASC so that they can evaluate something in its totality. In this circumstance, we're trying to approach this prudently and we're trying to approach it in phases. And I think that that's not something that's going to have a negative impact on the ultimate ratification decision by Coastal Commission, because ultimately the goal is to enhance access to the coastal areas. But we're doing it in phases because that is what works for our city. So I would urge council to support this item. I do believe that I do anticipate that we will move forward with allowing the UNHOSTED, but we'll have to take a look at the number. We'll have to take a look at the conditions. We'll have to take a look at some of the practices that have been in play for the first six months where we have the hosted scars. And I think those experiences and those opportunities that we have will better inform the decision in terms of what we allow at the next time we vote on this in six months. So I'm supportive of it. I do appreciate that this allows also our residents who live in highly impacted residential communities with parking impacts and such, to have an opportunity to see how we are able to enforce the first phase of this ordinance, which is the hosted stars, because enforcement is going to be a critical piece and I think residents will be much more likely to embrace this program if they see that the city has an enforcement mechanism in place, an enforcement mechanism in place that they can deploy as needed. And having the six months will allow us to develop that infrastructure in the city so that we're able to follow through and execute that in the way that we're promising residents, where sometimes we promise them enforcement, but we really don't have the enforcement infrastructure set up, so we can't follow through. This phasing allows us to do so. So while I appreciate that there are some residents who depend on short term rental income. That's a little bit disappointing for me to hear because they're relying on income based on. An operation that currently is not allowed in the city. So I think if you're relying on income doing something that's prohibited in a city, you kind of take the risk that at some point what you're doing is not allowed and may not be allowed to continue. My hope would be for those folks that they would partner with us so that we could move towards phase two and they can have compliance with what the city ordinance will be because if they've been relying on income running and hosted us here. They're running an operation that's not allowed in the city. So you kind of you take that with some risk. So hopefully the six months departure and allowing us to say is in will allow them to also participate and make sure that they are one of the ones that gets licensed when the time comes. But I think the comments are very, you know, very, very thoughtful. And I think they do take into account a category of folks who rely on income but rely on income for prohibited activity. And so hopefully as we go into phase two, they're able to recoup that income in a way that is legal and lawful through the city. So I would ask my colleagues to support this motion. Speaker 0: Thank you. Councilman Muggeridge, you back up again. Is that a second Q or no? Councilman Mongo. Speaker 2: Yes. I appreciate that. I guess a lot of these individuals started before we had banned short term rentals. And then when we did, we kind of talked about. And allowing certain organizations to continue to operate until we got some things in order. And we as a city have kind of had to take a lot of time because this is an evolving market that we don't know a lot about. And I do appreciate that there are less than there are hosted. There are less posted. Participants in the city than Unhosted. I also have heard from a lot of people who felt that after the meeting two times ago when we spoke about this, that we were on a track where Councilman's and De Haas had really taken the lead on lifting it to 1000 within the city. And they had hope in all of these things. And then. The city changed direction. And I know that the whole world has kind of been on its head, but I guess that that's why my discussion related to I'm at the last meeting kind of talked about well. Homes that are safer. And that's just not what has come about. And again, I recognize, especially in our communities that hosted our really the primary, but then students are also now not in school, so they don't need those. So I think a lot of things have changed. I appreciate your feedback and I will reconsider and think it over for a few minutes before I thank you. Speaker 5: So, Mayor Council, this is Tom. If I can add one thing. Councilman Austin Mayor when I get a second, if you can add if I can add some clarity. Speaker 3: Absolutely. Speaker 5: So one thing that we talk about in our lingo is hosted versus UN hosted and the state order actually talks about occupied and unoccupied. So I just wanted to make sure that that was clear. What the state order for COVID is trying to do is prevent people coming together in a shared space. So that would prevent people from coming into your home, from being in any place where you as the resident are interacting with them. It would allow a hosted STR where there's no interaction, where it has a separate entrance, where it has, you know, if it's a duplex, if it's in your backyard. So I just wanted to make sure that was clear. Those would still be allowed under the health order, even though they're hosted. They're just they're unoccupied. Same thing as if the resident were to leave and not be there. That is then considered an unoccupied unit rather than occupied. Thanks. Speaker 2: Thank you. That helps a lot. Speaker 0: Councilman Austin. Speaker 3: Oh, yes. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, and I appreciate the conversation. I definitely appreciate all of the very detailed work put into this item by our city staff. I appreciate the process that we have gone through to get to this item coming before us this evening. It has been many, many months and, you know, a lot of back and forth between the stakeholders. I'm not sure that we were able and have been able to get to a place where people can 100% agree on the approach moving forward. But I do appreciate the efforts and the level of compromise that has gone into getting us to where we are. I will have to agree with Councilmember Mongo. I do believe that the dynamics have changed, obviously considerably. COVID 19 has really forced everyone in every situation really rethink our matters. I'm concerned with, you know, Long Beach. I'm concerned about what is the best move for our city in terms of, you know, a total strategic thought on this. I want to know, how are we set up to enforce this this ordinance of citations and whether or not we're creating a situation where we're now encouraging property owners in our city to have invested in our city, to go now underground in terms of subleasing their they're their spaces. And so I'm a mom, although, like I said, I'm appreciative of the process. This doesn't feel like it's it's 100% right. And I do have my concerns. I'm likely to support the item before us this evening because I think, you know, six months from now coming back to talk about the Unhosted platform uses is is. It's something that we have to do. We definitely have to do that. And so I just wanted to share my concerns just initially in my comments. Thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you. Please go ahead and do any public comment. Madam Kirk. Speaker 6: We have one public comment. Speaker 4: Victor Boosie, you have 3 minutes. Speaker 3: So. The two boozy cold nights at a away. So you all just spent all this time talking about process. All this work went into FDI, short term, short, short term rentals. Now it's Airbnb. Call it what you want. It's a $38 billion company. You're putting all this effort in for more capital when the capital needs to go. One place economy. Housing is a human right. People shouldn't be making money off of housing again. Housing is a human right. So you guys spent all this time and effort. For Airbnb, a $30 billion company. But work on all these rules so people could make more money off of human rights. That's disgusting. Literally disgusting. The money should go to de-fund BTD. That's it. We're coming for your jobs. Either resign, retire, or get voted out. De-Fund the idea of my time. Speaker 4: Thank you. That's the end of public comment for this item. Speaker 0: Okay, thank you. With good Casper votes. And a reminder as we do that that item will be back in six months for additional obviously council dialog on so. Madam Court. Speaker 1: District one. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District two District three I District four. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District five. I. District six. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District seven. By District eight. Speaker 3: Hi. Speaker 1: District nine. I ocean carries. Speaker 0: Be. Thank you. Let's see, try to do some of the council items first here that we had a request for. Let's go ahead and do item 15 than 18 because I think our council items.

Ordinance

Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code by adding Chapter 5.77, related to short-term rentals, read and adopted as read. (Citywide)

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Speaker 0: Okay. Item 17, please. Speaker 1: Communication from councilwoman and House Councilman Supernormal Vice Mayor Andrews Councilmember Turanga. Recommendation to transfer one time district priority funds to the Small Business Restart Grant Program. Speaker 0: Not from us. Speaker 2: Thank you, Mayor. First of all, I'd like to thank my colleagues for their work in bringing this item forward. This is one of several items on tonight's agenda that aim in assisting our small businesses, which I think demonstrates our commitment to making sure that we are doing all in our power to assist them through a very difficult time. I'm excited that these resources can go towards grants that do not need to be paid back as well. I think it's important that we do our best to create opportunities and local interpersonal can take advantage of what without having to worry about consequences or or down the road. So I'm very grateful for the chance to help and be part of the solution. And I look forward to continue steps to protect our residents, our businesses that have been mostly impacted. I would like to make one amendment to the portion of the language, if I may, to the fourth District should read it increased appropriation in general funds approved in the Economic and Development Department by 25,000, offset by the fourth Council District one time district priority funds transferred from the city wide activities departments to be used for fourth District Council District Restart grants for two businesses damaged by the event on May 31st. Thank you. And I. I hope I could get your support. Speaker 0: Then by Air Andrews and then rank. I just go one after the other. Speaker 3: Yes. Okay, fine. Thank you very much. Okay. First of all, I want to thank Councilwoman Cindy and our economic development department for helping bring this item forward. This item is truly putting your money where your mouth is. In the sixth district, we have already funded the boarding up Mobil 15 businesses. We have created a database and a go fund me effort the community and have started. We have what are our business corridors to talk to business owners and help them file police reports online and help them with the CBG rebate applications. With this transfer of dollars, we're going to help our small businesses get the additional support they need. And thank you very much for bringing this forward. Speaker 0: Now some of your anger I mentioned. Go ahead. After Vice Mayor. Speaker 3: Thank you, Mayor. My son Andrew said it all perfectly and totally in agreement, the way he put it. And more than anything, I was inspired by the community's reaction on June 1st. And this is one step in the healing process, and I hope that we can do more. Thank you. Okay. Speaker 0: Let's do public comment, please. Speaker 4: We have one public comment. Victor Boosie, you have 3 minutes. Speaker 3: Again, we're here talking about small businesses. Why were those small businesses affected? What happened? The glands over the root cause. It's foolish. Nothing will be solved. Who doesn't like small businesses. I love going down to the park and spending money and feeling like a good American, no doubt. But I also don't like to get terrorized by the police. All of this time is being dedicated to small businesses and nobody is talking about the root of the problem. The only thing I'm hearing about reforms from shady cops. Nobody's listening. Nobody was out in the street. Nobody saw what happened Sunday. You guys are still talking about small businesses and making small businesses whole. How about making Long Beach whole, making Long Beach hold for the people, for the community, for the most marginalized of us? Listen to the people. We were out in the streets telling y'all to be fun to LBB. But all I hear is talking about small business. Small business. Small business. Forget about all that noise. All this time has been dedicated to small business and profits and all. I hear the refrain about not putting a book on the neck of a black man. And I'm supposed to be happy about that? No, I'm angry. I'm very angry. The people out there angry won't be too angry once I listen. We're doing this to try to get you to listen. I spent, like, 3 hours on the phone to tell you the same thing over and over again. The fund will be p d. Do you hear us? I see you. You hear us? You've been outside your house. Do you hear us? We're not giving up. The Long Beach is out here. We're looking for your. We are organizing in the streets, we will not give up. Speaker 1: So, Mr. Boucher, please stay on topic. DPD Mr. Boosie, please stay on topic. Speaker 3: I am on topic. I'm definitely on topic. Don't try to silence me, please. One public comment. Let me go on. What are you talking about? Stay on topic. I am on topic. I used my time. Speaker 4: Thank you. As a conclusion of public comment for this item. Speaker 0: Local police. Speaker 1: District one. I am district two. I. District three I want district four i. District five. I. District six. Speaker 0: I. Speaker 1: District seven. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District eight. District nine. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 1: Motion carries.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to decrease FY 20 appropriations in the General Fund Group in the Citywide Activities Department by $25,000 to reflect the use of the Fourth Council District One-time District Priority Funds for District Restart Grants to Fourth District businesses damaged by the events of May 31st; Allocate $50,000 from the one-time Business Corridor Improvement funds appropriated by City Council in the FY 19 Budget for Pacific and Anaheim corridors to be used for First and Sixth District Restart Grants to businesses located in the First and Sixth districts businesses damaged by the events of May 31st; Allocate $25,000 from the one-time sale of Successor Agency Citywide funds appropriated by the City Council in the FY 20 Budget to be used for Seventh District Restart Grants to businesses located in the Seventh District businesses damaged by the events of May 31st; and Direct City Manager to look at expanding the current CDBG grant program to incorporate eligible businesses damaged by the events of May 31st.

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Speaker 0: Thank you. I think the last item before we get to the some of the more the staff ones and other with interest of the questions here, let's go to item nine. Speaker 1: Report from police and technology and innovation. Recommendation to award a contract to Central Square to provide. Implement and maintain a police records management software system or a total contract amount not to exceed 2,452,691 citywide. Speaker 0: Okay. Can I get a motion in a second, please? Catherine appears. Speaker 2: Thank you. I'd like to hear a staff report before I ask questions. Speaker 5: Sure. We will have Lia Ericsson, our technical innovation director, and help lead that staff report. I will say that this is a very good investment. This is money that has already been set aside that the council invested in. There is a federal mandate to be able to do this type of system to increase our performance or increase our reporting. And this will really help us with transparency of data. So I'll turn it over to Leah, please. Speaker 1: Good evening, Mayor, and members of City Council. Before you is a recommendation for the city manager to enter into an agreement with Central Square Technologies for purchasing and implementing an upgrade to the police department's record management system or arm's. Yara MMS is a mission critical application that stores and retrieves police records. The Arms is the authoritative source of data and reporting for the Long Beach Police Department. The current ARMAS application has been in place since 2012. The impetus to upgrade is twofold. First, the current AMAs environment is running on aging technology that is reaching end of life. And second, new reporting mandates set forth by the U.S. Department. Department of Justice will go into place in January 2021. Current reporting standards are limited to nine crime offenses, whereas the new reporting standards account for 52 different offenses. These new offenses are in keeping with modern law enforcement challenges such as animal cruelty, hacking and identity theft. In addition, the new reporting standards will allow for granular incident data, such as time to be captured as discrete data points. This is counter to the current method of reporting in which most data points are contained within a narrative format. The city's current arms is unable to conform to the standards required by the DOJ. A full arms system upgrade will be required for the city to conform to the DOJ's reporting standards. Migrating to a more modern platform platform will bring additional benefits to the police department in the city of Long Beach. Specific examples include lessening reliance on paper processes. Police intends to digitize processes like traffic collisions that are currently conducted via paper. The net effect will be less time to complete processes due to digital workflows and more timely access to granular data for reporting. Improving customer experience for the public. This shift to digital processes, granular data capturing an authoritative reporting platform will better serve the public who seek police records. For example, the police department processes on average 13,000 requests for traffic collision reports. The process to intake, retrieve and produce these reports is largely manual and paper driven. The public and staff alike can expect a more streamlined process as a result of the upgrade, with shorter response times to record requests. Reducing reliance on third party applications is another benefit due to data sprawl and a legacy system. Please staff can currently rely on a bevy of applications to access their data in modern Iot. Ms. are a must serve system will serve as an authoritative single source of data and reporting tool. And lastly, enhancing reporting through better data. By having more granular data, the city will be able to readily produce detailed crime reports based on metrics such as the demographics of victims and or offenders offense occurrence by the time of day and or offenses, including the use of a weapon. City manager Tom Modica said this is better transparency. Central Square was selected as the firm to provide a modern armés after the conclusion of a competitive procurement process. Proposals from five qualifying respondents were considered by a multidisciplinary team from the Technology Innovation Department and Police Department. The selection committee selected Central Square based on technical, product capability, cost and references. The total requested contract authority is 2.5 million and reflects the requisite cost to fully fund the project for two years, including purchase of hardware, software, licensing and maintenance. The request a contract term is one year with four optional one year renewals. The request. The contract authority includes the upfront cost, the one time upfront cost for the project of 1.8 million. Which includes the hardware, software, licensing and maintenance, a 15% contingency and an annual maintenance cost of about 380,000. In year one with annual increases of 5% in subsequent years. In addition, the recommendation includes a one time appropriation in the Department of Technology and Innovation for 100,000 for as needed professional services to lend technical aid. Given the project's aggressive implementation schedule to meet the new DOJ reporting deadline. As City Manager Tom Modica mentioned, the project will be primarily funded by a one time appropriation of 2 million. The general fund group in the police department that was set aside for this purpose by city council and a 500,000 DOJ grant appropriated to the group General Grants Fund Group. Ongoing annual maintenance costs will be paid by TDI and recovered from the police department via the annual TID MRU. This concludes my report and I'm joined by subject matter experts from police and technology innovation. We'd be happy to answer any questions you may have. Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilman Pearce. Speaker 2: Yes, thank you. Thank you, Lia. And for those listening at home. Leah is our director of I.T., who is going to be managing this project. I've got a couple of questions for Tom Modica. If you could outline who's involved in this, you know, understanding first what exactly is required by the DOJ, by what dates. And if we feel like we're going to meet those expectations or if we could delay this item. I know the answers, but I want you to just say it for the public. And then understanding how police and I team or the I.T. team work together. If you could go through the 2 seconds. Speaker 5: Sure thing. So the DOJ requirement is that we have a system in place that meets their expectations by January 21. So we quickly put this together and put the funding in place that the Council put in last year. We are here to bid that project out. Even a week delay is going to impact us in their ability to deliver this project. And frankly, this project is going to be a very, very difficult to hit that deadline, even if we don't have any delays in terms of the project structure, the way that we run technology projects in the city, as we lead those through the Tech and Innovation Department. They then reach out to all the different subject matter experts throughout the city that need to be a part of that system. That's one thing. And here it's primarily the police department, because this is the system that captures all of the police reporting that is done on every single day, whenever there is incident reports or anything else that will go into this system. And then this is the system that we help to provide crime data and all those types of things that we want to know what's going on in our community. The project lead is tech and innovation, and they have a number of staff that that are dedicated to this project working with the contractor and then with police for technical assistance. Speaker 2: Thank you for that, Tom. I really do appreciate that that you listed out the fact that this is really about onboarding a new system and that the system is about transparency. Speaker 1: I know that in my. Speaker 2: Four years on council that it has been very difficult when we've requested data to get data and to get it quickly. And so would this new system allow us to pull. Speaker 1: Data more quickly and more information than we. Speaker 2: Currently can? Speaker 6: Councilwoman or council members and Mr. Mayor, Robert Luna here speaking up to answer that question. When we understand the requests coming in, we do our best to fulfill them. At the end of the day, the system that we're going to have is going to make it much easier for us to deliver information out to the public. Right now, the system we use is antiquated. A lot of times there's requests coming in or it takes actual people to start doing hand searches for a lot of the information. And I know there's a high level of frustration from many people out there. This system will completely change and revolutionize the way we provide information, specifically crime data out to the public. They're going to know more than they've ever known. We're going to be putting straight out to them with a lot of detail. So that's why we're recommending for this item to go forward. Speaker 2: Thank you so much for that, Chief. I really appreciate it. And I just I got. Speaker 1: A whole bunch of emails, calls. Speaker 2: Text messages about this. So that's why I want to make sure that the public understands that this is a system that is going to allow us to get what we've been talking about, which is transparency and access. Speaker 1: So I have. Speaker 2: To make sure I ask all my questions. Tom Modica We talked in support of this item. We have the framework, which is really where we're going to address policy, recognizing that this is just putting in place a mechanism to get data and that the money has already been spent for this. This is not us asking for the money right now is saying that we've already allocated it and we have to do it in accordance with the DOJ. But next, as we go through the process of. Speaker 1: Listening, I would like to. Speaker 2: Make sure that I publicly ask for a public study session on police records and the state law and what we can do locally and what we can't do locally. So that's as part of our reconciliation. I would like to make sure that we have that public opportunity to really understand state law, what the boundaries are, and what we as a city can do to help our police department and our public. And so with that, I look forward to hearing other people's thoughts on this and might have missed a question or two. If I do, I'll come back up. Thank you. Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you, Councilwoman. I do have I do have a shit on the floor by now by Councilwoman Mongo and council councilman's in Dallas. Is that a motion or just or you skipped the speech. He also mentioned has. Speaker 2: It was muted. I was cued up to set it up. But if that's already been taken, I just I support this item. I support anything that promotes transparency. And I think that this is going to be great. And I'm very happy to have Lia being the lead on this. So thank you. Your. Speaker 0: Councilwoman Mongeau. I'm sorry she made the motion, Councilman. They had second thoughts. Richardson. Speaker 3: Thanks, Mr. Mayor. And then I'll be quick. I like a lot of the discussion that I've heard already. I think it's important to note that, you know, I've advocated a number of people, advocated for a modern 21st century police department. And part of that means moving away from paper records to digitize records in a way that is consistent with national standards, allows a bit more transparency, access to data so we can make data driven decisions in terms of, you know, based on what's what's being reported. I think this you know, this this arm, this it's long overdue. I support moving forward with this. And I also want to recognize, I think with, you know, more folks paying attention to local processes, sometimes we do have to slow down and explain what things are. I like the idea of the suggestion of bringing forward a study session about record retention and what that looks like. There's been a lot of questions about, you know, the city clerk's process of of being consistent with state law on the destruction of records across all departments. And I think, you know, I think a study session would go a long way. Again, to update the council on what those laws are and what our practices are, and put us in a position to think about whether we want to make the investment into more records, retaining records for a longer period of time because of the cost associated with that. So all of these things are connected. And I think and I like the thoughtful nature of how everyone sort of framed. We all need to move to digitized data. We all need to support this, this and this so we can make better decisions moving forward. Thanks a lot. Speaker 0: Thanks, Councilmember Ringa. Speaker 3: He told this reporter with this item. The only question I have is knowing that technology is. Fragile. How long is this technology going to be available for and are we looking at another upgrade two or three years from now? All technology has a shelf life and it's unfortunate, but, you know, there's always new technologies coming around. I just wondering if this investment is the right investment we want to make. Obviously it is. But I'm just wondering what's going to happen two or three years from now when we're looking at technology advancing and having higher and better protocols for the retention of data? Speaker 1: A councilmember. Speaker 3: Go ahead. I'm sorry. Speaker 1: Oh. Burying a body. Our business information services manager will answer that question. Speaker 6: Thank you, Councilman, for the question. We have specked this out for a five year run, so we have sufficient hardware, software, licensing and warranties to support this application for a minimum of five years. Not to say that the application cannot expand. The software and hardware are architected in such a manner that we can continue to add to it, as opposed to have to rip it out and replace it going forward. Speaker 3: The response. Speaker 0: Gonzales Did you get a response you needed? Oak Country Council member Austin. Speaker 3: Thank you. So my question and first of all, I completely support all transparency and upgrading our technology. I think that is really going to be part of our future, something that we can can ill afford to overlook. My question is more about the timing and potential opportunities and this question maybe for the manager. I'm not sure if our government relations staff is on deck when there's a lot of activity happening at every level of government, state government, as well as federal government. There is a call decrying greater transparency, more accountability and policing. I was just curious to know whether or not we do, we forecast or might there be opportunity for federal money to come in and and pay for something like this as opposed to us doing it today? And this just a cautious question. Speaker 1: A Council council member Austin. I'm actually part of the project is covered by a DOJ grant. 500,000. In addition, some of the expenses for the feasibility study was also covered by a DOJ grant. And so the the remainder of the project is covered by a local share, which is consistent with, with other systems across the country. Speaker 3: Thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you. Public comment, please. Speaker 6: We have two public comments. Speaker 4: Our first speakers launched in. Speaker 3: 3 minutes ago. Speaker 2: But I'm. Speaker 4: Laurie Smith. You have 3 minutes. Speaker 2: Is this for? Item number 20. Speaker 4: No, this is for. Speaker 2: Yeah. I'm for item number 20. Speaker 4: I'm sorry. Victor Boosie, you have 3 minutes. Speaker 3: All right. We're talking about software and Long Beach PD. Let's not forget about Tiger techs. I remember Tiger Techs. And the way Long Beach PD were hiding messages, disappearing messages. We can't trust Long Beach PD. They are not to be trusted. Luna is not to be trusted. All those people in the Long Beach Police Department are not to be trusted. What kind of public servant uses Tiger text to hide what they're doing? Shady people hide what they are doing. Period. Point blank. I oppose. Item nine is a request from of PD for over $2.4 million in software to provide, implement and maintain a police record. More money for BP is not I repeat, is not the answer. More money to police is not the answer and is not the solution of the problem of police violence. This is not an area of debate. Black people are dying in Long Beach at a high rate. No more funding for arbitrary contracts. We must defend black lives again. We must defend black lives. We must use funds to reinvest in our community, especially Black Long Beach communities. The most marginalized of us deserve that. We must strengthen our civil services such as parks, housing, library services in Long Beach. We want to defund the police. We can't trust these fools with technology. The shaming the tiger takes proves it is no institution that was there to serve the public. Would you something like Tiger attack. Come on, now. Idea of my time. Speaker 4: Thank you. That concludes public comment. Speaker 0: Thank you. Roll call, please. Speaker 1: District one. I just district to. I. District three. I am District four. I am District five. I. District six. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District seven. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District eight. District nine. Thank you. Ocean cares. Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you. Great. Now we're gong to go to the rest of the meeting items. Item number eight.

Contract

Recommendation to adopt Specifications No. RFP PD19-065 and award a contract to CentralSquare Technologies, LLC, formerly TriTech Software Systems, of Lake Mary, FL, to provide, implement, and maintain a Police Records Management Software (RMS) system and requisite hardware, software and licensing, in the amount of $1,794,702, with a 15 percent contingency in the amount of $269,205, and ongoing annual maintenance and licensing, in the amount of $388,784, for a period of one year, for a total contract amount not to exceed $2,452,691 for year one, with the option to renew for four additional one-year periods, with annual maintenance and licensing increases of 5 percent, at the discretion of the City Manager; authorize City Manager, or designee, to execute all documents necessary to enter into the contract, including any necessary amendments; and Increase appropriations in the General Services Fund Group in the Technology and Innovation Department (TI) by $100,000, for as-needed professional services to install and configure the hardware and software necessary to integrate the RMS p

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Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 0: Thank you. I 11, please. Speaker 1: Communication from City Attorney Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code relating to Commission compensation read and adopted as read citywide. Speaker 0: The emotion that comes from a Richardson second. I can't remember your anger. Public comment, please. Speaker 4: We have one speaker. Victor Boosie, you have 3 minutes. Speaker 3: They find out. Dee dee Dee. When I keep saying it, I'm going to keep repeating it. So you all get the message. This is a call for everybody. Next meeting. Call in. Oh, then what the people are saying d find out the p d. I yield my time. Speaker 4: Thank you. Speaker 0: Roll call the police. Speaker 1: District one. District two. I district three. I district for. Speaker 3: The. Speaker 1: District five by District six. Speaker 2: By District seven. Speaker 3: By District eight. Merrick. Speaker 1: District nine. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 1: Motion carries.

Ordinance

Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code by amending Section 2.06.060, and Subsections 2.18.050.D and 2.63.030.A, all relating to commission compensation, read and adopted as read. (Citywide)

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Speaker 1: Motion carries. Speaker 0: 12 please. Speaker 1: Or from Development Services recommendation declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code relating to the extension of the expiration period for certain certificates of appropriateness and modifying the expiration period for future approvals. Read and adopted as read citywide. Speaker 0: I got a motion and it's actually a motion by I think it's Vice Mayor Andrews. And I got a second. Second my customers and day has. But a comment. Speaker 4: We have one public comment from Victor Boosie. You have 3 minutes. Speaker 3: Again. We're here to be that. Speaker 4: I'll be pleased to talk to the item. Speaker 3: I used my time. Speaker 4: Thank you. Conclusion of public comment. Speaker 0: Please cast your votes or call. Speaker 1: District one I district to district three. A district court. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District one. I. District six. District six. Speaker 3: Hi. Speaker 1: District seven. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District eight. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District nine. My version carries.

Ordinance

Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach municipal code by amending Subsection 2.63.080.I, and Section 20.20.050; and by adding subsection 2.63.080.J, and Subsection 20.12.180.C, relating to the extension of the expiration period for certain Certificates of Appropriateness and modifying the expiration period for future approvals, read and adopted as read. (Citywide)

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Speaker 0: Okay. Item number 13, please. Speaker 1: Report from Development Services. Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code relating to the extension of the expiration date for certain. Subdivisions and entitlement approvals and modifying the expiration period for future approvals. Read and adopted as read citywide. Speaker 0: Okay. I see a motion by Councilman Richardson and a second by Vice Mayor Andrews. Our comment is. Speaker 4: We have one comment from Victor Boosie. You have one minute or 3 minutes. Speaker 3: Defund the PD because a lot of times lives matter. I yield my time. Speaker 4: Thank you. As a conclusion of public comment. Speaker 0: Hiroko. Speaker 1: District one. I district to. I'm District three. A District Court I District five i. District six. Speaker 0: I. Speaker 1: District seven. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District eight. Speaker 3: Hi. Speaker 2: District nine. Speaker 1: High emotion carries. Speaker 0: Next item, please. I think that was 13. Let's see, item. 19.

Ordinance

Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code by amending Section 21.21.406, relating to the extension of the expiration date for certain subdivision and entitlement approvals and modifying the expiration period for future approvals, read and adopted as read. (Citywide)

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Speaker 0: Thank you. Next item 20. Speaker 1: Report from City Manager Recommendation two confirmed the appointment of Linda Tatum to the position of Assistant City Manager effective June 20th, 2020 citywide. Speaker 0: Mr.. Speaker 5: Very, very, very happy to be here today and to bring this item to you. So we conducted a selection process to pick our next assistant city manager. This is an incredibly important position. It's in our charter, and the council has a role in confirming the city manager's appointment. And so I am recommending that we appoint Linda Tatum. I could go on and on about Linda. She has been fantastic here in the city and has had over 30 years of very diverse experience doing huge projects in the region. And she's a planning expert and professional as well as a very, very solid administrator. She's going to do great things as our assistant city manager, and I ask for your support. Speaker 0: Thank you. That was item 22. I see a motion back by Councilmember Richardson, a second by Councilmember Price. Councilman Richardson. Speaker 3: I wanted to chime in and just offer my adulation and strong support to to Ms.. Tatum, who will be our next assistant city manager. She in my work as president of SCAD, we know the city's web strong reputation for planning standpoint. Ms.. Tatum has a has an incredible reputation as an administrator and as a planner, both in her time here in the city of Long Beach, but also in the city of Inglewood. And so I know that she's going to bring great contributions to the city manager, city management team and help bring a level of experience and sophistication to the team. And I look forward to the great things to come. Congratulations, women. And I'm honored to make this motion. Speaker 0: Thank you. Councilman Price. Speaker 2: Thank you. Congrats, Linda. I look forward to working with you. I think it's an excellent selection next. Speaker 0: Thank you. Vice Mayor Andrews. Speaker 3: Yes. Congratulations. I mean, I think you're like a diamond in the rough. And I'm looking forward to being, you know, coordinating this drive with you as soon as we can get some of these priorities. And congratulations again, young lady. Speaker 0: Thank you. GONZALES Pierce. Speaker 2: Thank you. I want to congratulate the whole city, Tom and Linda, for this appointment. Linda, I think that you are balanced, smart, fierce and fantastic partner for Tom in this position. And I also want to congratulate the department for really growing a great bench of people that can step up. And I know Oscar and Chris have been a pleasure to work with. Also very smart, strategic and thoughtful people that I know you've worked really closely with. So it's really great to see some of that leadership step up in this process. So congratulations, everyone. Speaker 0: Thank you. Councilman's in the house. Speaker 2: Thank you, Mayor. Congratulations, Linda. I am so excited to have you in this position. You bring not only diversity because you're a woman, but because you're an African-American woman. That I up that you you have stellar knowledge about the city and a passion for the city. I'm so big that I think that you're going to work so beautifully with Tom, and I look forward to working with you on many good things to make Long Beach better every day. Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilman Mongo. Were you were you keyed up for the last item or for this one? Speaker 2: I had tried to make this motion, sir, but it's okay. Speaker 0: Go ahead, Councilman. Speaker 2: Thank you. I just want to congratulate Ms.. Tatum. She's knowledgeable, professional and poised under fire. I like a lot of our department heads, but there's not a single department head. I love disagreeing with more than Linda because she teaches me so much about the city and the possibilities. I think there's a lot to be said of a person who can adapt and become a part of the Long Beach family so easily. Actually, when her real introduction to the larger community gatherings was during such a pivotal time in our city's history, I also think that it's a testament to her leadership in development services, because one of the things that's always really, really telling is when a number two is ready to step up and take on the responsibilities of the number one and. And you did that really well in that you have so many individuals within your department who are really ready to step up and lead. And so I'm. Congratulations. Great choice. I couldn't have thought of a better choice. I know that there was always whispers of who it could be, who it could be. And and Linda, your name has always been on that list since the very beginning, so we're really excited to have you. And congratulations to Oscar, who you trained so well. We look forward to working with him as well. Speaker 0: Thank you. And again, just because it's confusing on the system, how were you queued up for the last item or for this item? Speaker 3: I absolutely want to just take this opportunity to congratulate Linda, our congratulate Tom. But I also want to congratulate the entire city team and the strong stabilizing force. Somebody who was a strong department head, who's already a part of the city management team just shifted into a new role. And I think she's going to complement the city manager very well. And I think we're in good hands. So congratulations again, Linda. My full confidence. Speaker 0: Thank you. And council member Ringo. Speaker 3: Thank you, Mayor. And I want to add my voice of support for the election selection of Linda with a new city manager. We have a new team, and I'm looking at what we have seen so far, and it's very positive. I want to congratulate Tom. I'm making a great selection. I want to congratulate Linda for accepting the position because she didn't have to. Do you want to be the city manager? Could have easily said no, but she said yes. And I'm glad that she did because she's going to bring a lot of talent to this position and she's going to bring a lot of expertize and a lot of good, good decisions with with the management team here. So as we move forward with a new team, looking forward to working with with everybody. Thank you very much. Speaker 0: Thank you. And Councilman Super now. Speaker 3: Thank you. I'd like to congratulate Linda. I'm really looking forward to bringing your expertize to the position. I don't think there's anyone in the city who knows more about the impacts of population density and and really looking forward to you looking at this through that lens. Also, if I could borrow a little bit of time, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention what a great job Rebecca Garner has done over the last few months as the acting assistant city manager. So thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilor. Super. And I'm going to just make some comments to close this out as well on this item. I want to just first, I just note that I think Linda Tatum is just a phenomenal choice, and I'm just really proud that we have such a great management team in place. Mr. MODICA You're doing a great job in your short tenure. You put together a really strong team. You brought an uplifted women into your team, which is important. I want to note and Mr. Mark, correct me if I'm wrong, I think that that Linda Tatum after this vote will be the highest ranking woman manager. I want to say in the history of the city, if I'm trying to remember woman of color, there have not been a woman of color in the position of manager or assistant city manager. As far back as I can remember, at least in in modern times. Is that right? Speaker 5: Yes, in testing memory that at least in the last 20 or 30 years that that is correct. Speaker 0: And so I don't think it's I don't think it should be lost on the moment that not only is Linda the most qualified and prepared person to take on this role, and that's why she was selected. I think, Linda, the fact that you're also kind of breaking that glass ceiling into that these top two positions is a testament to you, to your hard work. And really, it will serve as an inspiration to so many other women managers, managers of color that are looking to you as an inspiration and as someone that is really going to lead the city in a great direction. And so we know how important this role is. We certainly saw Tom in this role for many years, and certainly you will be different than Tom in this role. You guys are both, you know, complement each other. But we look forward to having you in this position and your leadership. We know it's going to be really, really felt. I want to personally also just thank Becky Garner for her just great work and commitment to the city of Long Beach. She loves Long Beach so much and just thank her for her service as well. And as well as the other wonderful managers and leaders that have been promoted into your leadership team that you announced recently. Mr. MODICA And with that, I know I'm not I'm sure if you hadn't been, if you had Ms.. Tatum join you tonight or not. Mr. MODICA There where you are, is she there by any chance? Speaker 5: Yes, she is. Speaker 0: Why don't we just say a few words? So this Tatum did you want to say a few words? Speaker 1: Thank you, Mayor. Members of the council for that. For those beautiful words. I'm deeply touched by them. And I cannot tell you how humble am in accepting this position and your trust, your faith and your confidence. And I I've said from day one that the minute I came to work for the city of Long Beach, I knew that it was a special place. And I will I will tell you why I've always felt that Long Beach, unlike other cities I've worked in, they they know who they are. The city as a whole. I have not worked in a city where the residents and the leadership is as proud to be from Long Beach and be a part of Long Beach. It's really a special place and I've loved and enjoyed my work here from day one. It's a wonderful team and I'm just I'm really proud to be a part of it. And I look forward to serving our city manager and meeting the council's goals and objectives and the challenges that we face in the coming weeks, months and years. So thank you so much for your support. Speaker 0: Thank you, Ms.. Tatum. Madam Clerk, any public comment? Speaker 4: Yes. We have one public comment from Laurie Smith. You have 3 minutes. Speaker 2: Hi. Thank you for letting me address the City Council on this issue before you vote to approve for Miss Tatum being the city manager. I live in 90803 and in City District three. And as a property owner in Bluff Park, historic district and recent recipient of the Mills Act, I wanted to make you aware of my concerns with regards to Linda's management of development services. She failed to address community concerns as part of her duties. Supervising the department and allowed projects that did not adhere to Long Beach municipal codes and audiences. So as a result, the property values of homes in the district are now in danger and as is our quality of life. So disappointing that Tatum has selectively ignored audiences that the homeowners must abide by for city projects. And this flagrant indifference toward city audiences have left the city culpable for damages to property owners in our historic landmark district, which specifically addresses my concerns, which I after and I put in the e-commerce for everyone to view. And those concerns were never addressed. Even though the Cultural Heritage Commission agreed with my concerns, they have never been addressed. So I just wanted to note that the city charter doesn't negate that the powers and duties of the city manager is to direct and supervise the administration of all manager directed departments and to see that the laws and ordinances are enforced and executed. So Miss Tatum and Craig, back with the department's Department of Public Works led these projects and they failed to abide by the ordinances, never address community concerns. And these were cultural heritage ordinance, historic district ordinance and the Bluff Park historic landmark district court case. So additionally, the Certified Local Government Program, which she was overseeing, violations of those now jeopardize the federal and state funding of these programs. So if you're approving her for a larger role within the city, it's not going to make honorable to her continued negligence of duties. And I respectfully asked the city council council members require city staff members to fulfill their duties and to abide by the municipal code and the state certification of the Office of Historic Preservation. So thank you for your time and consideration. And I wish that one of her first duties, if you so approve her, is to make sure that the projects that she put forward and allowed to go forward is returned. And so that we will not have to seek legal issues on this and waste more of. Speaker 3: Long. Speaker 2: Beach time on this issue. Thank you. Speaker 3: For your. Speaker 2: Consideration. Speaker 4: Thank you for calling for your comment. That concludes public comment. Speaker 0: Thank you. Let's go and take a roll call, though. Speaker 1: District one. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District two, i. District three. District three. District four. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 1: District five. Speaker 2: By. Speaker 1: District six. By District seven. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District eight. District nine. Speaker 3: By. Speaker 1: Motion carries. Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you. That concludes the regular agenda. Did I? Madam Court, did we miss any items or. Speaker 3: We get them all? We got them all right. Speaker 1: Yes, we're complete.

Appointment

Recommendation to confirm the appointment of Linda Tatum to the position of Assistant City Manager effective June 20, 2020. (Citywide)

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Speaker 3: Thank you. Concerned calendar has been adopted. We do have a hearing tonight. It's on cultural heritage. So let me turn this over to staff for the hearing. Speaker 6: So the City Clerk. Speaker 0: Report from Development Services recommendation to receive supporting documentation into the record, conclude the public hearing and find the project exempt from secure declared ordinance. Amending the Long Beach Municipal Code to extend the expiration date for certain certificates of appropriateness. An ordinance to extend the expiration date for certain subdivision and entitlement approvals. Read the first time and later for the next regular meeting of the City Council for Final Reading and adopt a resolution to submit the ordinance to the California Coastal Commission citywide. Speaker 3: Thank you, Mr. Modica. Speaker 6: Thank you. The staff report will be given by Linda Tatum, our director of development services. Speaker 1: Good evening, Mayor. Members of the Council. In March, when the city the city council declared a state of emergency, the staff was asked to take a look at their operations and look for ways to develop resiliency, measures to assist the city residents and business leaders to return to normal life amid the economic the pandemic. So this request tonight is for city council to adopt an ordinance that extends the expiration date for land use entitlements. These entitlements are essentially the city's approval to allow land to be developed in compliance with code regulations. And when they are approved, they are granted either by the Director of Development Services, the Zoning Administrator, Planning Commission, the City Council or the the Coastal Commission. They also include an expiration date whereby the the uses that are approved must be either developed or the use must be vested. And if they aren't vested within those expiration timeframes, the the entitlement is voided. And if it's if an any entitlement is voided, it essentially means that the developer or the applicant has to start from scratch and file a new application because entitlements are costly to acquire both in dollars and in time. They are a significant they have significant value to the applicant, but they also serve an important public purpose. They encourage timely development of projects that are approved, and they also ensure that development approvals can be reevaluated if conditions on the ground change before the project is built. So in times of economic stress, so just what we're experiencing right now, property owners may not be able to utilize their entitlements as quickly as they would under normal economic conditions. And the city's interest in these entitlements shifts to providing a more flexible approach for developers in order to encourage new development. So staff is recommending with this action that all entitlements be extended for a period of two years and that this provision be retroactive to January 1st of 2020. There is a range of of different entitlement timeframes for various city approvals. It could be anywhere from 12 months for the certificates of appropriateness that are approved by the Cultural Heritage Commission up to three years for track maps that are approved by the City Council. So what this action would do, it would essentially extend the the entitlement time period for approximately two years, but it would make a consistent three year entitlement across the board for any entitlement that the city council approved or that the city approves. We think that this is an appropriate action because it can take anywhere from 8 to 12 months to get an entitlement and then an additional 18 to 24 months for a developer to secure plans, get building permits and the like . So we think it's a business friendly approach that also continues to protect the city because none of the approval processes will change, nor will any of the development standards change. So with that action, staff is recommending that City Council approved both of the ordinance, both for the Cultural Heritage Commission approvals, as well as for the land use entitlements and the zoning code. That concludes staff's presentation, and I can answer any questions you might have. Speaker 3: Thank you. Can I get a motion in a second? If I can get, please, a motion in a second from the council, I have a motion by Councilwoman for ICE and a second by Councilmember Ranga. Councilman Pryce. Any comments? Speaker 1: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Speaker 3: Councilmember Ringa. Let me comment. Speaker 4: I've got to go. Thank you. Speaker 3: Okay, great. Councilman Austin, did you have any comments or were you queuing up. Speaker 4: For a motion? No comments from queuing up for the next emotional thing. Speaker 3: Okay, great. Then let's go ahead and then take a roll call vote, please. Speaker 1: City attorney. I think we it's a public hearing. I think we need to open it up for public comment. Speaker 6: Is there any public comment on the line? Speaker 3: I didn't I wasn't I was told there wasn't any on for this. Is there is there. Speaker 0: Call in public comments starts next Tuesday at the council meeting for this item. There's no. Nobody on the line and all public comments have been sent to council and staff. Speaker 3: Thank you. So I see the roll call vote. Speaker 0: District one. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District two. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: District three. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District four. Speaker 4: All right. Speaker 0: District five. Speaker 1: By. Speaker 0: District six. Speaker 4: All right. Speaker 0: District seven. Speaker 4: By. Speaker 0: District eight. District eight. District nine. Speaker 4: Hi. Hi. Speaker 0: Ocean carries. Speaker 4: Irrigators on. Speaker 0: This date is nice. Thank you. Speaker 3: Great hearing has concluded. We will begin. The first item of the evening is going to be item 11. This is the which again, we're checking all the covered items first. And so we'll get through those in this first part of the meeting.

Ordinance

Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach municipal code by amending Subsection 2.63.080.I, and Section 20.20.050; and by adding subsection 2.63.080.J, and Subsection 20.12.180.C, relating to the extension of the expiration period for certain Certificates of Appropriateness and modifying the expiration period for future approvals, read and adopted as read. (Citywide)

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Speaker 3: Great hearing has concluded. We will begin. The first item of the evening is going to be item 11. This is the which again, we're checking all the covered items first. And so we'll get through those in this first part of the meeting. So I know that Madam Park read the item and then we have a staff presentation. Speaker 0: For From Development Services recommendation to approve a first substantial amendment to the five year consolidated plan, Citizens Participation Plan and Fiscal Year Action Plan to incorporate emergency funds from the CARES Act. CDBG. CV and ESG CV. Authorize City Manager to execute all necessary documents with HUD and increase appropriations in the Community Development Grant Fund Group by 5,465,696 , offset by grant revenue citywide. Speaker 3: America. Speaker 6: Thank you. Remember Mayor and members of the city council. So this is a significant program. We want to spend some time to educate you on what it is that we're proposing. This started with the council item asking us to look into doing some assistance for rental properties and or people, tenants, I'm sorry, and funding it out of our cares funding. So the county has done a program. We've got some information on that. We are proposing a $5 million program as well. And I will turn it over to Linda Tatum and Patrick here to go through the program briefly. Speaker 1: Good evening, Mayor. Members of the council, we have a slide presentation for you with this item and we will walk through that as briefly as we can. This item is a request for approval of the city's in an amendment to the city's consolidated plan to accept the federal COVID 19 CDBG and emergency shelter grant for COVID, the stimulus funds that were allocated to 34 of four COVID response. So back in March of 2020, the federal government passed the what they called it the Cares the Cares Act that included a an approximately $5 billion allocation to city funding as well as a to $2 billion in CDBG funds for. For shelter. Available to jurisdictions for their 2020 city BG allocations. So of this federal allocation, the city will receive $3.6 million in CDBG funds for COVID relief, as well as $1.8 million in emergency shelter grant funding specifically for COVID. I think I just want to point out that this is an immediate allocation. This funding that we're going to be talking about tonight is a is available immediately. It is only a portion of the approximately $9 billion that was allocated by the federal government. So we do we learned today that we will be receiving additional funding under both of these programs, both the emergency shelter grant, as well as the CDBG grants, specifically for COVID. So this is part one. Again, the proposal that I will be walking through tonight, talk specifically about the rental assistance, but with the subsequent funding, we are hoping to be more expansive in terms of the programs that we would be bringing back to this Council for consideration. Okay. What? Essentially, what the CARES Act does is it eliminates some of the provisions that cities would normally have to go through to expand their city by defunding. So I'll give you the broad categories under which the city can expend these COVID funds. They can spend it on building or public facilities. They can also use it for business and economic development, and they can also improve or enhance public services. And that's the category under which we are proposing staff implement the rental assistance program. The fourth category that it could be used for is for planning and technical assistance. And I think I would actually point out that there is an administrative component to these fees that's also included in this grant. So as I talk about this program, I didn't mention it, but it will be all of the staffing costs associated with the implementation would be covered under the grant funding. So again, in early April, staff, once we received word of this allocation, we began looking at potential program areas with the objective to focus on areas or areas that weren't currently being served either by other state or federal programs or by local programs that have been put in place by by this council. With that in April, about April 21st, the city council, as the city manager mentioned, we got direction from the council to take a look at the county's rental assistance program. And we did so. And we were also, through the mayor's action, pursuing additional funding from the county. This program, however, reflects the city's very specific allocation, specifically for use in the south, in the city of Long Beach, because the county's program and their funding was available specifically for unincorporated county residents. However, we did look closely and confer with the county staff in terms of looking at how they administered their program. And we realized that because we could not share their program and nor their funding, we had to develop our own program. But we wanted to make sure that we were at least looking at the components of their program, especially given that we were going to receive funding or we had anticipated getting some assistance from the county through Supervisor Hahn. Okay. As I mentioned earlier, there are three actions that the county's being that the city council is being asked to take. We are amending our current CDBG documents and these the amendment of these three documents, the citizen participation plan, our five year consolidated plan and our current fiscal year action plans. The city will amend these documents as a basis to receive and implement the and expand the CARES Act funds. So I talked earlier about this being a special allocation and and HUD has seen fit to waive some of these standard requirements. Those requirements that they waived are listed here. And I think it's been particularly helpful because the idea was so that we can get the money in hand and get it out to the to the community needs as quickly as possible. So these these waivers essentially enable us to develop a program quickly and to get I guess, to just get it underway as quickly as possible. So I'll talk really briefly about the program elements. I mentioned earlier that the the $9 billion Federal Cares Funding Act of the the amount that's available to us currently there are 3.6 in city B g funds specifically for community development related activities under the federal objectives. There is also 1.8 for the emergency shelter grant and those funds are being currently implemented by the the city's Health and Human Services Department in addition to the federal funds. Staff was asked to look to see if we could supplement this program funding with additional funds to to stretch it a little bit further. And we've been able to do so and are proposing an additional $2 million in CDBG funds to extend the the number of households that we can reach with this funding. So I'll walk you through really a highlight of the program proposals we are proposing to provide up to $1,000 in monthly rental assistance, up to $1,000 and up to three months. So a maximum of 3000 for any any one household. And this would be for households, low income households earning 80% or less of the area, median income. And the criteria are that they would have to have experienced homelessness I'm sorry, experienced income loss due to COVID 19 or and they also have to make sure that the payments are made directly to the landlord. And this was a part of the reason why staff thought that this was an appropriate spending mechanism, because there are currently no other programs that puts money directly into the hands of the landlord, specifically for rental payment and any of the other direct federal programs. And we thought that it would also be assisting landlords because they are in some cases small business owners at will as well. So we felt that this was hitting kind of hitting two areas of need in the community. As I mentioned, we modeled our program after the L.A. County program and adding the 2 million. In addition to the 3 million allocated by HUD, we will have a total of $5 million program. And if City Council adopts the program recommended by staff at 3000, a maximum of 3000, we could serve up to 1600 households. If Council determines that they'd like to see some other financial allocation of these dollars. There are some options available and I'll just throw out a couple. For example, if we allocated up to $800 per month, that would serve approximately 2083 households. And if you did something as as low as $500, that would allow us to serve even even more households up to just over 3300. But staff is recommending the $1,000. We do want to model it and be consistent with the county program because we are receiving an additional $300,000 in county funds from Supervisor Hahn. I would just note that I mentioned earlier that the emergency shelter grant funds are being administered by the Health Department. And I would like to just point out that all the funds have to be expended by December of 2020. I've included an income and a household size just for your reference, so you can get a sense of the eligibility for the program. And I just want to really briefly wrap it up by talking about how SAP would roll out the program. We think that it's important that we spend an adequate amount of time marketing the program in the community. Appropriate noticing. We're thinking of a program of approximately a minimum of two weeks to make sure that we get the noticing out to the community. We would work with stakeholders and others, including our economic development department, to get the word out to the communities as well as council offices. We will make sure that the application materials are available online, but we would provide direct staff assistance to mail the applications to anyone who would like to apply for the program. Lastly, we are recommending that we use a lottery system to receive the applications that we receive in the mail. We would ask for a minimum of 2000 lottery spots be given and then we would work through those to identify the qualifying households and again proceed to implement the program. We would do a very strong language access component just to make sure that the the applications as well as all of the program information are available in multiple languages in the community. We do have staffing to complete this task and we are ready and anxious to move forward with Council's recommendation of this program. And I again just highlighting that we did receive funding from Supervisor Hon and this funding of 300,000 will enable us to support an additional 100 households. So if we go with staff's recommendation, that would be approximately 1700 households. This concludes staff's presentation and I'm available to answer any questions. I will leave up on the board the next steps. And that's a rough schedule of how the program would be rolled out. Thank you. Speaker 3: Thank you. And thank you to the team for that. That's a great, great update. I want to I do have a motion in a second already. I'll go to those in a minute. I just want to add how important it is for the city to give direct financial assistance to to renters and to tenants. Essentially, this is a program that's going to give tenants in Long Beach that are were affected by COVID 19 with direct rental assistance. And we're talking about $1,000 a month. We know that for many that is not enough. But that is going to be that is going to help a lot of working people and working families in our community that need that support. So I want to thank First Councilwoman Janice Hahn for adding to our our program. That's significant. We're still asking and seeking for more dollars so we can make this program even more robust. Also want to thank Councilman Austin, who is kind of leading this effort at the at the council here as well. And I know he's queued up to speak next. And so I want to thank him and his work. And I've heard from from from renters across the city, they need this additional support. And and I'm really proud that the city was able to put this program together. Let's get it done and let's get it and let's get folks the support that they need. So with that, I want to turn this over to Councilman Austin. Speaker 4: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And I want to thank staff for their quick response and quick work on this particular item. We brought this forward maybe three weeks ago. I'm going to I'm really amazed at how quickly our city can respond under crisis. We asked if this was feasible, if this was possible to be able to develop a rental assistance program. And you guys came through in a big way. $5.4 million is nothing to sneeze at. It will help a lot of working families. The mayor said it will also help a lot of housing providers, property owners who are behind on their mortgages as well. I believe this these funds will go directly to the landlords and I'm encouraged after our state led committee and know that our city, our lobbyists in Washington, D.C., are working very diligently to get more resources in the next round of Cares and Hero program. And so with that said, I'm thrilled to have been able to bring this forward. I'm even more elated that we are able to provide this assistance to many families in our city. Of course, not enough, but we'll work to continue to get the funding as it comes available in the next weeks and months to come. And so with that, I'd like to make the motion to support the staff recommendation. Of $1,000 a month of up to $1,000 a month. But before I do that, I do want to ask what the up to actually means because probably less. Speaker 1: And yes, it means that because they will have to show the actual arrears of the rent as well as what their monthly rent payments are, they would get up to whatever their standard rent payment is, up to a maximum of 100. So it could actually, in theory, be less if their rent is less than 1000 per month. Speaker 4: Okay. Thank you for that clarification. With that, I make the motion. Thank you. And ask for my colleagues to support as well. Speaker 3: Thank you, Councilwoman Mongo. Speaker 1: Thank you. Councilmember Austin. Excellent work. I love this program. I think that it's exactly what's needed at this time. I do appreciate the thoughtfulness that came from staff in setting this up. I would only say that if I were a tenant or a landlord and I was waiting for a lottery to determine my ability to. In my apartment or my housing. It just seems to me like a big risk. I guess my question for staff is if you were to take a guess at how many applicants we would receive, what would be your thoughts? We don't have a really good idea. I think in large part it depends upon how how exuberant we are with the advertising and we are going to try to do that is as widely as possible. I think it will be. I would just throw it a wild guess and say probably 3000. And I will tell you that the need in the community is far greater than that. I mean, if you look at the need based upon incomes in the community, the impact of COVID, if you look at overcrowding, if you look at overpayment of rent, all of those are factors that determine need. So we know that the need is great. It's it's just hard to to guesstimate. But if I had to throw out a number, I'd say upwards of 3000 applications. And then for. Your process? Will we be providing technical assistance to individuals who'd like to apply? You said they would mail in their application. What does that look like? Is it simple? We have a hotline established to provide technical assistance to applicants, and we will be providing assistance. We will mail applications out to those who don't have direct computer access to download the applications. So in short, we'll be doing everything we can to encourage a very robust outreach for this program, as well as a robust support system, as well for applicants who want to submit. So I'm not making a friendly amendment or anything. I'm just going to throw some ideas out there if the city staff think we'll be receiving up to 3000 applications. My thought would be that we would look for a way to be able to meet 100% of the need. Meaning that. Of course, we'd like to receive another $5.3 million, which would get us up to 3400 homes. That up to $1,000, but we don't have that today. And so my only thought would be that we do have today it's $5.3 million. And if we gave 50% rent to 3200 people and then a second payment came in for $5.3 million, we would already have everyone pre-qualified and ready to potentially get a second payment and then everyone theoretically who applies could get help. Now, I'm not the main guru of this idea, and I didn't write the program. I didn't do the research. I really would love to hear from my colleagues, not my motion. I appreciate the opportunity to secure it and be a part of it. And I want to make sure that the idea, though, that if I were one of the applicants, I would rather receive 50% of the money than a 5050 chance of getting zero. That would just be my initial gut reaction. Thank you. Speaker 3: Thank you. Let me just keep going down. I have a few more speakers. Councilmember Pearce. Speaker 2: Thank you. Thank you. Councilmember Austin and staff for all of your work on this. I have a couple of questions for Linda and then a couple questions for our city attorney. I really, really appreciate this. The need is great and we know that even the people that have received unemployment, it's not enough for them to pay all their bills and pay all their rent. So my first clarifying question is, is this money going to the tenants or the landlords? Because I thought last time it was directly to the landlords. Speaker 1: The Court The criteria that are specified by HUD will require the payment be made directly to the landlord. So we work with the tenant to qualify the tenant, and once the tenant is qualified, the actual payment will go directly to the landlord. Speaker 2: Great. That's what I thought. The second point, Stacie Councilmember Margo, I know you mentioned it's not. We don't have to get into a back and forth. But my concern with that would be that some people might get a job by, say, you know, September or October and then they wouldn't qualify for the second part of the payment . So I would just worry about people not being able to get the rent assistance that they need. You know, if it is one or two months instead of the full three months. So that is that point. And then I have questions for our city attorney. So we this council, we I'm really proud of all the work that we've done on this council around renter issues and tenant issues. And I think, you know, while some of us, more than others, would like to see programs in place around, you know, prohibiting rent increases in their fault evictions, but we're not going to do that for the entire city. We know that. And my question for the city attorney is here we are giving city funds or county funds and CDBG funds. Could we say that for those landlords that accept this funding, where their tenant qualifies for this funding, that they then would agree to a temporary prohibition on rent increases, say, until the end of when tenants are paying their rent. So like July 31st, is that something that could be done with these funds? Speaker 6: I'm going to ask Rich Anthony to respond to that question. Speaker 2: Thank you. Speaker 4: Over. Speaker 3: Okay. Speaker 4: Hey, can people hear me? This is Rich Anthony. Speaker 2: Yes, Rich. Thank you. Speaker 3: Sorry about that, Billy. If what you're. I think the answer is maybe. Let me understand what you're asking a little better. Speaker 7: I don't think. Speaker 4: That the city can say if a tenant applies for. Speaker 3: This assistance and qualifies that the landlord. Speaker 4: Is. Speaker 7: Or then to not raise rent or to not. Speaker 4: Engage in a no fault eviction. Speaker 3: I don't think we can do that. But I'm not sure that that's what you're saying. I think what you might be saying is. Speaker 4: If we could give the landlord the choice, if the landlord wants to accept. Speaker 3: These dollars on behalf of a tenant, then the landlord knows that the two strings that are attached is if if he or she is going to accept the dollars, then they are not can be able to raise rent through a certain time period. They will not be able to know. Speaker 4: For eviction through a certain time period. Little bit. Speaker 3: Though, that gives landlords effectively the. Speaker 4: Right to deny a tenant or a tenant that otherwise has. Speaker 3: Qualified. The landlord can refuse that and say, no. Speaker 2: I'm not going to accept my rent. Speaker 4: Okay. Speaker 2: Then if we're giving taxpayer dollars, could we then say because we're in the middle of COVID, right. So people are going to be saving. Sorry, guys. Yes. Thank you. You mean just leave it at that. Sorry, guys. So we would be able to have tenants accept the money. I don't want to deny tenants the right to the money, but it makes sense to me that it would protect them from eviction or everything else. Speaker 4: Thank you. This is Rich Anthony again. I don't think we can do that. I don't think we can make it so that a tenant that qualifies then cannot have. Speaker 3: His or her rent raised or cannot be evicted for a no fault eviction, which would otherwise be legal under applicable law. I think that would probably raise some legal issues with landlords. You know, certain landlords that happen to have tenants that qualify for this COVID related relief and. Speaker 4: Rental assistance payments would suddenly be. Speaker 3: Operating under different rules than. Speaker 4: Similarly situated. Speaker 3: Landlords who didn't have tenants that qualified. And that seems. Speaker 4: Arbitrary to me at first pass. Admittedly, I have. Speaker 3: Not done a deep dove on. Speaker 4: Research on this, but I think that would. Speaker 3: Be problematic. And the way. Speaker 4: To address that problem, like I said, would give the landlords the ability to to not. Speaker 3: To not accept the rent. That might. Speaker 4: Be a problem. Speaker 3: For the very constituency of tenants that we're trying to help. Speaker 2: Yeah. I personally don't want to give landlords the ability to say no to money and then I am not a tenant, not be able to pay their rent. So that that is my my concern. I mean, I guess if there's more funding coming in and we've all been distracted this past week, I think it would be great if more funding comes in, if you could present some more legal background on this. Just because I feel like it's the only chance that we would have to protect people that have been impacted by COVID. Unless other people on the council would want to get to that place. So I'm my other questions. I'll move on from that issue and just ask that you've been able to do a little bit of research when you come back, if there's more funding provided. Second is, I know that there were some questions that community members and other people that I've talked to around the CBD funds, those funds are able to be spent throughout the city. Correct? Speaker 1: That is correct. The benefit is seen as being to the income qualified applicants. So yes, there is not a limitation to CDBG eligible areas as there are in other CDBG programs. Speaker 2: Okay. And then second. With that, with that funding, it seems like that's close to 4 million. Correct out of the hole fund. Speaker 1: The the CDBG allocation is 3.6 million six. Speaker 2: And I guess it's the same question is even though it's allowed to be spent throughout the city, I want to make sure that undocumented immigrants do not get left out of this process. And so for each of the funds, would people that are undocumented be able to qualify? Speaker 1: You know, there are no there are no. Speaker 3: Just to be clear also yet and this is available for everybody, including undocumented folks, and that's really important. So, yes. Speaker 2: Okay. Okay. I am going to take a minute. I'd like to hear from my colleagues on the questions I asked the city attorney just in regards of I guess the bottom line would be, do we want landlords? That would be good landlords to be able to qualify to get this funding if we were to add strings to it, like no rent increases during the COVID period and no eviction, no no fault eviction during this period up to July 31st. So I'd love to hear what what people think because maybe I'm off on not wanting to go that route, but like to hear my colleagues. Speaker 1: Thank you. Speaker 3: I think you councilman's in Sunday house. Speaker 1: Their first love. Thank you very much to the staff for this very, very comprehensive item. Thank you, Council Member Austin, for your motion on this item. As you all know. And many. And this is not exclusive in my district, but it's overwhelmingly in my district that what my my residents are asking for is help with rent. Long Beach was very proactive in enacting the eviction moratorium when the COVID 19/1 first time. And I want to thank my colleagues for all the amazing work that you did in bringing forth the moratorium and supporting policies like this, especially during our emergency. So I'm really excited about that. I'm also very thankful to know that the payment will go directly to the landlord. I think that that's a great way to to really help honor our tenants that are struggling with rent, to be able to to be able to help them in that way, especially for those that may be undocumented and prefer something going directly to their landlord. And not only that, but it also kind of helps out our property owners, which, you know, have been very, very much affected by this. And that's something we don't talk about much. But, you know, our property owners are landlords, you know, have been. They're suffering a lot through this as well. So this is going to be really good to be able to give them a little bit of of money that they've been owed and so on, and also bring some kind of relief to them going back to council . Council. Woman Pearce's questions in regards to the landlords, I think, and please correct me if I'm wrong. Council Member But I do think that what you might be trying to do is kind of like. Bring some. Use this as an incentive for those good landlords that are out there that are willing to come forward and accept funding like this. But like, I'm not sure what the legalities are as well. So I look forward to hearing the report from the city attorney's office. If we do get additional funding that maybe we can take a look at it then. Also wanted to see how the the city needs. Funds would be distributed, how much it would be. And I know that's part of this. So I'm looking forward to this program very much because I know that, especially in my district, this is going to help so many, so many families. And as Councilmember Mungo said, it kind of makes me nervous the lottery way that we're doing it. But it also seems like the most fair way I would like to see all of the families that apply, know, get, get help. And hopefully, you know, we don't know how it's going to work. We don't know if there's going to be a whole abundance of families that are going to want to apply right away or we don't know if we'll be able there won't be that many applications and maybe we can help everyone. So I can't wait to see this program move forward. And you. Speaker 3: Thank you, Vice Mayor Andrews. Yes. Speaker 4: Thank you very much, Mayor. You know, I don't doubt that we need this. I think, you know, let's get the website. You know, as we speak. Let's get all the website, you know, with this system that is, you know, equitable and provided, you know, payment on behalf of those working families that have been laid off, I has reduced hours. I think that to me, it makes a lot a lot of sense. Thank you very much. Speaker 3: Thank you, Councilmember Turanga. Speaker 4: Thank you, Mayor. When it comes right down to it. We don't normally we legislation like this because we want to make sure that we do it right and get it right. And when it comes down to it is that there's a lot of good players out there and there's a lot of bad players. So sometimes we would come up with these types of options. It's to make sure that the good players get rewarded and the bad players get to go somewhere else. So, I mean, I support Janine's idea because I think it's a good one and we need to keep landlords honest that they're going to take the money and that they're going to do right by their tenants. And hopefully that when we come to the end of it, to the end of the day, is that everybody gets everybody's happy. Landlords get their money. Tenants get to stay where they're at and and be able to survive this public crisis until it's over and until they get back on their feet. So that's all my comments for now. Thank you. Speaker 3: I think I'm got some more super out. Speaker 5: Thank you. I just wanted to thank Austin for. I think that's the best thing. And I. Speaker 3: Thank you, Councilmember Pearce. Catherine Pierce second time. Speaker 2: I did queue up a second time. I was really looking forward to hearing if Councilmember Austin had any thoughts on. On the mainly the two items, the prohibition on rent increases and the prohibition on no fault evictions. Since the city attorney did say that they were they were legal, it would just it would just mean that landlords would have a choice in the matter. Speaker 3: Councilor Pearce. Anything else? Speaker 2: I would like to know nothing else. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 3: It counts. I think that's the customers queue up again. Speaker 4: She asked me to talk. Speaker 3: About some present day has. Speaker 1: I do. Speaker 3: Oh. Speaker 1: I was just. Yes, I'm good. Speaker 3: Okay. I have no one else cued up to talk, so we'll go ahead and call a vote on the motion. No one else has a comment. I understand. I don't have any other cues. I'm just making sure I'm following the colors. You're so. Madam Clerk, please go ahead and call the roll. Speaker 0: District one. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District two. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: District three. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District four. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 0: District five. I. District six. District seven. By District eight. Speaker 4: Or. Speaker 0: District nine. I know. She Kerry's. Speaker 3: Okay. Let's do item 19, 20 and 21, which are just as I think, I think additional readings of items we've already passed. Item 19, please.

Contract

Recommendation to approve a first substantial amendment to the 2018-2022 Five-Year Consolidated Plan, Citizen Participation Plan, and Fiscal Year 2019-2020 Action Plan to incorporate emergency funds from the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act (CARES Act), Community Development Block Grant Coronavirus (CDBG-CV) and Emergency Solutions Grant Coronavirus (ESG-CV), and approve a substantial amendment to the Fiscal Year 2017 and Fiscal Year 2018 Action Plans to reallocate Home Investment Partnerships Program (HOME) funds for COVID-19 response; Authorize City Manager, or designee, to execute all necessary documents with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), and other entities necessary to receive these funds, and execute agreements necessary to implement and comply with related federal regulations; and Increase appropriations in the Community Development Grant Fund Group in the Development Services Department by $5,465,696, offset by grant revenue. (Citywide)

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Speaker 3: Okay. Let's do item 19, 20 and 21, which are just as I think, I think additional readings of items we've already passed. Item 19, please. Speaker 0: Communication from City Attorney Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code relating to COVID 19 paid supplemental sick leave, declaring the urgency thereof and declaring that this ordinance shall take effect immediately. Read and adopted as read citywide. Speaker 3: Okay. I see a motion that comes from Sunday House. Can I get a second, please? Second bit. Council member Ashton. Please, please do a roll call vote. Speaker 0: District one. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District two. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: District three. I. District four. Speaker 7: All right. Speaker 0: District five. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District six. Speaker 4: Okay. Speaker 0: District seven. Speaker 4: I. Speaker 0: District eight. Speaker 4: All right. Speaker 0: District nine.

Emergency Ordinance

Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code by adding Chapter 8.110 relating to COVID-19 paid supplemental sick leave; declaring the urgency thereof; and declaring that this ordinance shall take effect immediately, read and adopted as read. (Ordinance No. ORD-20-0017). (Citywide)

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Speaker 5: All right. Speaker 0: Motion carries. Speaker 3: Item 20, please. Speaker 0: Communication from City Attorney Recommendation to declare ordinance. Amending the Long Beach Municipal Code relating to the temporary prohibition of evictions due to COVID 19, declaring the urgency thereof and declaring that this ordinance shall take effect immediately. Read and adopted as read. Speaker 3: Can I get a motion in a second by Councilmember Pierce? Can I get a second, please? Seconded by Councilwoman and de Haas. Please do a roll call vote. Speaker 0: Council District one. And so District one I. District two by district three. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District four. District five. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District six. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 0: District seven. Speaker 4: I. Speaker 0: District eight. District nine. Speaker 5: All right. Speaker 0: Motion carries.

Emergency Ordinance

Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code by amending Subsection 8.100.030.A., and Sections 8.100.040 and 8.100.050; all relating to the temporary prohibition of evictions due to COVID-19; declaring the urgency thereof; and declaring that this ordinance shall take effect immediately, read and adopted as read (Ordinance No. ORD-20-0020). (Citywide)

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Speaker 3: Q Thank you. We're going to do item 21, another COVID related item. Speaker 0: Communication from Councilmember Richardson Council and Zendaya's Councilwoman Mango Council Member Urunga Recommendation to request City Manager to explore the feasibility of deploying tools and resources necessary to ensure retail businesses and restaurants can successfully and safely reopen. Speaker 3: I have a motion by Councilmember Richardson and a second councilwoman, and Bay has concerned Richardson. Speaker 5: Sure, I'll be brief. The reopening of our economy. The economy is coming in pretty, pretty quickly. A number of our businesses, although they are excited about opening there, there has been a number of things that folks are uncomfortable with. And we need to add the tools and resources to make sure that people have a plan, resources to open safely. That means technical assistance on how to reach some of the standards put out. In terms of occupancy. It means offering certain tools like online digital queuing systems to make sure that we reduce the waiting and barbershops and things like that. So a number of examples are outlined in the motion. I've talked to this with city staff. I think we can do more to make sure that our businesses are prepared to reopen safely in order to limit the impact and the spread of COVID 19. Thank you. Speaker 3: Thank you. Councilman Van De has. Speaker 1: Thank you, Councilmember Richardson, for this item and very supportive of the item. Speaker 3: Councilman on Mango. Speaker 1: Thank you. I also am very supportive of the item. I think it's really important that we use all methods possible to help businesses get back open so that our residents can resume their jobs so that they have a solid income. And I would just encourage us to continue to look at all options. Speaker 3: Thank you. With that roll call vote, please. Speaker 0: District one. I district to. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: District three. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District four. Speaker 4: All right. Speaker 0: District five. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District six. District seven. District eight. Speaker 4: All right. Speaker 0: District nine. Speaker 5: Hi. Speaker 0: Ocean. Speaker 3: Thank you. We still have four more Kogan items, so we'll try to get through these expeditiously. Item six the small business loan program. Madam Court. Madam Clerk.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to request City Manager to work with the Department of Financial Management and the Economic Development Department to explore the feasibility of deploying tools and resources necessary to ensure retail businesses and restaurants can successfully and safely reopen.

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Speaker 3: Thank you. We still have four more Kogan items, so we'll try to get through these expeditiously. Item six the small business loan program. Madam Court. Madam Clerk. Speaker 0: Item six Communication from Councilwoman Mango Councilwoman Zendejas. Councilman Austin. Councilmember Richardson. Recommendation to request City Manager to work with economic development to research, prepare and propose an equitable and effective COVID 19 Small Business Recovery Loan Plan. Speaker 3: Mango. Speaker 1: Yes, thank you. I would just say that in addition to the loan program, CARES Act funding is available for grants. And so I think that we can look at additional ways to operationalize that funding should it become available. I think that I want to thank all the different businesses that came together in the many forums that we conducted. People and business owners who live, work, own in the fifth District or throughout the city or participated. We definitely had different groups by type, whether it was restaurants, gyms, personal comfort items like hair care and nail care and the others. And each and every industry has its own set of needs. I think that it's imperative that we listen to what they need and then work through what is possible to make their needs fulfilled in any way that's possible through CARES Act funding or loan programs or the such. Speaker 3: Thank you, Councilwoman, Councilman and House. Speaker 1: You, Mayor. First of all, I'd like to thank Councilwoman Mongeau for bringing this item forward. I personally know that so many downtown businesses that were struggling before COVID and with COVID happening and the closures, it's just been really, really hard for the businesses. So I, I really welcome this item and that this, this help that we're going to be able to provide for our small business owners, I think is very much needed. And through this, I also have learned that a lot, even though a lot of businesses in in the in certain categories, each and every business is individual and have unique needs. So as we go forward, I'd really like us to have that flexibility at looking at each business and its unique needs as we move forward and reopen again. So thank you again. Councilmember one vote for this item. Speaker 3: Councilmember Richardson. Speaker 5: I just wanted to second the motion. I'm fully in support of the iron ore evidence, but I fully support the item. Thank you. Speaker 3: Dr. Pierce. Speaker 2: Thanks and thank you, Mungo, for bringing this forward. I think a lot of us have been thinking about how to support our small businesses and second districts definitely lost money. And I just wanted to take a moment to thank economic development for all the work that they've been doing, especially on the front end of this disaster. And then hear one more time from city manager just on the process for reopening. I know that we had a briefing. Yesterday or the day before where we talk about the numbers of covert incidents. And I think this is a good moment just to remind people that while we want the economy to open back up, it it comes at the risk of increased numbers. So if you could just explain to us one more time about the new or the next step and what that's going to take for these businesses to open up. Speaker 6: Yes, mayor and members of the city council. So we recently received the ability as a variance county to open up additional items and additional sectors that the Governor announced that last Friday with the ability for counties and health jurisdictions to make those decisions coming up as early as Friday. So we are in the process of that. It was 12 different sectors. That's a lot. Normally in the past, it's been one or two or three sectors. And so we are currently going through all the data to see where we line up with the governor's benchmarks for the ability to, for example, have enough testing, have enough hospital capacity, and then preparing some of those guidances about what can safely open when. And we expect that work to be done at the end of this week. And you're correct. You know, we obviously like to have our economy back up and going again. But it's also a balance with the amount of of cases that we still continue to see that are climbing and our hospitalization rate is up and it's actually higher than the county right now on a per $100,000 or 100,000 population basis. So it is a balance and we're going to have some some recommendations very soon about what we think should open and when and work with the county of L.A. on that. Speaker 2: All right. Thank you, Tom. And I just I wanted to go on record in saying that I love our small businesses and I would love for them all to be open. But I am very worried about our numbers going up and so making sure that we have, you know, support for them. The previous item also mentioned, I think you started to support this. Speaker 3: Europe, although. Speaker 0: District one. District one, district two. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District three. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District four. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 0: District five. District six. Speaker 4: I. Speaker 0: District seven. Speaker 4: I. Speaker 0: District eight. District nine. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 0: Motion carried.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to request City Manager to work with Department of Economic Development to research, prepare, and propose an equitable and effective “COVID-19 Small Business Recovery Loan Plan” for key sectors that have been hit hardest by closures associated with the COVID-19 emergency including but not limited to: (i) restaurants, (ii) retail, (iii) services, (iv) non-profit, (v) property-based businesses, and (vi) other very small businesses that provide employment to Long Beach residents; and, propose funding levels that consider the number of Long Beach business licenses within each category, and the projected needs of those within those categories to rebound.

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Speaker 3: Great. Thank you. We have one final item that is part of this COVID 19 package, and then one will be moving on to the next set of items. This is the item ten, which is related to basic needs. And so, Madam Cook, can you read item ten? Speaker 0: Communication from Councilmember Richardson, Councilwoman Zendejas, Vice Mayor Andrews, Councilmember, your UNGA recommendation to request city manager to work with Health and Human Services and the Office of Civic Innovation to create a citywide basic needs security initiative known as B and T and together Long Beach. Speaker 3: Thank you. And I'll turn this over to Councilmember Richardson. Speaker 5: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I wanted to do a more full sort of presentation here, but obviously, you know, there's been a reprioritization of my focus. And this the proposal here is to acknowledge that right here in this moment, while we're facing three crises, the city has a role in providing and expanding for the provision of basic needs within our city. We know that in this moment we have more shelter capacity than we've ever had, which it's always been a touch, you know, touch and go discussion on where the shelters go. But in this moment, through this crisis, we have more shelter capacity we ever had. We've seen unprecedented levels of care and giving and food security, people coming together, uniting, figuring out how to just help people put food on the table. And in this moment, the city has a responsibility. And that responsibility is to leverage our tools and our resources to package these things in a way that it is easy to access in a way that is simple to access. Put a front door on all the things that are happening. The front door could mean a simple phone number. If you're hungry or you need shelter, call one phone number. A front door could mean a digital dashboard that highlights the capacity to meet food security and the level of hunger . Our capacity to meet shelter security with the level of need for shelter in a way that the broader community can be engaged, the philanthropy community can engage, the food security and housing security community can be engaged. And this is this is something that I think we're uniquely positioned to do. I know that mostly food security has been taken care of by, let's say, Wik or county or federal or state resources, Cal Fresh and all those things. Well, so our workforce dollars and we do that here in the city of Long Beach with Pacific Gateway, we take federal resources of state resources and we put a front door on it. So it's easy to walk in. You have a one stop job center where you can engage all these programs in one place. That's what we should be doing. Nothing is more important than ever given all that we're we're facing right now, that the the public sees and understands that their condition, the way that they access food, whether they get shelter, their head is is a top priority. I know that it has been, but we need to reaffirm that. We need to reaffirm that in the way we package and the way we discuss this. One thing I'll say is I came up with this name, you know, the basic needs band together or didn't have any brand and together it took VA from basic indi from need and said band together we can call this whatever we want to call it. That's not as important. What's important is making sure people can access these resources. We have the resources to coordinate and that we can continue to fund and support food security and shelter within our city. Thank you. Speaker 3: Thank you. Next up is. In the house. Speaker 1: Thank you, Mayor, and thank you, Councilmember Richardson, for for this item and for allowing me to co-sponsor this item. As you know. I it's it's just been really difficult with COVID 19. And I'm very, very proud of the city leaders, our community leaders, our volunteers who have just come together and realized that food insecurity has been one of our biggest, biggest, most critical need in this city with COVID 19. And I think that it's very important to understand that a lot of people are are losing their jobs and and don't have a lot of resources, whether it's for they're trying to decide between food and rent and stuff. So I think something like this is very important. I'm really excited for this program and to see how we can make the program like this work. In times like this, when when the community comes together, I think great ideas come out of times like this. So moving forward, I'm really excited to see how this program is going to elevate our city even to a higher level. So thank you for letting me be part of this. Speaker 3: Mr. Andrews. Speaker 4: Yes. Yes. Thank you. Thank you very much, ma'am. You know, I think that this is a great item. You know, I know the city has been pulled in many, many different directions. And I must give credit to every single legislative staff that has worked in each council office that was out in the trenches, like my staff, 11 old door to door and taking owners about their way and needs when the call back was about councilwoman. And I want to thank you also. And I started with, you know, and we started a great food relief fund that in Midtown went from 1000 and that matched 95 various donors in the organization. Now this department would have have is really available in various languages and for those who still grapple with the digital divide. And I want to thank you for all of. You know, the church has been a nonprofit organization, the community religious and stepped up to the plate during this crisis and had an amazing work and put in the rapid and the rapid response with the grant fund. They basically have support the Latino community. And I want to thank you very much for that. Thank you very much, Mayor. Speaker 3: Thank you, vice mayor. Next up is Councilman Mongo. Speaker 1: Thank you. I want to thank you, Councilman Richardson. I know we talked about this long before it became an agenda item and some of the things that the Fifth District just talked about for years. And we're really able to be operationalized during COVID. The fifth District is home to thousands of fruit plants, fruit trees that produce large quantities of fruit that often get spoiled or wasted. And one of the things that we were approached about several years ago was how do we as a city harness all of that food? We have community gardens on the east side that donate over £60,000 of edged apples and fruit a year to our homeless shelters. But during this crisis, we were able to work with our churches to do drop off food drives, encouraging those who had an abundance of fruit from their home trees to donate them at our local churches that were then packaged with people who didn't have fruit trees dropped off, necessities including but not limited to rice, pasta, soup and all of those things, and put together packages for hundreds of families across the city. I am in lockstep with hoping that we can continue these efforts beyond this time. Not only is it good for the community that we serve to have fresh fruits and vegetables available to them year round, but it's also really good for our community in terms of the depletion of rodents. When you don't have fruit on the ground for them to eat, you don't have rodents that are overfed, then you don't have coyotes and so on and so forth. So this has been something that's been really able to get a kick start during this crisis, but has been on the brink for many years. And so I'm glad that while we have the momentum, we look at this as a as an opportunity to hopefully institutionalize within a lot of our partners the ability to keep systems like this going long term. Speaker 3: Thank you. Council Member Councilmember Councilmember Pearce, I don't know if you were queued up for the last item or did I call you or is this a new queue up for this one? Speaker 2: Not good. Thank you. Speaker 3: Okay. Sorry about that. Okay, then that concludes council comment, will. Before we do the roll call vote, I just want to add just very, just very grateful to all the council members that have been doing these drives. I've seen been seeing some of them out there, including the community community groups. Speaker 4: The whether it's food. Speaker 3: Finder or the the our labor and union partners, brothers and sisters that are out there putting these drives together. They've been amazing to see. And so just thank you to everyone involved in these food and these food drives. And I think focusing on food security and food access is really important. I just want to thank the council members that have this board in front of the council today. So with that, if we can do a roll call vote. Speaker 0: District one. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District two. District three. District three. Speaker 4: District. Speaker 0: High District for. Speaker 5: I. Speaker 0: District five. Speaker 1: II. Speaker 0: District six. I strict seven. Speaker 4: I. Speaker 0: District eight. Speaker 4: I. Speaker 0: District nine. Speaker 5: All right. Speaker 0: Motion carries. Speaker 3: With you. Good question, Chris. That concludes all of the COVID related items. So I want to thank everybody for their for their patience on those. Obviously, COVID continues to be a serious crisis in our city. We're going to be transitioning now to the next set of items and will be starting with item 28, which is the framework or reconciliation item. And then on to the PCC item, which is item 26. And we also have the local emergency proclamation, which is item 29. And so those will all be reviewed within the next section of the meeting. Speaker 6: And so. And Mr. Mayor, this. Speaker 3: Is. Speaker 6: Mr. Mayor. This is Tom. There is one other COVID item. If you wanted to take it now or do it later, it is the street sweeping item number 23. Speaker 3: You know, since we're I think I think folks want to move to the next set of items. So why don't we just have that item? Is it just a report back? So we'll just put that item at the end of these next few items. That's fine. So why don't we go ahead and move to item 28, which is the framework for reconciliation item?

Agenda Item

Recommendation to request City Manager to work with the Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of Civic Innovation to create a Citywide Basic Needs Security initiative, known as “BAND Together Long Beach,” to enhance the coordination and delivery of food and housing security programs.

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Speaker 3: Item eight, please. Madam Court. Speaker 7: Report from Public Works. Recommendation to amend eight contracts for as needed architectural services to extend the contract terms for an additional one year period and increase the aggregate amount by $1.5 million citywide. Speaker 3: I have a motion and a second have a motion by Councilman Austin, a second by Councilman Ranga. Without objection, please do a roll call vote. Speaker 7: District one. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 7: District two. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 7: District three. Speaker 1: II. Speaker 7: District four. All right. District five. Speaker 1: By. Speaker 7: District six. High District seven II District eight. District eight. District nine. Speaker 4: I went this way to sleep. Speaker 1: As far. Speaker 7: As ocean cares. Speaker 3: Okay. Thank you. You guys put those on mute, please. Vice Mayor Andres. Thank you. Item. Next item. Item nine. Mr. Clarke, 99. Speaker 7: Report from Technology and Innovation. Recommendation three Award contracts to 13 recommended firms to provide as needed professional and technical services. And technical support information.

Contract

Recommendation to authorize City Manager, or designee, to execute all documents necessary to amend Agreement No. 33933 with Aetypic, Inc., of San Francisco, CA; Agreement No. 33926 with Architects McDonald, Soutar & Paz, Inc., of Long Beach, CA; Agreement No. 33914 with Gwynne Pugh Urban Studio, Inc., of Santa Monica, CA; Agreement No. 33962 with HMC Architects, of Los Angeles, CA; Agreement No. 33927 with IBI Group, of Irvine, CA; Agreement No. 33912 with Kardent, of Long Beach, CA; Agreement No. 33913 with Mary McGrath Architects, of Oakland, CA; and Agreement No. 33917 with Alomar Rania, dba RA-DA, of West Hollywood, CA, for as-needed architectural services, to extend the contract terms for an additional one-year period through July 31, 2021, and increase the aggregate amount by $1,500,000, for a total annual aggregate amount not to exceed $10,500,000. (Citywide)

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Speaker 7: District three. I searched for. I District five. I. District six. District six. District seven. District eight. I. District nine. All right. Motion carries. Speaker 3: Thank you. Item 13, please. Speaker 7: Report from Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Communications. Fire. Health and Human Services. Police Recognition to receive and expand Department of Homeland Security grant funding for the 2019 Urban Area Security Initiative grant in an amount that to exceed 1,184,315 citywide. Speaker 3: Thank you. I have a motion in a second county councilman's in Dallas and a second city councilmember Ranga Roque over District one. Speaker 7: I district to. District two. District three. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 7: District four. I District five. District five by district six. District seven. District eight. District nine. I know she cares. Speaker 3: Item 15, please.

Contract

Recommendation to authorize City Manager, or designee, to execute a contract and all necessary amendments, including term extensions, with the City of Los Angeles to receive and expend Department of Homeland Security grant funding for the 2019 Urban Area Security Initiative Grant, in an amount not to exceed $1,184,315, for the period of September 1, 2019 through May 31, 2022; and Increase appropriations in the General Grants Fund Group in the Disaster Preparedness and Emergency Communications Department by $190,000, in the General Grants Fund Group in the Fire Department by $418,804, in the General Grants Fund Group in the Health and Human Services Department by $80,000, and in the General Grants Fund Group in the Police Department by $495,511, offset by grant revenue. (Citywide)

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Speaker 7: District nine. All right. Now she carries. Speaker 3: Thank you. Item 18, please. Speaker 7: Communication from city attorney recommendation. Recommendations are to declare ordinance amending the Ombudsman Municipal Code relating to Commission compensation. Read the first time. Later in the next regular meeting of the City Council for Final Reading Adopt Resolution Emerging Fiscal Year 2020 Salary Resolution City Wide. Speaker 3: Thank you. I have a motion because we ranked second my concerns and the roll call vote please. Speaker 7: District one, district two. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 7: District three. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 7: District four. Speaker 5: They? Speaker 7: The Sir Club. This requires. I. District six. District seven. I. District eight. Speaker 4: All right. Speaker 7: District nine. Hi. Russian carries.

Ordinance

Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code by amending Section 2.06.060, and Subsections 2.18.050.D and 2.63.030.A, all relating to commission compensation, read and adopted as read. (Citywide)

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Speaker 3: Thank you. Now we're moving on to item 24. Speaker 7: Current Communication from Council member Pearce recommendation to increase appropriations in the general fund group in the city manager department by $448 to provide a donation to AOC seven for their food pantry event that took place on June 5th, 2020. Speaker 3: Can I have a second, please? I have a muslim accounts number. Pierce, can I have a second? Second accounts from Ringo. Roll call the police. Speaker 7: This one. Speaker 1: Right? Speaker 7: This or two. I District three. I district four. All right. This record. District six. Higher District seven. I am District eight, District nine. I know she cares.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to increase appropriations in the General Fund Group in the City Manager Department by $448, offset by the Second Council District One-Time District Priority Funds transferred from the Citywide Activities Department to provide a donation to AOC7 for their food pantry event that took place on June 5, 2020; and Decrease appropriations in the General Fund Group in the Citywide Activities Department by $448 to offset a transfer to the City Manager Department.

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Speaker 3: Thank you. We now have our last item, which is item number 23. I think we got all the rest. Item 23, please. Speaker 0: Report from Public Works recommendation to receive and file a report from Public Works providing an update on street sweeping and provide input on policy direction to staff on next steps strategies on street sweeping as it relates to the safer at home public health order citywide. Speaker 3: Thank you. I know that there's a I have a couple of requests for to get a staff report. Mr. Murdoch, can you give a short report? Speaker 6: Yes. Public works to give a short report. Speaker 3: You may, may remember city council. We wanted to come back before you and provide a brief update on where we're at with our Clean Streets program. And more specifically, talk about numbers related to the amount of fines and request for. Speaker 7: Dismissal of those. Speaker 3: Citations with those numbers. Speaker 7: Deacon Oconee And we'll go through the data. Thank you, Mr. Beck. On May 19, the City Council approved the staff to begin issuing street sweeping citations as part of our Clean Streets program come May 18th. On May 19th, the City Council provided discretion to the city manager to offer one time dismissals for those people who are experiencing COVID hardship. And I'd like to go over a little bit of the data prior to writing citations. During the weeks of May four and May 11th, staff issued over 84,000 warning fliers to people who had parked in violation of the street. Sweeping restrictions. Posted street sweeping restrictions. The first two weeks we issued citations, we issued about 14,700 citations the week of May 4th and May 11th. There was an ongoing decrease. So in the first week there was about 8500 and the next week was about 6000. So we saw a decrease. The first week of June, we saw a further decrease to somewhere around the 4000 number. And so we continue to see that the education that's been put out there seems to be taking effect. So far, we've as of this morning, we've had 994 requests for dismissal of the site due to COVID 19 hardship. It's probably important to note we have noticed an increase in the amount of debris that we typically collect. Also, we want to mention that in addition to the two, the dismissals for the one time dismissals for hardship, we still offer a couple of different payment plans to assist those who continue to have difficulty paying for these sites. We have gone from from a very difficult sweeping operation in that some routes were only 10 to 15%, availability to sweep to around 90%. So we're getting good compliance and we will continue to provide education on this issue. Thanks. Speaker 3: Thank you. Uh, I got some more supernova. Speaker 5: Oh, thank you, Mayor. I think the first order of business might be to congratulate Craig back on his retirement. I think that was announced publicly today. So, Craig, I know you'll miss these meetings, but have agree. Um, and our last meeting with us came up. I was prepared to ask for an extension of the moratorium and we went a little different direction and that was non notification of the DMV. Um, for collection on, on fines. What I learned subsequent to that meeting was that that never happened and that's why we were not able to suspend that policy. So tonight I am prepared to make a motion to ask for. Either an extension of the moratorium. That would be for the next three and a half weeks. It would go till July 5th, and that would actually put us in alignment with the city of L.A.. That's how long the moratorium is lasting. Um, in lieu of that, I guess it would be an extension of the forgiveness policy that is extend. Um, you know, the what we have 994 requests. Something of this nature just to alleviate the pain here. So if that can be, uh, my motion, if that's understood, and I'd like to make that much. Speaker 6: Councilmember. I'm going to ask Craig back to talk a little bit about I think you provided two different options there, and we'd like to give a couple comments on those. Speaker 3: Councilmember, if I understand kind of your goal here, it is to try to align what beach practices with what L.A. City might be doing. And I know L.A. is looking at providing some forgiveness opportunity through the month of June. Since this year, we have a holiday on the 4th of July, I think, aligning it with maybe July 6th. So we would start we would give you a notice through the end of this month and initiate on a monday, which I believe is July six. And what your what I believe you're requesting is that we would extend the opportunity to dismiss tickets and potentially expand that over the course of this time beyond one forgiveness per request. Speaker 7: Is that what we are understanding? Speaker 5: Yes. And it wasn't the goal wasn't to align with L.A. I'm just saying that that that's a practice that's happening out there. So we would it wouldn't be something out of the ordinary we were doing. Speaker 3: And the way the way I'm understanding it also and I have a I have a second tier motion counts and were super not covered by councilmembers and they asked. But I want to clarify also, I think that the the staff suggestion would be that we would take the second requested council member supernova, which is to extend the opportunity for residents to get their tickets dismissed through that 4th of July weekend that there's more opportunity for residents. I think that was that would be staff's suggestion. From what I understand it, that's another reason. It's one of the two options, Councilmember, that's amenable to you and and amenable to the second year of your motion. Yes, it is. Speaker 5: So let's just be very clear on the date. So it would start back up on I have the date, the six. But if the parents of the given. Or it would end on Sunday the fifth. It would start back up on a monday, the sixth. Speaker 3: Right. The forgiveness would end on. The forgiveness would end on Monday the sixth. Is that right, Mr. Beck? Mayor. That's correct. That would take. Speaker 7: Us through the July 4th. Speaker 3: Holiday. We don't sweep streets on Saturday or Sunday. So we would we would begin again Monday morning, which is July six. So all dismissals would be over. Basically the July 4th holiday. And councilman and they asked, do you second that motion? Speaker 1: I do. Speaker 3: Okay, great. Well, thank you for that, Councilmember. I think that's a good relief for the community. Let's go. Have to go. Speaker 1: May, I just wanted to say one quick thing. Sure. Oh, we move on. I just wanted to say thank you to Craig Beck, who was an enormous help on on Monday morning and just getting everything together. Thank you so much. Thank you. Craig Beck for your 34 years of service for this city. And we're going to miss you greatly. But you've left some great, great big shoes to fill. And you've also left the city in much, much better conditions than it was when you first came in. So I absolutely want to thank you for all your service. Speaker 3: And we'll still all get harassed. So you're back for, I think, a few more weeks on the council. So you have more reports to give as well. So you ain't leaving yet. Craig We still got you for a little bit. So let's go to the street. Councilman Richardson, I'm sorry. Did you have something? Speaker 5: I know. We'll have an opportunity. My kids are beaten down the door. I know, I know. We'll have an opportunity to address Craig more formally, but I just have to say, man. We got the Highland Park Community Center done before you go. I appreciate you, man. We got to get that thing open. It's beautiful. It's incredible. I really want to just just cap off your career with the city with this really tangible. You know, we got it done before the building turns 100. So so thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And look forward to recognizing. Speaker 3: Great. Thank you. Councilmember with that will do a roll call vote. Speaker 0: District one. Speaker 1: I am. Speaker 0: District two. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 0: District three. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 0: District four. I District five. Speaker 7: I want. Speaker 0: District six. Speaker 1: Oh. Speaker 0: District seven. Speaker 4: I. Speaker 0: District eight. Speaker 4: I. Speaker 0: District nine. I know she cares. Speaker 3: Great. Thank you. That concludes where I was two weeks worth of of agenda in one week. So I just want to thank the entire city council for, I know, a long night and a very important one and the community as well. And so with that, I don't see anyone keyed up for any new business. So with that, we will conclude the council meeting and we will adjourn. Thank you.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to receive and file a report from Public Works providing an update on street sweeping; and, provide input and policy direction to staff on next-step strategies on street sweeping as it relates to the Safer-at-Home Public Health Order. (Citywide)

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Speaker 0: Okay, motion carries. We still have a few minutes for for our budget study session. The time served so a few minutes away. So why don't we go ahead and do the Open Streets Initiative item 11, and then we'll we'll we'll be in time for the for the budget session. 530 Madam Clerk. Speaker 1: Communication from Mayor Garcia, Councilmember Pierce, Councilman Price, Councilmember Your Honor, Councilman Austin. Recommendation directs City Manager to create an Open Streets Initiative. Speaker 0: Thank you. I want to just first of all, just think that all the council members that have been a part of this and who have been a lot of discussions in the community and we really appreciate where this is going. I want to just say some couple general comments. First, let me start saying that we know that the COVID crisis that we're in right now is a serious one and it certainly is a health crisis. First and foremost, but it's also an economic crisis. And it's an economic crisis that affects small businesses, especially it affects communities. And I think that the council should be commended for the creativity and innovation that is coming out with new ideas and how we help our businesses and community. We have been aggressive in working with our state, our county partners and how we reopen. I think that with some great ideas from our Restart Long Beach Advisory Group, from many of the council committees and from some of the small business owners themselves. And so we want to thank everyone. One idea that certainly is not a new one, but it's one that is beginning to grow across the country. And quite frankly, the world is reactivating our open landscape and our streets for the public, even more so than it is today. And so what we have in front of us is a new Open Street initiative that is going to want to explore ways to open up more public space throughout our city for increased outdoor activities, safer access to transit, a stronger economic recovery, and to allow us to physically distance and be safe within our own city. We know that as restaurants begin to open, they are going to be limited in how they reopen because of space if we want them to be successful. There are opportunities to allow them to reopen and expand sidewalk dining, expand tables and chairs onto the street and into public spaces, reopen some of our parking lots to some of these restaurants and retailers and really provide additional business support for these businesses as they begin get ready as they begin preparing to reopen. I'll also add that this initiative would look at not just how it would help businesses and restaurants especially, but also communities. And you are seeing now the different cities are reopening up small neighborhood corridors across the city and limiting traffic. And so they become kind of spaces, public spaces for people to enjoy, to walk, to recreates, to ride their bikes in a way that's safe. And what's great about Long Beach is we have a great tradition of being leaders and trailblazers when it comes to open space and activating pedestrian access. You think about the Parklets movement, which really began in many ways here in Long Beach. You think about our early innovations and the related bike infrastructure that happened here in our community. And so we've always led the way on these issues, and this would allow us to continue that work. And so the recommendation in front of us is to direct the city manager to create an open street initiative and explore ways to open up more public space. The plan should include options that would enable creative opportunities for outdoor dining and and as well as recreation opportunities across the city. And I'll just make a couple of comments and I'll turn it over to the two the coauthors of the motion. I'd like, as part of this motion to also explore. There's been some ideas about, for example, doing drive ins in some of our convention center lots in the downtown. I want to explore that as well. There's a lot of interest in doing kind of the drive in movie theater style expansion of public space because those lights are ours, our public lots, and I'd like us to move quickly. First, you know, we certainly don't want to create open street projects in an areas that that that may not work. This is certainly not a mandate to do them everywhere, but four, four neighborhoods, council offices, businesses that want to partner with the city to create these spaces . It should be a kind of project by project review. And I think if I can ask also staff to move quickly in a time is now and I'd love to see some of these neighborhood corridors opening up soon and I expect the council members to be very active in how they want to see these open. And I think they're getting requests from restaurants and businesses. And so I think I'd love to see the councilmembers engage within their own districts and create these opportunities as they see how those partnerships in the community. And so that is that is the motion that we have in front of us. I do have Councilmember Pearce who's made the motion. I have a I have a second by Councilmember Andrews. So let me begin with Councilwoman Pearce. Speaker 4: Thank you, Mayor, and thank you to all the businesses. Residents, the neighborhood associations that have chimed in. I think the support that I've received or heard has been overwhelming. And so I'd like to just share. I had many conversations with members of HRO and the association as a whole, the same for East Village individual members that live there, as well as the association and also Adobe. And what I can say is that everyone is excited about the opportunity. Everyone wants to see what city staff comes up with and everyone is saying that they would like to see something that could be flexible. As you mentioned, Mayor, what might be appropriate on pine might not be appropriate in a neighborhood area or might not be appropriate on Fourth Street. So with that, I'd like to share a little bit. I think there's some interesting ideas even around closing an entire street like pine that has ball bounce or curb cuts that allow for parklets to be put in. But then there's different streets like Fourth Street that would want to be able to make sure that people know that businesses are open in the middle. And I think that we've seen that work on promenades. And so I'm not as fearful as some might be, but I'd look to staff to come up with some ideas around signage, messaging, whether it's on the permanent or something that could be brought in temporarily for those weekends or weekdays. That it happens, I think would be really exciting. What I've heard from Retro is that they're very excited about doing something like Thursday through Sunday. Same thing with East Village. As we know, greenhouse gases are the number one cause of greenhouse gases is transportation. So as we look at closing down these streets, it's not saying that people aren't going to drive there. But as much as we can encourage people to ride their bikes where we have additional bike parking, where we have not just drive up movies, but bike up movies. And so really taking this, again as an opportunity to have that climate lens, because we know COVID has made our climate crisis has been made worse by the COVID situation. So really making sure that these are something that are flexible but that are exciting. I'd also like to see from staff moving very quickly and after this first phase of doing it with business corridors and maybe neighborhood corridors, having a conversation around, you know, when we get to face two or phase three, what do neighborhood block parties look like? Because we know that those have been something that have happened almost every month in a lot of neighborhoods throughout the summer, and that people are essentially doing their own selves right now. They're having musicians come out and play on the sidewalk and people are really staying in their house or on their yard to watch. But are there some guidelines that we could put in place or a toolkit that we could also put in place so that we can create a safe space where people know that they can invite musicians or work with their council offices or the city departments to open up those spaces. So I'm excited to see what staff brings back. And again, I do want to see things move as quick as possible. I think our promenade in the downtown is a is a prime location that we should be able to open up the second that we reach that benchmark. So I look to my council colleagues for their shared support as well. So thank you. Speaker 0: Councilmember. Remember, Vice Mayor Andrews, I'm going to just come back to you that I have some other books cued up that are coauthors. Are they? They're also cued up. So I'll come right back to you, Vice Mayor. Next up then I have is council member Austin. Catch them here. Speaker 3: Austin in. Speaker 0: Remember. Yeah, we can hear you. Speaker 3: Okay. Thank you. Well, thank you. And first of all, I want to thank you for bringing this item forward, Mr. Mayor. You know, I know that other cities, other cities in our state are looking at creative, innovative ways to engage community, but also support economic, commerce and communities and save our small businesses. And I think that this is an item that will will help us to do just that. I know for a fact in my district, we have a number of areas that could benefit from this area. This item here and this innovative approach, obviously, because we know that what we do that do it well, we have a successful bid. We also have Virginia Village, an area that is up and coming. And, you know, several small businesses need the support. And so I can I can see Market Street. There's other areas throughout my district and all throughout our city, our city that will benefit greatly from this with a little bit of creativity and organization of our local businesses with support. And so and I think this also gives our our businesses a big latitude to create safe spaces. In support of our community as well. And so I think this is a win win. I'm fully supportive and I believe support my colleagues to do this. Speaker 0: Thank you. And then Councilmember Price. Speaker 2: Thank you. Can you hear me? Speaker 0: Yes, we can. Speaker 2: Oh. Thank you. So I'm wondering if there is any staff report or visuals on this concept. Before I provide comment. Speaker 0: Yes. Actually, you know what? Thank you, Councilwoman, because they actually did prepare slides and I was supposed to turn to them, I think, at the end of my comments. And I did not. And so let Mr. Monica and Mr. Beck we go through that those slides. I know you've prepared some slides for the council. Speaker 5: Yes, certainly. So staff totally recognizes the urgency. We hear you loud and clear. So we did kind of accelerate the the review process. This was something that we had been working on and reviewing. So we actually are prepared tonight to give kind of a larger presentation, to show context and what these could look like. And then really, our our goal tonight is to hear from the council about what is it that you're interested in and where should we focus. And then we would work on implementation if, if we got the green light. So I will turn it to Craig and Carl Hickman to go through the the presentation that should be showing on your WebEx screen. Speaker 6: Thank you, Tom. Mayor, members of the council, thank you for the opportunity tonight to talk about how we can utilize our public spaces to help address our COVID recovery response. What you have before you is some information that relates to how the team looks at providing open streets. And in this presentation this evening, we're going to review kind of what our goals were and really best practices that we're seeing in other communities and kind of taking items from those best practices that we work well in in our city. We like the idea of open streets, certainly something we've been promoting for some time with the implementation of many of our bike boulevards. I know this council's been very supportive of the concept behind Vision Zero. We look forward to sharing our Safe Streets Long Beach plan with this council in June, which I think ties in nicely to the Open Streets concept, like space for for businesses. We have some examples we're going to share with you this evening. And communication is going to be very important as we move forward, I think. I heard some of the council talk about flexibility. We fully support flexibility. Every location is a little unique and different and how we approach it needs to address that location. So I'm going to ask Carl Hickman, the city's traffic engineer, to go through some of the examples. Again, our program goals here is that we would be able to move quickly, we would be able to be efficient and have a low cost option. So when we talk about Parklets, we are not talking about the city's permanent PARKLET program, where we have specific development guidelines, but something that is call it Parklet Lite. Being able to utilize those spaces for public activation and you'll see some of the information that we present tonight as as an example of how that could occur. So it's important that we're thinking about maintaining social rather physical distancing to help support reopening of businesses. And that's included in here this evening as well. So with that, Karl, if you could please go through some of the information that we put together and share with council our concepts. Sir. Thank you, Craig. The next slide. You'll see when we were first talking about Open Streets concepts for the city of Long Beach. We wanted to investigate what other cities were doing. And here in this slide, you'll see examples from Denver and Oakland, where we have partial closures of residential streets. These are roads that now are open for traffic. That is only local traffic. And the regular cut through traffic would be eliminated. It greatly calms traffic and gives open space for residents to use the roadway and the right of way. Next. Next slide, you'll see in Oakland, they dedicated 10% of their entire street network to open streets concepts, and they found that 75% of the residents were in favor of those ideas. In New York City, there was an initial rollout of only a 1.5 mile stretch of road, but they've since tried to expand that to over 100 miles of streets in late April. So as you can see, many cities have concepts that they're implementing. For businesses. On the next slide. This is from the city of Vancouver where they're exercising and utilizing flex space options. You'll see in the slide where patrons are allowed to queue up in the roadway along the curb line while still practicing social distancing. They're able to access the retail establishment, purchase what they need to do, and at the same time, cars can still use the roadway, drive by and stop, park whatever they may need to do. So, again, this is from Vancouver. Also here we are, we see partial or full closures that are applicable applicable to non arterial streets where there are dense business corridors. This. These pictures here are from New York City and then in Florida. Next slide. Also, there are many examples in many cities throughout the country where they are establishing special delivery or pickup zones for retail establishments and restaurants so someone can stop by curbside pick up a meal, a business can have a delivery made near their business to accelerate their efficiency of their operations. So this is quite common where where they have special pickup and loading zones. Not from a residential point of view. We already have a program here in Long Beach where we close Bayshore Drive from ocean to second, and we do that every year from June 15th to September 15th. This is a roadway where we feel we can move that start date up sooner or we can even extend it to go longer. So this is something that we can implement, implement rather quickly. And also from a residential standpoint, we have many bike boulevards throughout the entire city and we could do partial closures designed to discourage cut through traffic and it would slow vehicle speeds. We have many throughout the city. To name a few, we have 15th Street, Daisy, Myrtle, Sixth Street and Vista Street bike boulevards. Again, we emphasize denser neighborhoods with limited park access. This would allow residents to get out and utilize the city right away. So for businesses, we can have partial or full street closures. Again, we want to focus on dense retail areas on non arterial streets. And we also have retail corridors on arterials that that will require partial closures and flex zones to retain vehicle throughput. Again, we don't want to totally shut down the cars driving by. They may want to stop in and access the business. We want to make sure we maintain that accessibility. And as far as the flex zones go, let's see here. Trying to move forward. Where's I.T. when you need them? Okay. As far as the partial closures and flex zones for businesses, we will need to work very closely with each individual business because, again, not every situation is the same. We have to streamline our existing sidewalk guidelines and work with each business to make sure that we can accommodate their needs. Some examples we have, we could do partial closures or flex zones on Santa Fe Avenue, PCH, to Wardlow, Second Street, Livingston, the Naples Plaza and roadways in Bixby Knolls that are yet to be determined. Again, we're going to support retail and restaurants and businesses. In many cases, city equipment will need to be supplemented by other devices to make these partial or foreclosures happen. Our public works team does not have all of the equipment, all the tools that we need to accommodate every one of these types of requests. We're going to need water barriers, delineation cones, signage, etc. and we may not have the ability to supply all of these devices and tools to each and every business that wants to do this kind of a program. And we're always going to consider ADA requirements. Public safety is a priority and emergency access. We're going to communicate closely with different stakeholders to make sure that we implement and consider everybody's concerns. Right now on Pine Avenue, we have a program. We have the ability to shut down Pine Avenue, either from first to third or from first to Broadway. And again, we have bollards there at all four intersections that we can install and we can shut down those roadways to a full closure to support business activity. This is something that we already do for for the taste of downtown and for other events. Looks like we're having issues with the battery. And you please move forward to slide. 13. Yeah. We're on 14 now. So again, for businesses, we talked about partial closures and flex zones. There was recently a a pilot program that was enacted last week. I understand that the event went well and this is something also that we could implement very quickly and stick with it as a good model for us as we move forward with the program. This was put on by the DLP and. And Studio 111. Next, we have a slide here that depicts a basic traffic control setup, which we would call a soft closure. It would be for a neighborhood street where we allow local traffic to still use the street and access it. But it would be shut down to to cut through. Traffic is going to greatly calm the neighborhood and allow the residents to utilize the city right away. Next, we have an example of a partial closure on a larger street, and you'll notice that the lane closest to the curb line has been closed. The red would be water filled barricades or delineate or something like that where we could establish parklets. We could establish dining areas, seating areas, again, to allow retail to utilize the right of way. The next slide is a full closure, where we would take a major street and do a full closure, not allow anyone into the area except for emergency vehicles. We again, we could allow for dining areas, seating areas, use of the right of way, maybe with plants, planters, things like that. But this would be an example of a foreclosure. Here. We took an example on Second Street, a street that we all know pretty well. And this is where we would repurpose the lane again along the curb line. We could install diagonal parking, we could repurpose the lane to accommodate parklets additional retail space. We could allow parklets of any kind, retail, dining, things like that. And we would also allow for a closure of a side street. We would call it a street lit where the nearby side street or Minor Street would be shut down to allow for similar activities or even parking these. This is an example of where we may even target private businesses that have private parking areas where we could utilize that space as well to accommodate some more activity. Now moving forward, we would need to have a communications plan. How are we going to communicate to residents? How are we going to communicate to the businesses and everyone who wants to use these zones? We'd be using signage, press releases, social media, graphics, websites, etc., etc. to get the word out about what we're trying to do in the Open Streets program. Guidelines and next steps. We want to make sure that we streamline sidewalk dining guidelines. Again, we want to be flexible and be able to move nimbly and quick. So we would need to streamline our processes and make these programs happen for the residents and for the businesses. We need to identify available city resources, see what we have on hand, what could be used, and anticipate what we may have to have businesses or residents perhaps rent or purchase. Again, we have to develop traffic control plans similar to the ones that I showed earlier, where we're going to call out exactly what is needed equipment wise and how the setups are going to take place. And we're going to continue conversations with all the stakeholders to make sure that all of folks considerations or needs are met. We want to make sure that safety is a priority. And then we're going to again roll out the communications plan, amend the program as we move along. Again, we have to be flexible. We're going to be collecting public and stakeholder feedback at all times and reevaluate our processes and how we do things as we move forward. Again, this is rather unique for the city, but I think that we can be flexible enough and accommodating and make things happen. Thank you. I welcome your comments. Thank you, Carl. So just a couple things that I wanted to add to the to provide a little context to how do we move this forward. We have the team looking at how we manage current guidelines for, say, a PARKLET program where we believe we can get that done in a different process, where maybe the city takes the initiative to put in place some of the elements that were shared with you this evening, working closely with the business districts to align what would work in a particular area, and then kind of having a public private partnership where the businesses, for example, could put tables and chairs into the space that the city creates. We're also working actively with our partner at Metro to see if we can identify some funding to help move this forward. So we're fairly far along. We're looking forward to hearing, as the city manager said, direction from council this evening and we stand ready to implement any guidelines that you recommend. That concludes our report, and we're open for questions. Thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you, Mr. Beck. Thank you. And thank you for the presentation. And I want to thank Councilman Price for noting the presentation, because I went right by. It is a lot of work, so thank you guys for all that. Can I bring this back over to Councilwoman Price? Councilwoman Price. Councilwoman Pryce. Okay, I'm going to come back to Councilwoman Pryce. Let me go to the other maker of the motion, which was Councilwoman Zendaya's. Speaker 2: Thank you, Mayor, and thank you very much city staff and Councilmember Jeanine for bringing this up. This is so exciting for me. Not only am I excited to see what this is going to look like and especially that summer's coming up, I think that this is going to be very important. But I'm also very excited to see that we will be paying attention to the ADA accessibility issues that might come up, and especially because we have a lot of people in the first district, my district, with mobile devices as well as myself. So I thank you for taking that into consideration. And I can't wait to to see this happening and have it out in our street. So thank you for putting so much work into this. Speaker 0: Thank you. Councilwoman, I think we have Councilwoman Pryce back. Speaker 3: Enter your access code or. Speaker 2: Anything meeting followed by. Mr. Mayor, can you hear me? Speaker 0: Yes. Speaker 2: Okay. You can hear me. Okay. Thank you. I want to thank staff for the presentation. I thought that was an excellent presentation and I want to thank the mayor for bringing this forth. This is a concept that we have thought about for many years in terms of whether or not a temporary closure of some streets would make sense so that we have, you know, a day or two where there's no cars traveling on the street and we just have pedestrian and bike access similar to how we do streets. But it's always seemed like such a huge undertaking that really in Belmont. Sure, we only do that for the car show. But but I love the idea of being able to expand this concept. I will say that we are doing everything we can to think about being nimble and being flexible in terms of our businesses, getting ready to reopen and helping them expand their capacity so that they can get back to a place of economic viability once we get underway. And Parklets are one of the things that we've talked a lot about. What I've communicated with the businesses in the shore is that, you know, for Parklets we do have to give up parking spaces which have been at a premium in Belmont. Sure. Since this court, the corridor is generally very active, especially in the evenings and on the weekends. And so maybe in the in the as we explore this option, maybe we try a pilot program where we have, you know, maybe three or four retailers or restaurants participate so that we're not giving up too many parking spaces and see how it works and see how the functionality is and fine tuned where we need to. And if the investment in the parklet is not too great, then it's something that we can have the a rotating concept where hopefully many of the as many businesses as want to can participate in it. And I really only envisioned it for Second Street right now, but I definitely see it working on Broadway as well, where we have a business corridor that borders the second district. I know Taste already has a parklet concept on Broadway, which is working out really well. And so I think this is a great concept. I love the idea that council woman peers raised in terms of music and having music on the street and being able to showcase other art on the streets and and really make it a user friendly, pedestrian, bicycle friendly experience for people without impacting. So the residential neighborhoods that are adjacent to these corridors too much. So thank you very much, Mr. Mayor, for bringing this forth. I look forward to having detailed conversations with the city team in regards to specific streets where this might work in the third. And I'm grateful to have been one of the folks who signed on to this. Thank you. Speaker 0: I think it, councilwoman. We're going now to Vice Mayor Andrews. Speaker 3: For thinking leadership when you say them. Because, you know, last summer we started, you know, seeing black boys in the sixties, back in the close, you're someone someone straight and made it possible for community to come out and partake in the Zumba and the free. And so I think they were looking at open space, you know, where we can come up and do something productive during these times when everyone is tired of being kind of cooped up. So, you know, I would like to chime in and suggest that we look at part in that, especially the ones that are not actively being used as part of the open space. You know, they could lead to create a huge iso, at least in my district. You know, we have former RDA labs that are sitting empty and we we'd like to be able to develop those and also look at them and and look at that and then be looked at to try to bring some sort of, you know, activity and some type of physical activity. So I'm looking forward to suggestions and to innovate this impact and think about giving. Thank you, Mayor. Speaker 0: Thank you, vice mayor. Next up is Councilmember Richardson. Speaker 3: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I think this is a great item. I think it's really refreshing to see some item that's sort of tangentially related to COVID and really talks about something fun and exciting for the future is refreshing to see that we've made a commitment over the last few years to open streets. It's a well recognized commitment within our city and across the region. Just tonight in our consent calendar, we approved a grant from Sky Blue Mobile Sauce Production Committee to host another open street event, Artesia Boulevard. We got to figure that out, obviously, with social distancing and what we're dealing with. But the fact that we received yet another grant is is more recognition that we're leaders in this space. A few months ago, I was able to go to New Zealand in my role as Vice President Stag and it was a yeah. We were able to see firsthand some of the integrated space between our hotel we stayed in and the local restaurants and hotels across the street. The traffic was just limited to lay people pulling in the park, but it was incredible to see the way that the tables and the seats were, you know, spilled out from the restaurant into what would be the entire street. And there was no curb. It was all one level. You walk out the hotel across the street, there's no curb the step off. And there were barriers that are movable that really made the space safe and cars sort of meandered and everything was safe. It was really interesting to see. It was very well done. Locally, I know a number of great examples. There's a farmer's market that I love, I think is Redondo Beach or maybe Manhattan Beach, where they do a road diet on one side of the media and it's limited to the other side. The meeting they do, the farmer's market. I always look at that and think Atlantic Avenue. I think maybe even Artesia Boulevard if we if we do certain things. So it's totally possible. I think we need to have a toolkit. It was possible in all types of corridors from our commercial quarter to a residential corridor. I think it's fair to say that this level of creativity, it helps spur economic activity. So we actually need it in certain spaces. So we need to think about areas that are burgeoning, that need economic activity and how we could apply it. There are also areas like open space. I was glad to see that in the presentation. That said, I was disappointed to not see an example in North Long Beach. There are plenty of opportunity there. I would love to see more of that in the future. The Lab project, for example, is is considering certain strategies to expand walkability around the shops. It's essential now and the way we design shops. And it's when innovations like these are built as a means to overcome barriers to emerging communities that we really help shape the region. I love that, Mr. Mayor. I love that you brought up driving. I have little ones. We do the paramount drive in all the time. Pre stay home. Order all the time. There's plenty of opportunities for us to look at those things and all parts of our city. And the last thing I'll say is we need to look at this and it's been brought up, but we need to look at this as a model for how we implement and these social distancing standards for cities across the region. Because I know that both GAG and MRC are changing their grant programs to reward concepts like this, which may be helpful to public works as we find more funding where, you know, Skog and my sources both want to look for solutions like this in our future grant programs. So thanks to staff for the presentation. Thanks, Mr. Mayor. All the co-sponsors and I'm in full support of motion. Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilmember. I have councilman proposal. Speaker 3: Thank you. I think the opening comment by one appears was that one size doesn't doesn't fit all. And this may not work for the fourth district. Councilman Richardson, I didn't see any examples in the presentation. The Fourth District either. And the other comment I think Carl Hickman made was public safety is a priority, as he said that I noticed on the screen there, you know, kind of a makeshift parklet on the street without a rail. And I think part of the transportation system, we may not be able to outfit every site with all the equipment that we normally use. But I'd be interested in to see the kind where we don't have the rails protecting the public. I didn't get the overwhelming support from the folks in the fourth District. And the mayor and I both received an email today from one of the members of his task force, and I just want to respect his comments and share those little bit that where you have a very parking impacted area. Even giving up a parking lot for seating probably doesn't work. And I think overall. This restaurateur would like the focus to remain on the complete reopening. Like, let's not lose sight that that's where you need to be. Ultimately, I wouldn't want to see this this project delayed that process at all. And I think that we're talking about phase three. The other point I wanted to make was outdoor dining opportunities that are adjacent to residential areas. Normally that would involve a see up process. If we're fast tracking this, we'd want to know what what are the neighbors rights are? Are would there be something similar to see where neighbors could weigh in on this? And my final point would be about law enforcement and their services required. We had an incident today in a fourth District donut shop. You can read about it and there'll be post where the shop had to be shut down due to gridlock from cars queued up. And we just have to be very wary of these types of situations. That's it. Thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilmember and Councilwoman Mongo. Speaker 4: Thank you, Mayor. I want to thank Public Works for a great presentation and for your leadership on this item, Mr. Mayor. I think the one size fits all will not work, so I really do appreciate the discussions related to various things. I also think that full reopening could even be bigger and better with opportunities like this. I think we're going to have to work hand in hand, not just with the restaurant owners, but also with the landlord. Each district very different. And in some cases in our district where we might have said the Spring Street Business Association and they might want to set aside some of the parking lot for one of the restaurants. We need to be cognizant of grocery stores that are significantly impacted right now as well that may have crossover parking. And so with those things in mind and the opportunity to really jazz some things up in terms of if we aren't able to do this, some of these restaurants are able to even bring music to their parking lots and let people sit outside, maybe a movie, a drive, a concert. Those kinds of things can really bring some lifeblood back. Many of the stories in the post related to the individuals who've been singing on their porch every night as people do their walks or the trolley that's been going through the neighborhood with singers on it from the same family. Many who we can do to get people back to work and engaged and still say stay safe. Because even if every single thing was open tomorrow, the volumes are going to take a lot longer to recover as incomes take a while to recover. And people who have been perhaps deferring their rent and other things now have debt that they need to maintain and they can't necessarily spend that disposable income that's now consumed by debt service on going out to eat and all of those things. So for those reasons, I think that it's important to really do both and support business owners and tenants and landlords all in one big package. So I think is a creative way. As long as we can ensure that the residents are protected and the landlords are protected and the city is protected. Thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilwoman, to some final comments. Just want to thank everyone for for their support staffs and a great mayor. Speaker 3: I had my hand up. I guess you didn't see it. Speaker 0: Know, Councilmember, you're not in the queue, but I don't have it here. But go ahead, please. Speaker 3: I'm sorry. I did try to use the system here. I basically thank you for including me in the time as well. I really appreciate that. And looking forward to working with staff on some areas in the seventh District that I would be very, very benefiting from such a program. And thank you for thinking of this. One of the things that I'm concerned about, obviously, is that some of these establishments are open till two in the morning. Is there going to be some curfew involved as well with this in terms of looking over what the timeframe would we would be opening street up like this or closing down, as has been the discussion with PD. Speaker 6: Councilmember, if I could address your question, I wanted to share that there is a city team involved with this. Certainly a police department is represented on the team, public works, fire department, special events, Health Development Services. So there's a number of interests and ideas that that are brought to bear as we consider any location. I also should have maybe emphasized that what we're sharing with you on the screen this evening is proposed to be temporary in many situations that would allow us to move the quickest to install these temporary features, allow our our kind of recovery process to begin. And then as we we transition from recovery to kind of more permanent operations and then these temporary features would need to be replaced with permanent features if they were so desired. So all those questions about timing and length and noise and surroundings, those would all be considered as each location is ultimately designed. And I also wanted to make sure that I addressed the safety issue. Certainly one of the reasons I asked the traffic engineer to be part of this presentation is anything that goes into the street and the public right of way needs to have our city traffic engineers approval to ensure safety. So nothing would get installed that was not safe. Some of the examples were examples of other jurisdictions, not necessarily what we would put here in our city and safety would be paramount. Hope that addresses your question. Thank you. Speaker 3: Yeah, it does, because obviously there is a public safety concern about that in regards to looking at different. Streets around the city and in all our districts. And as as it's been pointed out, each district is different and unique in its own way. Is there a budget number that we need to hear or you want to hit to to ensure that every district at least has some kind of of a business opening up with with this program? I would hate to see that. You know, there are many districts that well, there are some districts that have more business districts, if you will, then, than others, mine being one of them. And I would like to know if I can have at least two or three places in my in my district that would be that would benefit from this program and have money for it. So, I mean, is there is there a a target that we're looking at in terms of financing this? Or is there can we just go ahead and just draw the straws? How are we going to determine which streets we work with and which we don't? Speaker 6: So Councilmember Yanga, specifically, first, I want to address the other comments that came up. There was no intention to slight any particular disarray. Speaker 4: Not to look. Speaker 6: Like we were only trying to show a couple examples. We certainly recognize that every district has unique features and we would work with those particular representatives and members of those communities to address those unique features. As far as funding, one of the things that we're working on right now, the city has received an allocation of funds for beach streets. Given that we're in the middle of a COVID pandemic, it's unlikely that you'll see a beach street event occur in fiscal year 20. So the idea is we could repurpose those beach street dollars to help implement many of the items that were presented here this evening. And if we're successful in repurposing those dollars, we think that we'll have sufficient funding to do implementation in all nine council districts. So I don't want to leave anyone with the feeling that just because they didn't see a particular representation in this in this presentation, that they're not included. We would work with everybody to try to implement what we can with that funding. If that funding is not made available, then we will try to address that as we continue our budget discussions. But but so far the signs are positive and we think we're going to have funding to do this. Speaker 3: Okay. That's all I have. Thank you very much. Looking forward to working with you and staff on this. Speaker 0: Thank you. Think you're all the councilmembers come up with closing thoughts. First is to the staff. I know that Metro is going to be adjusting its funding model for open street events to exactly this direction. And so all new metro money as it relates to Open Streets is going to be for projects like what we're going to be ahead of the game on, which is which is really good. I also agree, I think we've got to have a city wide perspective so that we're doing these across the city. Just want to uplift the idea of parking lots. Mr. BECK I'm hearing from a lot of restaurants that maybe aren't on a street, but are there parking lot adjacent. And so there's some creativity there. That's great. I want to also just mention a lot of these are going to be, you know, in many ways just done kind of, you know, with rail that just kind of comes up and then restaurants come in and and decorate and put their their tables and chairs up. And so I think we've got to be flexible that the different kind of parklet like spaces are open spaces could all look very different. And we should experiment, see which ones works, see which ones don't. We're not really creating, you know, traditional kind of parklet like structures, right? These are more flexible type structures as we explore. So I also want to make sure, Mr. Beck, that we're not imposing the same type of parklet fees or other kind of barriers for for small businesses. And so I know you guys will be flexible with that and we'll we'll be late in our approach. And just to conclude, I just want to thank really the dozens of restaurants that have reached out to our office, really from across the city and every from every business district that we've been talking to that are excited about this program. And I want to think also that the bids and the property improvement areas and and the Council of Business Associations for their leadership on these ideas, they've been doing a great job of promoting these and working with the businesses as well. So I thank you all. And with that, I'll have the court do a roll call. Speaker 1: District one. District one. District two. I. District three. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District four. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District five. I. District six. Speaker 3: By. Speaker 1: District seven. District eight. Speaker 3: Hi. Speaker 1: District nine. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 1: Motion carries. Speaker 0: Right. Thank you. We're going to transition now in just a few seconds to our budget hearing, which. We'll be next. So. Mr. Modica, just get that prep and we'll start in just 30 seconds. And Mr. Murdoch, are you guys ready to go?

Agenda Item

Recommendation to direct City Manager to create an open streets initiative and explore ways to open more public space throughout Long Beach to allow for increased outdoor activities, safer access to public transit, and stronger economic recovery, all while maintaining appropriate social and physical distancing.

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LongBeachCC_05192020_20-0447

Speaker 0: Right. Thank you. We're going to transition now in just a few seconds to our budget hearing, which. We'll be next. So. Mr. Modica, just get that prep and we'll start in just 30 seconds. And Mr. Murdoch, are you guys ready to go? Speaker 5: We are ready to go. Speaker 0: Out and have a quick read. Read the study session item. Speaker 1: Recommendation to hold a study session to receive and file a presentation on the city's fiscal outlook. Speaker 0: Great. Think I'm going to make some opening comments and then turn this over to Mr. Modica for the presentation. I know we have a lengthy budget presentation. It's a very important presentation. I think we're all aware that we have some significant budget challenges here, both in the near future and in the years ahead. Budgeting was already going to be difficult. As we all know, with COVID 19, it becomes a major economic challenge for us as a community. I've been sharing with folks that just as well as small businesses and others are struggling and there and they're really struggling, including workers, that also impacts the city and our ability to to fully function with all the services that residents and our residents expect becomes much more difficult. And so this will be a difficult budget process. It's going to require all of us to come together and focus on those core services and the core functions of a city. All it's going to make and force us to make some difficult decisions and prioritize. And so that's something that will begin. We'll have this presentation tonight. And of course, we know that we have a robust process that will start later this summer with our our budget oversight committee, with the recommendations that I'll make to the council. And, of course, the deliberation of the council will go into as they go into the fall. I want to want to also note that this is a moment of shared sacrifice for the city. I expect, and I believe every member of our organization will be making sacrifices and will be stepping up to to to take this on . And so I think we're all ready and prepared to do that, including all of us. I know. And so we're going to have to push ourselves harder than ever before to get past this economic crisis. And it's one that's not just the city of Long Beach's challenge, but certainly the state of California is facing an enormous deficit as our sister cities all across the state of California. Let me also just finally note that you're going to hear a presentation tonight of what we have in front of us today. And obviously, there has there have been conversations about the governor's proposal to provide additional funding for Long Beach or there's been conversations about the county and possibly reaching out and getting support there or even at the federal level. And while all of those are very are our options and certainly some are very promising and none of those have yet been adopted or even the governor's proposal has to be passed and adopted by the legislature in the month or so ahead. And so I think what you going to hear from staff tonight is where this budget is as of today and not incorporating what may be possible in the future. Rightly so, we're going to hear a budget budget as it is today. And if those dollars materialize from the state, which we're you know, we're optimistic they will or from other places, then obviously these projections will change as we go into the summer. But but we should expect tough decisions regardless. And so with that, I want to thank the staff for their incredible work. And I want to turn this over to Mr. Modica to start this budget process. Speaker 5: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I think that was a very good introduction of kind of where we are and also what the future might hold for us. So the mayor is absolutely right. We are required and responsible for putting together a budget with what we can control. And that really is kind of the process at hand. We are very hopeful if there is additional, you know, revenue or if things change, we will be flexible and will be able to incorporate some of that. But as of today, we're required to put in place and start the process for how we are going to solve this here locally. And so we do have an in-depth presentation for you tonight. We're going to talk about first the financial strength of the city. We're going to talk about the impact of COVID 19 pandemic on our economy and our services. Grace Yoon, our budget officer But your manager is going to give us a projection update and talk a little bit about the budget process. And then I'd like to share with you kind of my goals and strategies for budget balancing. We're not asking tonight for the Council to make any decisions on the budget. This is really for us to present where we are, kind of the approach the city manager is going to take. And then, of course, to listen and be and be mindful of some of the thoughts that the council has. So in terms of financial strength, one, every single year we balance our budget. We do that. It is a key to good financial management. We maintain our bond rating. We've been in difficult times before and we've gotten through every single one. So we do have experience with this every year. We deliver to you a balanced budget and every year the council is physically disciplined and structurally balances the budget. In terms of our reserves, we get asked a lot. We have a general fund reserve, an operating reserve of 13 and a half million dollars, which is about two and a half percent, which is within our our policy. And then we have an emergency reserve, which is four and $5.5 million or eight and a half percent. That is roughly about one month of operating payroll. Emergency reserves are really there for a catastrophe. We are certainly the closest, I think, that we have been in a long time for having a major, major issue that a reserve would qualify for. But we also need to remember there's the potential for an earthquake or something else that could come up. And so we think of those things when we think about our reserves, particularly our emergency reserve. We have other reserves, including unfunded liabilities, capital and one time projects. We also maintain our AA credit rating. It's a very strong credit rating. We do have a large and diverse tax base. So some cities have seen very large impacts and deep impacts on certain things like, you know, sales in TOT. We have experienced those as well, but we do have a diversified base. It's not the only thing we require to fund our city. Prior to the pandemic, our economy was doing very well and we had very strong development activity and we remain to be a full service city. So we are in control of those services. And so what we're seeing with this pandemic really is severe and it's unprecedented. We have never experienced anything like this in our lifetime. We have businesses that are shut down. We have unemployment skyrocketing, some of the highest that we have ever seen, including the Great Recession. The revenue decline was incredibly sharp and quick, and we are also at the same time experiencing increases in our expenditures to deal with the pandemic. And we are doing everything we can to get federal reimbursement. But the exact level of reimbursement is not certain, and it won't be 100%. We also have an uncertain economy. We don't know when the economy is going to get turned back on, when we can restart, and also whether or not we're going to be in another cycle in a couple of months if there's a downturn or if the virus resurges. And so we also do not believe a quick rebound is considered likely. That was the hope a couple of months ago. It would be what we call a V rebound. It would go down quickly and up quickly. Most economists are looking at what they call the swoosh recovery. If you think of a Nike swoosh that it is, it goes down sharply and then it slowly graduate, gradually goes back up. We also have a lack of one time funding that we are not expecting those large one times to come in. You know, if, you know, our bond rating could be at risk depending on what the level of the impact, how long it goes, and our reserves are at risk. And of course, we do expect, like every other city, our services to be impacted. So do you want to recognize that we are not alone in this? We've all been reading the reports of all the cities in California and across the nation that are struggling with financial issues due to COVID one, where one area that we are unique is that most cities there is 488 cities. In California, I believe 484 are on a July one fiscal year. And there's about four cities that are on the federal fiscal year. And Long Beach is one of them. So we're a little we have a little bit more time to digest what other cities are doing and to prepare for our federal fiscal year, which is October one. So I'm not going to read all of these. But to give you a sense of what's going on in the other cities in L.A., they have a $231 million revenue loss. They're using special and reserve funds. They're proposing 26 furlough days and they're doing some significant reductions, including 20% reduction in street sweeping. San Diego has over $300 million. They're looking at 10% reduction in services, eliminating 342 positions, including some sworn library and parks positions. Santa monica has been one of the most dire impacts that we've seen for the size of their budget 48 million in their current year, 102 million and F 21 for a total of around 225 million over the next couple of years. They've taken on significant reductions. 330 7f2 years. They've reduced pay in their management and others. They looked at street sweeping and going from weekly to monthly. San Jose or San Francisco has seen huge cutbacks in clout, including pushing their whole budget timeline back two months. Oakland has done hiring freeze and laid off employees. Sacramento has a $30 million revenue loss and they're looking at kind of their tax measure that they had passed as part of the assistance. San Jose has a huge loss in the current year and 65 million in the next year and as furloughed more than a thousand of its employees. And so, as with many other cities, our revenue losses really are too large to absorb. It's not something we can just manage in-house. We know that both our staffing levels and our services will be impacted, and so we do need to take action to minimize those impacts. The mayor mentioned this, that there are some federal resources out there, but the city of Long Beach did not receive the large City Cares Act funding. You needed to be 500,000 a population or more. We are at about 484, 85. And so a city, for example, that was just on the other side of that 500,000 received $89 million and we did not. So that has been a huge priority of our mayor and our council is to request those dollars. And there is now $450 million allocation in the state budget, and we believe Long Beach is going to get a portion of that. And so it could fund things like certain expenses. It's not completely open to anything in everything. It's really COVID related, but that is an opportunity for us. There's also a federal legislation that could put more than $1,000,000,000,000 into helping state and local governments with their revenue losses. And that has passed the House, but not yet the Senate. And of course, we're still talking to looking at grants and in talking to the county as we are a health jurisdiction and they are receiving funding for health jurisdictions. And so the pandemic has really created this significant financial crisis. And we are going to be looking at ways, two different ways of delivering service, transforming the way that we work, providing services to our residents. We've already rapidly and effectively adapted our organization, and so we have done a lot more online. It is it required us to innovate, to go faster, to offer services we never thought were possible online, are being offered online. And so moving forward, we're going to have to really continue that work to imagine how we could do things differently and also look strategically as look at those in technology investments, invest in innovation, make investment into businesses and revenue sources, and also look at our organizational structure. So I'm going to turn it to Grace Young right now to go through what the numbers look like for Long Beach and some of the budget details. And then I'll conclude with kind of our approach on how we're going to address this. Grace. Speaker 2: All right. Thank you, Tom. Good evening, Mayor, and members of the City Council. In the next few slides, I will be going over the updated projections for the General Fund and select other funds that have significant losses and other concerns. These are the Tidelands, ESP, measuring and airport funds. Before we turn it back over to Tom to discuss budget development strategies and approach, these projections that we've made, as we've mentioned earlier, are preliminary and will be updated throughout the budget process and may have significant changes. They are potentially more likely to get worse than better, but we will keep assessing the information as it becomes available. So as Tom mentioned, Long Beach has responded swiftly and effectively to mitigate the threat of the pandemic. And the city has taken a number of direct actions to assist our residents and businesses. Some of these actions have adversely impacted revenues or expenditures. In this slide provides examples of our responses as well as a rough estimate of potential fiscal impact. Our main response to address the health crisis may potentially have a net cost of 3 to 6 million in the general fund and potentially another 3 to 5 million in the health fund, with costs likely continuing past the end of the fiscal year. We roughly estimate a loss of about 2.3 million in both parking citations and towing revenues with the higher revenue loss if street sweeping citation program is not maintained. Gas and water have lost about 700,000 and fee waivers and the no shot off provision and the general fund has lost about 170,000 and business license penalties with much larger losses. If continued beyond today, the revenue losses from people not paying at all are not included and cannot be estimated at this time. The city has also allowed rent payments to be deferred. The city normally receives about 2.4 million a month in rent. The monthly totals are large. So to the extent these payments are never made, which is not projectable at this time, there will be an adverse impact. And so we'll continue to evaluate these things and take them into consideration as we address our budget shortfalls. Turning to the general fund with the stay at home order and all the closures and cancelation. The projected shortfall in FY 20 has gotten significantly worse. Sales tax non measure is projecting a loss of up to 12 million or a 17% decline. From our pre-pandemic projections, TOT is reflecting a $10 million loss or a 43% decline from pre-pandemic projections. Oil has experienced an unprecedented drop in prices, even going negative at one point. Currently, it is trending around the mid-twenties in terms of price per barrel, and our budget is at $55 per barrel. We're projecting a 3 million loss at this time or a 30% decline from our previous projections. But we are mitigating some of this by not funding future abandonment cost, which passes the risk and costs to future generations . Parking citation revenues is estimated at a loss of 2 million, which is an 11% decline from previous projections. And there are also pandemic related expenses, which have been about 11 million to date and for the general fund. And as mentioned before, we are currently estimating about 3 to 6 million total costs that won't be reimbursed. But again, this is a very fluid number and we will need to continue to update this. And we're also continuing to look at other revenues that may be adversely impacted and will include that information in future projection updates. For FY 21. The projections have also gotten significantly worse with the assumption update of a slower recovery as opposed to the much quicker rebound that was assumed at the early stages of the pandemic. Sales tax non measure is projecting a loss of up to 6 million or a 9% decline from previous projections. Totters at 8 million loss or a 36% decline. And for oil, we're projecting 5 million loss or a 55% decline from previous projections, which was assuming, again, that $55 a barrel. And our assumptions now is budgeting at $30 a barrel. But again, similar to FY20, we are mitigating some of this oil loss by not funding future abandonment costs. And we'll continue to review and update these projections throughout the budget process as we get more information. So here is the general fund budget forecast. We are showing a shortfall in FY 20 ranging from 25 to 41 million. This range here represents a high and low scenario based on the level of severity, what the level of severity might be in terms of revenue losses. There's still great uncertainty as to how the economy will react for the remainder of the fiscal year, and limited actual data is available right now. In Fy21 we are showing an updated shortfall of 30 million and the out years are showing shortfalls as well. In general, we are assuming that revenue losses continue through FY 21 but start showing improvements and then more or less recover by fy22. We're not assuming a second phase of COVID 19 or another general recession. These numbers also include the cost for negotiated contracts and an assumption of a cost of living increases for other groups. There's also higher CalPERS costs beginning in FY 22 due to the expected investment loss that we are anticipating in FY 20. And bottom line is that these large these are large shortfalls and indicate a need for a long term plan and substantive corrective actions. The Thailand's operating fund is also facing fiscal challenges. This is the fund that supports operations and programs of beaches and waterways, the Convention Center and capital projects and the Tidelands area. For FY 20, we're anticipating to end the year with a negative of funds available of 5 million. Assuming no corrective actions, if we continue to make no changes, the negative funds available grows to about 19 million by the end of FY 21. The assumptions we are making here regarding oil prices is $30 a barrel in FY 20 for the rest of the year. $35 in FY 21. $45 in FY 22. And then back up to our current budgeted 55 in FY 24. There are also extra costs for bonds we are anticipating to hit in FY 21 due to the aquarium and Queen Mary shortfalls, as well as to mitigate the convention center loss per the contract. We're also assuming that for FY 20 and 21, as I've mentioned before, we would not be funding the annual oil well abandonment costs. So for the shortfalls in FY 20, in FY 21, the budget process will be looking to address this with a combination of project funding, savings from operational reductions and the use of reserves. Any projects slated for deferral or cancelation will be brought before council before any action is taken. The SAP fund or the special advertising and promotion fund is also severely impacted as total revenues, which is a very sensitive and volatile revenue source, is its main source of funding. And the SAP fund supports advertising, promotional and public relations projects and special events that call positive attention to the city. For FY 20, we are projecting and ending funds available of -700,000. Again, assuming no corrective actions, this is dropping from the 5 million in funds available at the beginning of the year. If we continue to make no changes, the negative funds available grows to about 2.6 million by the end of FY 21. The extra 1% tax that is effective in July is not included in these numbers as it is dedicated per resolution for specific purposes and again, similar to timelines for the shortfalls in FY 20 and 21. The budget process will be looking to address this with a combination of project funding, savings from operational reductions and the use of reserves. And again, any project cancelation will be brought to City Council first for review. Measure is also taking a significant revenue hit compared to pre-pandemic projections. However, the impact of this is somewhat mitigated because the FY 20 adopted plan was based on a lower budgeted revenue projection as the plan was finalized prior to seeing the strong F1 19 year end performance in FY 20. Compared to our budgeted measure plan, the loss is 5 million, and for FY 21, we are projecting to be below the anticipated revenue in the plan by 2 million. After this, however, we are expecting that revenues will be at or better than the projected revenue levels assumed in the FY 20 budget plan due to the long term revenue increase from the approved ballot measure. This additional revenue from the ballot measure has not been programed yet and will be up to City Council. How to allocate that in the future. As part of the 521 budget development process, a revised spending plan will be proposed that takes into account the revenue declines in FY 20 and 21 , the difficulty in funding public safety operations, as well as the long term revenue increase from the approved ballot measure. We do anticipate that we will need to potentially postpone some projects depending on cash flow with the revenues and also potential reallocation of revenues to help maintain public safety services. Again, any changes or updates to the measure plan will be reviewed with City Council. Lastly, the airport fund has also experienced an unprecedented drop in traffic and flights, potentially resulting in a loss of up to 20 million in Fy20. Uncertainty around when the airport will resume normal operations and how the airlines will adapt to the pandemic make it impossible to have reliable projections for the future at this time. The key immediate goal is ensuring that there is adequate cash for operations in the city's practice of maintaining a large funds available for the airport fund has made a huge difference, and the 18 million CARES grant funds that. Speaker 1: Were awarded will also. Speaker 2: Help greatly, and the airport is anticipating on expanding these funds over the next six months. The airport is currently reviewing options to reduce operating costs, and the Terminal Area Improvement Project is being done in phases with exit ramps for each phase in order to protect cash as necessary. Moving forward, we will be carefully monitoring adaptations by airlines and passengers, as that will affect and impact airport's future and fiscal health. There are other funds and operations that are impacted by the pandemic, including other enterprise funds. For example, we expect mobility and other state county funding from gas tax to be adversely impacted. Utility fund revenues, including penalty fees, are likely down. Towing fund revenues are down significantly due to reduced tows and cancelation of lead sales. All of these impacts have not fully been analyzed yet, and so we will continue to evaluate and update counsel in the future. And as part of the budget process, all funds will be asked to evaluate the health of the fund and to find efficiencies. So with this presentation, we are restarting the FY 21 budget development process that had been temporarily suspended for about two months as the city worked to respond to the pandemic. Our goal is to meet the normal adoption date and the intent is to give the city council and the public close to the normal time they typically have for review and for the budget hearings and public discussion. In order to achieve this goal, we will need to implement a modified process that has shortened timeframes, different deliverables and less time for in-depth analysis. We will be submitting to the Mayor and City Council a booklet summarizing the key proposed changes, as well as the mayor's budget recommendations in lieu of a full proposed budget book in order to meet the time frame goals. The goal is to provide the core information needed for discussion and decision making. The full adopted book will still be prepared and published after the budget is adopted in September. And lastly, during the Flight 21 year, strategies will be developed for future year shortfalls. And with that, I will turn it back over to city manager Tom Mordecai to discuss the goals and strategy for budget balancing. Speaker 5: Okay. Thank you. Thank you very much, Chris. So first and foremost, we're going to do what we need to do to protect public health. And so we do not expect an impact on COVID 19 pandemic. We're going to continue to do all the great work that our team is doing, that our community is doing to to help people through this and to preserve public health. That said, we are already reducing non-critical expenditures as much as practical. We will look at the strategic use of the operating emergency reserves, but also making sure that we preserve reserves for the future. Any use of reserves would come to the council before they would be be spent. We are not anticipating layoffs of full time staff in 20, but we are likely going to have to follow what other cities have done and reduce some of the part time staffing hours where there is not budget or work for those employees. We will be minimizing layoffs by utilizing attrition, holding open a bunch of positions. And we've had experience doing this in the past. We were able to hold positions to get vacancies and also for places for people to move into in the event of position reductions in the future. We will propose a balanced or we will balance propose a balanced budget. We're going to be emphasizing core services and maintaining a balance of services. And you'll hear me talk about that later tonight. We're going to keep looking for transformational opportunities, looking at how we can do things differently. And then we're also going to have to make investments in our economic future. And so for the F 20 budget strategies, we have put in a hard hiring freeze. There are exceptions, of course, to specific positions, but every every position is being scrutinized on whether we should hire and we're cutting back those nonessential expenditures. We will provide recommendations later to the Council on defunding some of those non-critical capital projects as something to consider to close the year in balance. We see that as one of the last things that you would have to do, but it is something that we are working on. We would reconsider our summer activities and programs impacted by the pandemic. We know that kids are going to need a place to go in the summer, but also what can be safely opened and how do we look at those differently? We're going to emphasize full time staffing over part time or non-career staffing. I do believe we should defer our decisions on our police and fire academies for a little bit until we get a better picture of what is going on with our FY 21 budget. I'm not saying we should cancel those and not do any academies in the future, but that we have to make decisions right now about hiring people in the next month or two, and that we would defer that for a little bit and we would continue to in encourage innovation and investment opportunities. And so we see a four pronged strategic approach to the general fund reductions. First, we would look to new or reallocated revenue. We through this would be looking at our fees, would be looking at ambulance fees for public safety, for example. We're going to be looking at how measure aid can be appropriately used for our public safety. As that's one of the eligible uses, we would explore additional efficiencies, innovations and strategic investments. You know, how do we do things differently looking at everything from management consolidations to our functions to our various bureaus and divisions? How do we use that different technology? How do we come back as an economy? I'm also letting you know and letting our employees know and I'll be communicating this tomorrow that we're going to be asking for assistance and contributions from our employee groups. I had a chance to talk to them all today and and let them know that that is something that we're going to be bringing up appropriately at the bargaining table. So that is something that we are going to engage in discussions we got. I think our employees understand and know that we are in some very difficult times. And so I was encouraged by all the discussions I had today. And finally, we're going to be looking at service reductions that prioritize the city's core services and values and do an outcomes based decision making process. And so this is really the core of the presentation. Mayor and Council, I want to talk to you about something we're calling a balanced outcomes based approach. And so we know we have critical services. We need to meet our local, state and federal mandates and legal requirements. We have to have a core of a system in place to support all of our frontline systems and services. And so we need to keep that in a functioning capacity. And then we have the core services that our community relies on. And so we're going to have to prioritize and balance all of those core services and really look at what we are going to consider reasonable response and service levels. And so this is not an exhaustive list, but this is what I hear from you as the council, from our community. Our core services are things like police patrol, emergency medical and fire services. Our infrastructure response like potholes, sidewalks and facilities maintenance. Our maintenance of our public assets are spaces. These are things like code enforcement, graffiti, landscaping, tree trimming, our response to homelessness, our maintaining and enhancing our revenues, our quality of life services, which is a huge long list, but. Could include library and recreation and community programing and support for our youth and senior populations. And so how do we achieve that balance? We need to have a couple of outcomes that we're focused on structurally balance the budget, preserve that capacity as an organization so that we can effectively operate and provide the services our community wants and needs and then retain those acceptable service levels. And so what steps are we going to take? We're going to look back over the past five years and review the additions that we've made to the budget and look to see are those still in keeping with our priorities and those core services. We're going to reevaluate what is an acceptable service level. If we made a reduction in that in that core service, is that something that we can live with if it's a 48 hour response time or a 72 or we're going to look at technology in other ways we've serve the public. I do believe we should look at the entire organization and look really at outcomes rather than, you know, a percentage in a percent there. We're going to look at our service delivery changes from a whole city perspective, but also through an equity lens. How are we serving all of our residents? But also what it or how does equity play a role in this? And how do we know what the impact of those reductions would be through an equity lens? We're going to also pursue in cost recovery. We need to look at services differently and we need to think about how we can operate. And I think the COVID experiences has opened our eyes to different ways to operate. And I think we need to recognize as a community that service reductions will occur and we're going to have to adapt our approach and expectations. And so why a balanced approach or if we over concentrated our service reductions in one area in particular? I do believe we have so little services left that all of them are considered essential. We've been through the Great Recession. We no longer do things that we used to do back then, but now we really are in that area where things are all important. If we exempt certain areas and say we're not going to touch that or touch that or even consider it, that leads really do a fractured service approach. Everything should be on the table as we look at this and then we create options and then look to see what the what the alternatives are and what the outcomes are and especially balance because our services are linked. And so we we talk about the public safety continuum and public safety relies on libraries and parks are poor infrastructure and our maintenance can impact our police and fire. Homelessness can impact police and fire. And support for our frontline workers are critical to their effective operation. If we can't support them in the field, they're not going to be effective. And so you've seen this graphic before where we really look at all the different pieces of the puzzle that we do and how they're all interconnected. And so that really is the concept behind the balanced approach. And so I do want to I'm almost done, but I do want to end that finding $30 million next year in the F 20 budget is going to be very, very difficult. And so we're going to have to look at everything. And I'm just giving you an example of of our budget. So police is 250,000,048%. You can see all the percents. And just to put that in perspective, you know, ten officers is about two and a half or $2 million. A fire engine is $3 million. Tree trimming is $3 million. Parks vacancies, 450,000. And library, a medium sized library is 500,000. Those are by no means what we're proposing, and those are examples only. But just to give you a sense of scale. 30 million out of this budget is going to be difficult. And so we are looking at options. And so we are going to be asking all departments to participate. And my philosophy is we're going to put together something that we believe is a budget, but then we're also going to show you what some of the alternatives would be. So when you have to make those tough decisions in the budget, you can see why there's other alternatives and kind of how staff got to those those recommendations. We're going to ask for targets above what we need so that we have that flexibility and options. And we're asking all departments to submit reductions, including non city manager. Non public safety will be in a range of 0 to 12% of their budget in order to provide those options. And public safety will be in a range of 0 to 3 and a half percent to be able to really look at different ideas. The final recommendations are going to be balanced or based on that balanced outcomes approach, and we're going to keep updating our projections through this budget development process. I'm hoping they'll get better. It's a possibility that they get worse. And so finally to wrap up is we have since the pandemic, has substantially changed our financial landscape. I've said this a couple of times, but we we do know that significant service reductions are going to be needed and that we really need to maintain our core services and values. And also ask ourselves, what are those through this budget process? You know, we we will do this. We will do it right. It's going to be tough. But this team is up for the challenge to present you with those recommendations. And this council makes very good, deliberative decisions during the tough times. And I believe that I believe very strongly that that's going to continue. And so we do hope that all the work that we've done in our economy has really built a good foundation and will be able to recover quickly. And I will just end with saying we will get through this and we will come out on the other side a better organization. So with that, I know that was a long presentation, but we stand ready to answer your questions. Speaker 0: Thank you, Mr. Modica, and just really excellent presentation, obviously sobering information, but you and the team have just done a great job of putting that together, so we appreciate that. I do have a speakers list queued up count. Sorry, ringing. Speaker 3: ex-Mayor. Well, this is the last time that you put this in in a readable format so that we can get it. Speaker 0: You sound a little bit far. Speaker 3: If you look at my little town, I guess. Is that better? Speaker 0: A little bit. Speaker 3: Okay. Let me do this then. How about that? Speaker 0: Okay, that's better. Speaker 3: Okay. So, anyway, this is a lot to absorb and I'm glad that it's in this format so that we can study it more, more carefully and come up with some recommendations. What interested me in this stood out to me, obviously, is how we are going to work with our enterprises. Twain obviously stood out to me. It's a it's an enterprise business that we conduct. And there was a there's a stoppage of sales at this time. Leigh Sales obviously is 50% of that total operation and being that tween is down, I can see why we don't have that many cars on to sell. But it's still an enterprise and I think we should still try to maintain the strength of our enterprise as much as we can. And if that enterprise is going to be cut back or or at least minimized to a certain extent, what does that mean? That we're also looking at layoffs in in enterprise departments? Speaker 5: So Councilmember, one of the unique things about COVID is it has affected everything. So we have seen in all of our funds, we're seeing, you know, different things that we haven't seen before. Towing has historically been a fund that has been able to support the general fund. And so when we look at this, we're going to be looking at every fund, you know, some funds. You know, they're going to have different ways that they contribute to the to the issue and to the general fund. And so we're going to take a look at a fund by fund basis. And towing is one that we're going to keep a very close eye on. But you're right there. There have been impacts in there because we're not towing cars anymore. And that fund is now also not bringing in some of the revenue that it had brought in before. Speaker 3: Well, we've got to be. I guess that would also impact what we do with street sweeping and ticketing as well. I would take it because I know some some of the pounds come from students. We have vehicles that are out there abandoned or have five or more tickets which make them eligible for towing and eventually being able to sell them and pick them up. Just out of curiosity. I if I recall correctly, the the toy yard can hold up to about 1500 cars, you know, exactly right now where we're at with that. But the inventory of vehicles are. Speaker 6: We are. This is John GROSS. We are not at capacity. We're a little fuller than you might expect. I think we are in the 800 900 level, but I don't confirm that and send you a note if that is a is an error there. And we did resume much of our towing operations this Monday. So we're we're hopefully going to mitigate the revenue losses while still being very responsive to the COVID situation. Speaker 3: Okay. That's all I have for now. Thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilmember. Next up is Councilwoman Price. Councilwoman Pryce. Not a recent. Speaker 4: Survey. Speaker 0: Now we can go ahead. Speaker 2: Okay. Thank you. So thank you very much for that presentation. And I really, really appreciate. Tom, that you have shared with us. You know, so honestly, what is happening and what we can expect in the future, I think it's really important for us to have these honest conversations. And I agree with you that I believe that my colleagues and I will be very deliberate and will be very thoughtful in the decisions that have to be made. And I think we are all ready for that time. But we're hopeful that you have some more time to evaluate your options in terms of, you know, where we can tighten our belts, what projects we can defer, and that you will come to us really when when those tough decisions have to be made. And all creative approaches to preserving jobs and services have been exhausted. So I'm really hopeful that we can preserve as many jobs. I mean, to me, that's the number one goal, is to do everything that we can to preserve jobs in the city, because those jobs translate to services and they translate to quality services in every single department. And I know that's all of our goals. So to the extent I mean, I know I speak for myself, I'm not speaking for the whole body on this since I'm the second person queued up and I know others yet have had a chance to speak. So I'm curious to hear what everyone thinks. But speaking for myself, I think, you know, looking at projects that we already have in the queue, infrastructure projects or capital projects that we already have in the queue, perhaps those take priority over new projects. If we haven't started a capital improvement project or it's not in the works yet, it hasn't gone through the air, hasn't gone through. Planning and permitting those kinds of things. Then maybe those are those are projects that take a back burner and projects that are underway maybe take more of a priority. I love the idea of taking a look five years back to determine what new programs to do we fund during that time. And are those truly essential? You know, I'm I'm a lawyer. And one of the one of the gifts that that you develop over time, especially as a trial lawyer, is advocacy. And so when we talk about, you know, what is an essential service or what is a core function of the city, you know, obviously, the best debaters of the world will be able to take either position and argue their hearts out. But I'll tell you right now, when we're looking at the governor's orders and we're thinking about things like, what is it, a central business as a small business owner, I certainly could make an argument to you all day long that the business that my husband and I run is an essential business because it goes to mental health , it goes to progress, it goes to personal worth, it goes to all these things. But in reality, I know what the term essential service or essential business means, and that would be a disingenuous argument. So moving forward, I want us to hopefully get on the same real page about what is an essential core service of the city , and how can we make sure that we preserve those so that we do have equity in the city in terms of every resident being able to benefit from that service that we provide. And so I'm hopeful that we can look at the past five years, think about everything that we've funded, and then think about what services do we have that every resident in this city, regardless of their zip code, relies upon and needs? And how do we make sure that we continue those? So I look forward to that. I do have a question regarding the shelf shortfalls, and I guess this question is for grace regarding the show shortfalls, does that include all the previous shortfall numbers that we had anticipated, which would have included our CalPERS liabilities as well as our contract negotiations? I think it does. I think I heard you say that that includes everything. But is that true? Are these COVID related shortfalls only? Council member. Thank you for the question. You are correct and that these are revised shortfalls that are inclusive of everything. The previous projections and that included some CalPERS or other shortfalls are included in these numbers. Okay. Great. And then the other question I had is that you're not assuming another recession. Why is that? Is that because there's a likelihood that there won't be another recession? Or is it just an assumption that you're making for the purposes of these calculations? Council Member That is an assumption we are making for this particular presentation. We are providing a best estimate of what we think the projection numbers will be in the current and out years. But we are planning to do a better and worse case scenario in the next round of analysis. That includes a potential recession scenario as well as a scenario of what the scenario, what the situation might be if things turn around and look better. And based on those better or worse case scenarios, we will be also developing some contingency planning. Okay. And then I guess thank you for that. And I guess my final question would be really to the city manager, given the fact that we're experiencing major shortfalls in Tidelands, if we continue to leverage the Tidelands Fund or utilize Tidelands monies in order to respond to COVID related scenarios that might impact that fund, will that or could that have an impact on our ability to pay employees that are funded out of the Tidelands Fund? So, Councilmember, this is Grace. I can address that. So what we are projecting right now is a shortfall to the bottom line, tidelands funds available number. But we are planning to address that with looking at projects, looking at the reserves that we have and also making some operational reductions in the future to have a stronger fund moving forward. We would be adjusting things so that we are making sure we make our payroll in the current year and that there is enough cash to do that and funding balance to do that. And so that is not something we're concerned about in terms of being able to pay our employees, but moving forward and looking at the health of the fund. There may be reductions, strategic reductions that need to be made through the budget process, but that would be done and evaluated as part of the budget process. Okay. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. With that, I'm going to turn it over to my colleagues and I'm sure everyone has thoughts to share on this. Thank you very much to the entire staff for your presentation. Speaker 0: Thank you. Next up, I have Councilwoman Mungo. Speaker 4: Thank you. I really appreciate the presentation. I do have a couple of questions before I make any additional comments. I want to thank all the staff for all their hard work. Of the 11 million year to date spend on COVID from the general fund. What are those expenses really? Or is that our test kits? Is that our homeless shelter set up? Is that what? Speaker 2: Councilmember. Majority of these costs are labor related. And so they point to the people that have been standing up, the EEOC, the IMT, as well as other departments that have responded to address the response. Some of these are their budgeted normal salaries and some are overtime expenses. There have been some non. Speaker 4: Salary. Speaker 2: Or non-Labor costs that have hit. Right now these are being coded as COVID. We're not sure if they will be reimbursed, but they may be things like setting up our telecommuting or other expenses. Are there purchases that needed to have been purchased in response as well as the response to the health? Addressing the health issues with the homelessness and other expenses, material expenses that have been expended by the EOC and the IMT. Speaker 5: And testing would certainly also be one of those expenses. So you're having an item before you tonight, about to $2.4 million for testing. So we are hoping to get reimbursed for 75% of everything we do, but we are going to have some unreimbursed expenses as well. Speaker 4: So just so I'm clear if our annual. Let's do a monthly. If our monthly payroll expenses were $10 million and 2 million of those full time salaried employees were transitioned over to COVID, wouldn't our face expense drop? And then the 2 million would be reimbursed at 70, potentially reimbursed at 75%. And so our actual. Costs would have been reduced. Speaker 5: So for the most. Speaker 4: Part, supplement would be the overtime. Sorry. Speaker 5: So for the most part, FEMA is not going to reimburse typical salaries of a budgeted employee, even though they're doing COVID rather than what they were doing before. They're looking for extraordinary expenses, things that are above and beyond. That said, some of the federal dollars that, you know, we've been asking for could fund some of those expenses because we certainly have people now doing things that are not what they were budgeted for. They're doing all COVID all day long. So, you know, that's going to be part of the nuance in the next couple of months as we figure out state money comes in and others what is going to be eligible and what is not. Speaker 4: So a lot of sense. I appreciate that answer. Secondarily, what is our monthly rate of spend on COVID on a go forward basis? Speaker 2: Right now, I can say that all together the courses have been coded to COVID is about 18 million or about 18.5 million. All funds with 11.3 being in the general fund and 7.2 being in other funds. And that represents expenses from the beginning of the pandemic to about mid-May. It is difficult. I mean, so we can extrapolate that and say what the monthly cost has been. It's been about two, two and a half months, but it's hard to say that that value will be our monthly spend because these costs that have incurred so far represent a different level of spending over different times. There was a a lot of cost to stand up the EOC and the IMT, and then those staffing levels have changed. And moving forward, there will be different expenses that we were anticipating with testing, addressing homelessness issues. And so right now it is very difficult to say what the regular monthly costs will be. But we have a team that's looking at this weekly and we'll be evaluating that. And as Tom mentioned, also looking at which of these costs will be able to be reimbursed by grants. And we'll be looking at that and providing updates to council in separate communications about these costs. Speaker 4: So just for some perspective, you said it's been two and a half months, 18 million, so almost 6 million a month, something to think about as a as a group as we go forward. Mr. MODICA, you you'd mentioned that we would look at what has been added to the budget in the last five years. I know that as a budget oversight committee last year we did discuss anything that had been added in the prior five years. If we did that list plus this year, it would be the six years since we a majority of the council turned over in 2014. I would just ask that while we have done that and that list is available, we might want to reach deeper back because the priorities of the prior council, all of which except for two are gone, may not be the priorities of today. And so I appreciated your line about just reassessing the organization as a whole, not necessarily where it came from or what year it was added, and just really talking about what makes sense. Does it make sense that certain things are folded into other things for efficiencies? What are those things? How could we save on management costs and department head costs by collapsing departments? I brought this up at council before, but during the Great Recession, Gardena collapsed a lot of their departments, unlike the county way when they created the DCO system where they put departments together and created higher level positions. When I'm sorry, when Gardena did it, they collapsed it and reduced the number of department, had salaries, reduced the number of management positions. And so that really helped with the structure overall. And then I just want to say that I recognize that there's a big difference between capital investment and our ongoing operating challenges. And I want to be sure that I'm a go forward basis. Our capital investment is spent on things that reduce our ongoing expenses best. So if we can invest in some kind of. I'll give you an example. L.A. County is looking to buy a testing machine. We have a lab, so we're in a position where we can do that. Our costs for tests for COVID go down 66% if we have our own machine. Then we start factoring in staffing costs and the such. And what does that look like? And it's still a significant cost savings, not just when it comes to COVID, but let's talk about it when it comes to city services. If we're able to buy something or do something or automate something in an area where we can still preserve people, even if the types of jobs change, as you said, holding the vacant positions open and allowing people to move around, maybe automation of parking in certain places in the city that are currently staffed and other things. Those investments can save us in the long term and can one or two of those could save an actual person's job, and that job could mean the lifeblood of their family. And so I think that those things are critical for us to consider at this time. Thank you for the great presentation. I plan to be continuing to monitor this closely, and I look forward to having a further discussion with the Budget Oversight Committee. Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilwoman. Also, I know that councilwoman for your cure. That's also a motion to approve or receive and file council. Yes. Speaker 4: Yes. Thank you. Speaker 0: Uh, Councilmember Pierce. Speaker 4: Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Staff. I really appreciate, Tom, the way that you've come forward with your first budget as city manager. I recognize it's not the ideal budget for any city manager to have as their first, but you definitely have the experience and have worked with this council long enough to understand kind of how we're all thinking. And I appreciate that that was reflected in your presentation. I really appreciate the outcome based approach and talking about the equity lens, the conversation you had about what what is public safety, which is something that for the last ten, 15 years of my life is always a question that comes up for me, which is, yes, it can be police officers to some, definitely it can be firefighters. But we also know that public safety for so many of our most vulnerable is access to jobs. It's youth programing, it's mental health. And so when I think about the unique moment that we're in in history and really thinking about what does it mean for the city to be to provide essential services? And I think that our essential goal is to make sure that should there be a rebound or another surge or should there be another pandemic in in five years, how are we as the city, really positioning ourselves so that it doesn't get this bad? Right, because we know that this health concern has really impacted so many. And so I echo the same comments I made last time around. Investment in climate. And I want to take that to the point that Councilmember Mongo just said. We do have a lot of capital investment projects that are in dreamland that we haven't brought forward. I know from talking to staff that there's a long list of things that they'd like to do as we look at capital improvement projects, thinking about how we can reduce our energy bill. So I would really be curious, you know, one on one maybe with our finance team to understand what our electricity bill is for the city and reminding us that whenever we do investments or tries to get microgrids on facilities like fire station or parks that we could be able to lock in our energy cost at 2% growth every year instead of something as high as six or 8%. And so thinking creatively about that is where I think we should think when we're talking about capital improvement projects. As I mentioned, I feel like the the jobs program and everything that our economic development team has done has been wonderful. We have really demonstrated a short period of time that that team can step up, that it can reach a community that historically hasn't been reached before. And so when we talk about essential making sure that we are thinking creatively about how to maintain staffing there. It was brought up about youth services and the fact that right now we don't have a summer program planned as a mother of an eight year old. Trust me, I would love to have a summer program even if they put them in bubbles where they couldn't touch each other. I wouldn't send her away. I'm kidding. But I do think that there are some creative programs out there. And I did talk to Scott today about programs, whether it's an online program that's 2 hours a day with park staff facilitating a Zoom call. That's what groups like the Girl Scouts are doing. What are some of the other summer camps are doing? So I don't want it to be something that is cost prohibitive because we are trying to maintain our budget, but really thinking about how we ensure that our community doesn't go nuts in the next year if we continue to have this lockdown or, you know, shift. I had two questions around oil revenue and I wanted to understand, when we budgeted for oil, we haven't budgeted for 55 a barrel right now. What's the lowest that the city has budgeted for oil revenue in the last ten years? Speaker 2: Council member, we have budgeted as low as $35 a barrel in FY 17. Prior to that, we went even as high as $70 a barrel. And if Y 13, 14 and 15 and in oh nine, we went even higher than that to $85 a barrel. And we learned our lesson very quickly that budgeting at the actual price is very risky. And so our practice from lessons from the past history has been to budget more conservatively, at least at a minimum, $5 below what we think the actual revenue will be, so that we end the year with a little bit of a cushion and some anticipated one times. But we have budgeted as low as 35 in FY 17. Speaker 4: Okay. Thank you. And that was helpful to understand that $5 below what you estimate. So I'm just curious about what policies there might be around trying to budget, you know, very responsibly with that. The other comment that I'd like to just make sure we talk about as we look back, I agree also with Mungo's statement around let's look farther than five years, because we know that this council is a council that's gone through everything to get what we have now. And so looking at the previous councils and saying maybe there's something that's there that's not working or that we're budgeting for that isn't necessarily efficient. And it wasn't mentioned yet. But as we talk about equity and making sure that everybody has access and that we're making sure our neighborhoods are safe. I would like to make sure that we maintain the language access program that we have worked so hard over the last seven years for and making sure that all of our residents really have access. And I think, Tom, you've done a great job just in seeing the community meeting that you had with our Latino community, very different than what was happening last year. And that really demonstrates the value that the city is carrying forward with engaging everybody. And so language access is being a part of that. So I look forward to going through this process. I know it might be difficult for some of our community members having a shorter timeline. And so I just I appreciate your guys work on this. It's not an easy task. Thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you for that, councilwoman. Next is councilmember supernova. Speaker 3: Thank you. Just a couple of points. Mr. MODICA, I'd like to go back to slide 24 and the fifth bullet point down. You're probably not surprised I'm going here. I think I made a very compelling argument about this topic in the past, but it may not have been convincing. That point is defer decisions on the fire and Police Academy until later in the fiscal year 21 budget process to better understand funding and budget from a. And what I would like to do is propose that we go ahead and conduct that fire academy in August. And then possibly, if you need to, you know, eliminate one, it would be, you know, that February class. And the reason I say that is. Now some of the points that I made before that we are in the pandemic right now, it already hit prior one time. We hope it doesn't hit again. But there's always that vulnerability as you get past guys, you get into the fire season where we have automatic aid, uh, mutual aid, and then you. These other jurisdictions, they may be hit by COVID also. So this is not a time when we have the luxury of limited staff with fire. And heaven forbid you just saw a couple of nights ago, L.A. City lost ten firefighters were injured in one fire. And we just need to keep fire fully staffed and make sure that you have everyone in place and functioning at 100%. If you if you don't do that, you risk firefighter safety and public safety all the same time. That's a statement. Tom, if you want to respond, go ahead. But my asking is very simple. Let's go ahead and. Go. Will be. Um. Um. August. Um. Academy for fire. And then if we have to make adjustments later, let's look at that. The other well look point. Oh, I'll tell you, I talk about three sweeping and other cities eliminating some of that. But I'll wait to our other agenda item tonight to bring up those points. And just one final point I'd like to make. And this goes back 18 years, and that is I served on a fourth District advisory committee in 2002, and we're having lots of challenges back in 2002. And one topic that came up right away, and I know it's not in your presentation, was the sale of city assets. And I think time they talked about city buildings. So I'd just like to ask if that is something that would be on the table is. You are free. Speaker 5: I'm sorry you broke up, Daryl. Can you say that again? Council member We couldn't hear you. Speaker 3: About that or what are your thoughts? Speaker 5: Can you repeat that? Daryl That did not come through. Speaker 3: Okay. Can you hear me now? Yes. Okay. So in 2002, when we were in tough budget times, one of the first topics of discussion was the sale of city assets, including building buildings. Is that a discussion for later on in this process? Is that being examined now or it's just not part of the presentation? And is that a more drastic way you look at it later date? Speaker 5: So to answer that question first, I think we we're open to anything. So, you know, my challenge to the departments and others is to look at how we've done things, look at how we've done things. We can do things differently. If that means there's an asset that we can put in play that would help, I'd want to be able to see that and review that. And if it makes sense, propose it to the council. Speaker 3: Okay. Thank you. That's all I have for now. Thanks. Speaker 5: And I did want to clarify the question on Academy. So we have been through several years where we didn't have any academies and that was part of the budget strategy of the Great Recession. It did save some funding, but it also led to some problems later where we went four or five years without any new police officers and firefighters, and we're still feeling the effects of that today. So I do believe that academies are important, that we, you know, can't be too shortsighted and and not do academies at all going forward. That's going to have to be part of our strategy. I am concerned just about the short term timing. We have one coming up in June, I believe in July for P.D. and August for fire. I'm looking to get a little bit of room by looking at a couple of months of pushing back so we can make some decisions. And just so we understand how this affects things like the safer grant, the rest of the budget police, the number of people, the retirements, and even looking at how many firefighters were in police, we're going to need. So this right now is a shorter term decision just to allow for that analysis. And I wouldn't expect it to be pushed much longer than, you know, a month or two or three. So that's really our thinking at the time. Speaker 3: So I think in case they broke ups of what I was what I was saying, if you can hear me, was that I would like to not forego the August Academy. I don't know. I think we should probably take a look to see if eliminating a training academy would affect the safer grant and also just the timing of the year. And as I mentioned in viruses and whatnot, I would much rather look at a later academy for elimination as opposed to one to make up in August. So that's it. Thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilmember. Councilmember Richardson. Speaker 3: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. First of all, I thought the presentation was incredible. You know, this is this is we're heading into a difficult time. But somehow this presentation and maybe I'm a serial optimist, but I feel good about going into this process with with with Tom delivering the framing that he delivered about a balanced outcome approach and making sure that we still resemble the city still resembling substance itself in some ways as we come through this. I think I was glad to hear the confidence in Tom saying that our team is up to the challenge. That's incredibly important. I have support from your leadership. I heard the question, what are our values? That was important for me to hear that values are going to be a thread that sort of guides the decisions that we will make. And we need to make sure we have a full understanding what those values are across the city. What's our what's our philosophy as the city, as it relates to our budget? I think a few things on it sort of highlight. I think the economic investments are important. If we're talking about a 3 to 4 year recession here. This is an opportunity to plant some incredible seeds and seeds that will allow us to come back even stronger than we were before in all parts of town. I remember when there was a little bit of, you know, every once in a while we hear about, hey, we're able to make this investment in this project to make it happen. But we were able to get the money back through the increased property taxes or increased sales taxes that will generate on this project. I want to hear more of that as we move forward. Where are the other seeds that we can plant in all of our neighborhoods to really make sure that our economic engine is booming over the next two years? I was proud to hear that discussions have gone well with our employee groups. We will certainly need buy in from our entire city family in order to preserve the quality of public services that we have. I was around I started in the city in 2010 in the midst of a tough budget and budget season. That was you know, that was I remember that was the budget. That rescue 12 was cut. I can speak to you know, I know that there's going to be a lot of conversations about priorities. And what I can offer now is that what I'm really looking for as we make these decisions? I think we're too early to talk about what the priorities are today, but I'll be looking for certain conditions on how we make those decisions. And I think that balanced outcome approach sets that up quite well. I think one is we need to consider and reflect on data. So as we approach prioritization of cuts, I want to know more about the context to everyone's ability to access services no matter what neighborhood you live in. For example, in his neighborhood, what is the per capita rate of access to your library? If you have 50,000 people with access within a mile or two miles of your library that we need to understand if that library hours were cut, hours it to have a greater impact on that significant amount of people, just as an example. The same applies to afterschool programs, tree trimming streets for street sweeping emergency response times. I know a lot of times we talk about as it relates to emergency response times, what the overall citywide average is. But when you peel that out and I had to learn this the hard way, I didn't realize it initially. But that cut to Rescue 12 gave North Long Beach a 3 minutes later response time in emergency responses than everywhere else in the city. We had to peel back, you know, layers to understand that and which made it incredibly important. We were just going on with the citywide average was so we need to understand what those impacts are so we can we can understand what the base level commitment is will provide to the city, not the average, the base level commitment. Everyone should meet a minimum standard for every one of these services, not the average on minimum standard. And see how we all compare to what that minimum standard is across the city. If one one area town has a much significantly lower, lower, lower response time or low access to some service that should affect every one of us . And that's the way we should really be thinking about this thing as it relates to public safety. I was glad to see the reference. The public safety continuum was reflected in the presentation. It's important to our community and frankly, it's a part of the values we've talked about for the last ten years. Public safety continuum. The outcome of safety is it's judged by a broad set of factors beyond crime statistics. Yes, we want crime down. We want response times low. But safety to me also means that our streets are clean, well-lit. It means our parks are activated and graffiti is abated. It means. That means public works. Parks. Animal control. Animal control. Libraries, health. They all play a part in helping me make our community and keep our community safe. I'm glad to hear that we're moving forward with our academies. I'm glad to hear that the reference to the academies that were canceled in the early 2000s and the way that that affected our ability to respond. And so it's great to hear the framing that, hey, we're moving forward, I think is responsible, that the city manager saying, let's evaluate the impact of the safer ground and the size and scope of the academy. So I think that's responsible to do. Another thing I'll say, just based on witnessing this, this process in the past is contracting out. I think I've heard it a number of times. We're proud of the quality public services that we provide as a city. We want to continue to count on that. It's quality because those are those are hard working city employees. We know their name. We know they're going to retire from the city and they love this city. So we need to really be mindful of as we explore, as we explore ways to innovate and use technology that we're mindful of, of contracting out and protecting and preserving our quality both services. The last thing I'll say is, you know, I think these it's going to be a few difficult years. That's true. But this is a real opportunity for us to reinvest and reimagine, to set the stage for a truly robust recovery in our economy. That should be our focus. If we really focused on thresholds, outcomes, service outcomes and set the stage for robust recovery. Thanks a lot. That's that's my. Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilmember. Appreciate that, Councilmember Austin. Speaker 3: Well, I thank you. And I think my colleagues have said most of what needs to be said, and I appreciate all the comments thus far of Tom. I thank you and financial management staff for giving us a very, very clear. Outlook on what is facing us as a city in terms of our finances. I did do have a couple of questions and then a couple of comments as well. I'm not sure if I heard it, but we do know that there are other actions you take you both the state and federal level that could yield windfalls of of moneys to our city to help us deal with COVID 19. And I would hope that should that happen, I think that should that happen many of the. Conversations regarding potential cuts to our budget will be mitigated. And I'm speaking particularly to the Heroes Act for Congress right now. Well, let's hope that the US Senate and the President do the right thing to help not only our city but the rest of the country. I didn't hear a lot of conversation regarding how we are going to be utilizing our reserves to to to deal with this crisis. And perhaps you can enlighten us again on that, how strategic or if we're going to be using our reserves strategically to to bridge any gap. I tend to agree with the comments regarding. Public safety. Yes, public safety represents two departments, represent almost 68% of our budget, a little over that. But these are critical services for our city and they should be prioritized. I think our residents would agree with that by and large. But at the same time, we need to to consider. The personnel there and the human resources that we have in those public safety. Officers and firefighters that that we invest so heavily in. I guess the one question that I have and will have is, you know, as we move forward in the budget process above the budget oversight process. I'm always curious to know where are our our city staff is and what the outlook is on on retention, retirement or I think those have that information will help us make good, sound decisions, particularly when it comes to our our our our personnel budget moving forward. I'll remind you all that I'm reminded by this. That. That in 2012, when I joined the city council we were facing a month later we were hit with a $17 million budget deficit projected for NY 13. And obviously then it was quite a task for the City Council where the cuts that were being proposed were enormous and obviously that is. What we're facing today is is significantly higher than that. So the decisions before us are going to be great. I'm super excited and I'm thinking, Chuck, Tom, for reaching out to our bargaining units, our unions throughout the city. Their partnership in this is going to be critical. Their involvement engagement in this process is going to be critical for us all. We are in this together and we want to come out of this as a stronger city. I do think that we should be looking at. All of our contractors contracts are evaluating those very carefully and in-sourcing the work where we can. We do have a very talented staff and even looking at consolidating apartments, redefining our city where we can do that, you know, right sizing where we can. But from a standpoint of sensitivity and understanding that the people that. Personnel that work for the city have done so diligently, faithfully, for many years, and they are the face of the city. Most of the time. And so all I'm really, really interested in understanding more about the balanced outcome based approach. This is a first, and I'm sure it's an innovative approach of learning more about that as we engage more in this conversation. And I think there was some conversation regarding projects. I understand this is budget. Our biggest challenge is to be more more programmatic general fund, not necessarily projects in terms of one time funds. So I would just say that there are jobs associated with those projects as well and jobs that are important to our economy. And so let's not be too quick to cut. You know, public works projects that that that are that are improving our infrastructure. And making our city safer as well. So I'm going to reserve the rest of my comments. Looking forward to a robust conversation. With the Budget Oversight Committee and the rest of the City Council for weeks and days. The. Speaker 0: Council member, Vice Mayor Andrews. Speaker 3: Yes. Thank you very much. First of all, I want to thank you and Grace and everyone to help with this presentation together. I'm not going to make it long because we have a big agenda tonight. So this is how I'm accountable. You know, until a U.S., as you know, managed that time. But you were there and we got through that. And I feel very, very confident you being on the know with this. And so I think there's so much that we have to look forward to and looking forward to continue to work so we can make some decisions that keeps the livelihood of our city. You know, I really think we can afford to put our public safety at risk. You know, our infrastructure is important and a continued workforce is vital. So we are really, really going to have to keep an eye on this. And so with that, I think the presentation was everything that we saw there. So there will be more questions right now. I think, you know this great presentation and thank you again and your crew. Speaker 0: Thank you. Vice Mayor Andrews, I want to go to a councilman in house and then I've got a group of folks that are chewed up for a second time. So we'll go to you guys after Councilman De. Speaker 2: You, Maer. And thank you so much, Tom, and city staff for all of the hard work that you've put into this. I echo all of my colleagues sentiments in regards to this item. It's it's terrible time that we're going through. But I feel very confident that we will indeed take a good look at this budget. And together we will come up with a really good resolution so that we can indeed come out stronger from this. One of the things that I also want to echo is the importance of our public safety, especially with police and fire. I think that a couple months back, I remember hearing people throwing out the words, oh, we another recession is coming. You know, we should expect another recession. And I would be like, Really? Hmm. But but never in my wildest dreams that I that I think that something this this that mental would happen to our city. And with that said, I'm so glad I'm so glad that we have a city manager right now that is at the top of his game and that knows budget very, very well. I feel very grateful to have you leading this time. With that being said, you know, we are in a recession. And I also think back of when people said, what happens if we go into another crisis? And I'm not talking about just, you know, Corona virus again, which, you know, could or could happen again. But I'm talking about those things that are also unpredictable and that are out of our control. Like if we have a major earthquake, what is going to happen with that? You know, we are a state that is very prone to earthquakes and we should expect that. But we've been very lucky to not have had one. But what if that happens? You know what will happen. So those are things that I worry about a lot. That's why I go back to how important it is to keep our public safety. I agree immensely with my colleague, council member, super not in the fact that we cannot we should not risk. Not having our fire academies right now. I think we need them more than ever right now to prepare ourselves not only for a second round of COVID. That knock on wood will hopefully will not come, but also from any other catastrophes or any other things that might affect our our safety, our public safety in in this city. I'm I'm also very prideful to have our own police department and our own fire department within the city, and they take such great care of us. Then I think that it's time. Times like this that we need to take care of them. I think that bringing on the academies, at least the ones that are scheduled to come sooner than later, and then let's work through them and see how we can adjust those. And actually, if we need to eliminate something further on down the line, then we should. But right now, I think that that that to me is very important. So I want to make sure that that we do continue to have those the media that can and be also, you know, from a budget perspective. We could also say that when new new recruits come on to either fire or PD, they come in at a much lower rate than those who are retiring. So maybe we can think about some incentives that could help people retire sooner. But, you know, and also seeing that after this pandemic, those that were maybe in the verge of deciding whether to retire or not retire might be deciding to retire. So then that would leave a little bit of room to be able to bring some of our new recruits into our department. So again, thank you all for all your sentiments and thank you staff for all the great work that you're doing. And I'm I'm very hopeful that together as a city and as a council, we will come out of this stronger than ever. So thank you very much. Speaker 0: Thank you. I might go back again for a second time to some council members council oranga. Speaker 3: I would call the comments have been great. Thank you. Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you. We know we have a long agenda. Councilmember. Here's for you up again. Speaker 4: Yes. Just very briefly. Yes, we have a long agenda. I wanted to just briefly echo the comments around the academy. I know. I guess my question is more about if there's a. There is a way to craft the academy differently versus just saying that we can't fund them. And so I agree with what the comments that have already been made. But as we look forward, this is always a good time for us to kind of restructure and say if it's 7 hours this day, does it make sense to make it six and then do X amount of training, you know, and at a different time ? So I'm just curious about that and I don't need an answer necessarily. And then wanted to I just really appreciated Rex and I haven't talked about the budget conversation at all, but I appreciated hearing how he brought up access to services. And I think that that to me is really what the lens needs to be. Call it whatever you want to call it, but everybody should have the same access to resources, even if that means that that everybody's time is a little bit more delayed. But I appreciate all the comments that have been made and agree on the comments around stopping just, you know, making sure that all of our all bargaining units that are coming forward, that we're obviously negotiating in good faith and that we're all being asked to kind of do the same thing as much as we possibly can. So thank you. Speaker 0: To come. Thank you, Councilwoman. Councilwoman. Mongo. Speaker 4: Thank you, Mayor. Just another quick question. Are we accounting for the percentage each of our public safety agencies is in relation to the budget. But when we. It. Speaker 5: Councilmember. I think you're breaking up a little bit. Can you repeat the question. Speaker 4: Into consideration, have a significant reduction in overtime due to special events. But it does the percentage of the budget that they are on a go. Can you hear me now? Can you hear me now? Yes. Okay. So when we talk about the percentages on one of the slides in the presentation, police and fire and public safety and preparedness and the EOC and dispatch make up 70% of the budget. And one of the things that definitely has hit our communities is a considerable reduction in special events. And a lot of times that special event overtime is matched with a special event revenue. And so has that been taken into account in the percentages on a go forward basis with a reduction of these special events? Speaker 2: Councilwoman. The projections of costs have been taken into account in terms of the overall FY 20 general fund and ACP expenses. In terms of the percentage, if you're talking about the percentage for the budget targets. Those are viewed more from a budget expenditure percentage perspective and is a starting point to generate options. And the final decisions would really be based on what Tom was talking about, the balanced outcome approach that's just based on their current budgeted expenditures. But in terms of looking at our actual expenses in the year, we are looking at things like overtime and savings there, as well as additional expenses that were unexpected. Speaker 4: Thank you. I just want to close by saying once again, it's going to be a difficult time. We're going to get through this together. Hopefully we'll get through it stronger when we come out than when we went in. But we do need to. Really as a council, look at what our priorities are because this will not be none of these decisions will be easy. Thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you. Councilwoman Gottesman, our concern is that you again? I'm not sure. Yes. Speaker 3: Yes. Okay. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So just hearing the conversation, I think the Academy, you come up a lot and I just want to hear a little bit more from staff. So. So what stage are we? So, Mr. Modica, what stage are we in on this current academy? Where are we in that phase? I know that we discussed this being one of our first with our new diversity program, the Diversity Officer and Fire Academy. And I want to understand sort of the risk to this potential class. So can you give us an update on where we are with this? Speaker 5: Yes. So we also have Chief Luna here and Ray Toohey, who can answer some specific questions about fire and police academies. So Fire and Police Academy is scheduled to begin in July. And right now, the police or Fire Academy I'm sorry, the Fire Academy is scheduled to begin in August. The diversity officer has been doing their work and both classes have done good outreach related to diversity. So I'm very cognizant of that. I don't want to lose that good work. What I am really asking and looking at is to push it back a little bit within some months so that we can and also look at the size of the classes just so that we can really rightsize those academies to where they need to fit and just understand the financial implications. I also have some COVID concerns. We've been tracking L.A. City. They had an academy class where 17 recruits tested positive. They put in a lot of different protocols and still had 17 recruits test positive. So bringing that many people together in an area is not really, you know, conducive to COVID. So I am looking at you again, giving us a little bit of time. We are in you know, we're not looking at losing those classes completely. And at least allow us to do some additional analysis. So if I didn't answer the question, we have both Ray Tuohy and and Chief Looney here. Speaker 3: Sir. Can I speak to the question? Speaker 5: Okay. Well, I think fire has been the bigger question. I'll bring up Chief Tuohy. Speaker 3: Thank you. Speaker 6: Councilman Richardson, this is deputy chief to a yeah. We are at the background check. The packets have all been received of of approximately in excess of 50 candidates for both classes. They're being evaluated by support services. So we're in deep into the process. The challenge for us, for the fire department is the high caliber of candidates that are a part of our process. They're also being evaluated for other local agencies. Chief Espino and I are on a weekly conference call with the area fire departments and more than half of them in excess of 20 departments are advancing on their hiring process and these candidates are high on their list as well. So we want to capture the quality that Long Beach attracts. The once the background process is completed, they'll head towards the medical. And if if in fact, the August class proceeds, then they'll begin the first week of August. Speaker 3: Okay. So here's what I would offer to that. I think we need to make sure that as we balance the fiscal impacts, let's say, for grants and all those other things, we also balance the integrity of the class that we are attempting to put forward. I know that a lot of work has gone in on these classes. I also know that it's difficult to maintain. You know, we've talked about this for a while. Efforts and outreach that goes into making sure we have a diverse police force and fire department. And, you know, I want to make sure those things are not compromised. So what would be helpful to me is to understand, you know, before we make decisions, I understand what's happening in some of these other departments. Are they delaying? Are we sort of if we delay that, triggers that they will participate in other academies happening in other agencies? I really want to make sure we factor that out. I want to I want to say that you should do your you know, do your fiscal diligence. But let's make sure that we are balancing the risk to the rest of the academy as well. You know, if this delay is risky, I'd like to know that. Thanks a lot. Speaker 5: So my own counsel, I think there's been a lot of questions just on academies, and I certainly understand that given how much we have left to work on tonight, I'd like to suggest that come back with kind of a report on the academies, the financial impacts, how much they cost, how much they're going to cost if we keep them on the current schedule, potential impacts, safer grant, all that type of thing. So I'll prepare that and then try to answer some more of those questions. Speaker 0: Thank you, Mr. Modica. I know we have a long agenda. Have folks have queued up for a second time again. So I'm going to go through them hopefully to. Speaker 3: Their. Speaker 0: Expeditious. Vice Mayor Andres. Okay. Councilman's in Dallas. Speaker 3: Yes, ma'am. Thank you. I'm here. Speaker 0: Okay, go ahead. Speaker 3: You do that on cue, up more than once. But I really want to go back in green with the super, because I don't really think we can afford to jeopardize our academy for the summit. You know, and also, you know, we talk about math, how increase in emphasis on full time personnel. I want to make sure that we hear that they really do hear me loud and clear that the proper engagement with appropriate unions but use up to par. So please work with our union. Keep them involved and informed before making any decisions that will affect their members. Thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you, Vice Mayor. Councilman Sun has. Speaker 2: Thank you, Mayor. Really quickly, just wanted to say thanks to Tom for providing that information about other academies and and for letting us know that there have been COVID positive cases in other academies. That seems like an enormous amount, something I wouldn't want to put our academy through. But I think that I I'm confident in the organizers of the academies that they will indeed learn from those agencies and be able to be prepared to be able to conduct an academy at this point through COVID, because, again, we need them. Another thing that I wanted to say is that especially because all of these candidates have already been in process, they've been told that they're going to be joining the academy, especially for Fire and the Argus, I think guess is close enough, but yet far enough that there could be a lot of the implementation of social distancing and ways that we can we can reorganize what the Academy looks like for the fire department. So thank you again for sharing that information. And I look forward to hearing the report on this. Speaker 0: Thank you. I think that was everyone that was queued up a second time. So let me go ahead and we have a motion in a second to receive and file the report. Thanks again to staff for a great update. More to come, of course, and appreciate all the input tonight from from the council. I know the staff does as well and they'll use that input as we move forward. So can we get a roll call vote on the receiving file? Speaker 1: District one. I district to. Speaker 2: My. Speaker 1: District three. Speaker 0: Please. Please mute your phones, guys. If you. If you are. Go ahead. Speaker 1: District three. District four. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 1: District five. Speaker 4: I. Speaker 1: District six. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 1: District seven. Speaker 3: By. Speaker 1: District eight. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District nine. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 1: Motion carries. Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Thanks again for the budget presentation. So let's go on to the rest of the regular agenda. We're going to do item 25.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to hold a study session to receive and file a presentation on the City’s Fiscal Outlook.

LongBeachCC

LongBeachCC_05192020_20-0462

Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Thanks again for the budget presentation. So let's go on to the rest of the regular agenda. We're going to do item 25. Speaker 1: Communication for Mayor Garcia. Councilwoman Zendejas. Councilmember Pierce. Vice Mayor Andrews. Councilmember Urunga. Recommendation to request city manager to report on street sweeping outreach program to impacted neighborhoods and impacts on first day of enforcement efforts. Speaker 0: Thank you, Madam Court. I'm just going to be brief. I mention this over to Mr. Murdoch in just a minute. Obviously, strict street sweeping enforcement resumed yesterday. And I think there was broad consensus with the council of why street sweeping is important for public health and safety, especially as it relates to clean water and clean, clean gutters and neighborhoods and neighborhood safety. So we I think everyone is in agreement. We also know, obviously, that there's huge financial hardship. It's happening across the city and there's a really strong communication communications program that was put in place to address these upcoming weeks where it's back in place. And so this is really a two part recommendation tonight. But the first I hope we get turn over to Mr. Modica would give us an update on how our enforcement efforts, what our communication strategy was like the last few weeks, and maybe an update on how Monday and yesterday's enforcement went. And then I'm going to have some suggestions about how we move forward. So, Mr. Modica. Speaker 5: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. We'll have Craig Beck and Nico Marconi in. Give that update. Thank you. Speaker 6: Thank you, ma'am. Members of the council. We did put together a brief little outline just to share with you on some of the efforts made relative to street sweeping and keeping our city clean. Dico has that and he's going to go through the information for this evening. A. Thank you, Craig. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, and members of the council. We did resume issuing citations for street sweeping as of yesterday, Monday, May 18th. And just to give you some background, the city originally suspended, issuing street sweeping citations on March 17th. The city did encourage residents to move their vehicles, despite the fact that there were no citations. But as time went on, fewer vehicles were being moved and sweeping in. Many areas of the city had become ineffective as debris continued to accumulate. As a result, this city council agreed and directed staff on, I believe it was April 21st to resume issuing citations on May 18th and to provide two weeks of noticing prior to that by putting fliers on cars that would otherwise have been cited for a street sweeping violation. So beginning of May 4th, we began putting fliers on vehicles, warning them that beginning May 18th, we would be we would be issuing citations. Yesterday, about 925 sites were issued on Monday. Our average Monday is typically around 450 citations that are issued. So we issued about twice as many as we typically do. But if we go back to May 4th, where we we first started putting fliers out on May 4th, Monday, we fired 6000 vehicles and probably just a little bit over 6000 vehicles. And if you take a look at the 6000 vehicles reducing to 925 vehicles, two weeks later, it's about an 85% reduction in the number of vehicles that were on routes compared to May 4th. So with that and our other public education outreach efforts, which I will review in just a moment, I think the message did get out to the majority of the public. Any time we attempt we temporarily suspend citations for street sweeping. We typically see a spike when we first initially resume citations, despite how much outreach we do do. We also typically see a small bump during light rain days like we had yesterday, because some people assume that we are not going to sweep it. We only suspend sweeping if the rain makes the operation problematic. Yesterday we did have one route where we stopped sweeping partway through the time zone. It was the 10 to 12 a.m. total from 10 a.m. to 12 noon time zone. But by 1230, when we began the next time zone, that was dry enough to continue sweeping. To get an idea of the tonnage being collected, our inability to sweep properly during the suspended time period brought us to a low of 0.3 tons of debris collected on April 27th. Compared to when we did start sweeping the citations again yesterday, it jumped to 2.54 tons. So it was more than eight fold increase in the amount of debris that was collected. This compares to about one and a half to one and three quarter tons in a typical sweeping pre-COVID. So it still was a spike from what we would regularly get. And that's a reflection on the increased debris that was accumulating along the routes. It's important to note, too, that Monday is our fewest routes, fewest residential routes, so other days have much more significant tonnage that come with it. We did receive approximately 150 calls on Monday regarding street sweeping. Virtually all of those calls were questions, not complaints. We have about ten complaints on Monday about why are we issuing citations. The rest of the calls, about 50%. We're asking if we indeed were initiating the resumption of issuing sites and 50% were questions regarding are we still sleeping because of the rain? We did receive about seven or eight more complaints today and the city has provided a free parking program to help assist people that may be impacted for parking as a result of being home . We have 20 lots citywide that are available with over 4300 parking spaces. For those spaces, 1357 permits have been issued, leaving nearly 3000 permits still available to utilize those off street parking lots. I'd like to talk a little bit about our outreach efforts. We issued six press releases through our Joint Information Command Center, specifically about the street sweeping program. We have included information in six different editions of the Golden Beach newsletter. We have in five locations and our on our websites on the city's COVID page, the public works page, the city's press release page, among other pages, where we have identified the street sweeping, resuming service and parking enforcement resuming service with regard to street swimming, we ran paid advertisements online ads in the post, the grunion an opinion on starting May 15th to Saturday, May 23rd excuse me, our social media, Long Beach City social media. We had over 50 posts with 500 over 500,000 views between March 16th and May 17th regarding street sweeping public works, social media 21 posts with over 122,000 views. And Long Beach Recycles also had 13 posts with nearly 10,000 views. An interesting note to make is that the recent overall increase of posts tend to be supporting resuming street sweeping operation and with the information center has not seen a general increase of complaints leading up to enforcement. And that's that's a that's actually a. An example of how our our residents and businesses have, I believe, embraced and appreciated the efforts that we've made to provide some relief and are now helping us in providing the proper street sweeping service. All these are these efforts don't even include the council offices and the mayor's office for messaging your constituents. And we appreciate the support you provide in doing that. Also, as I said, we worked for two weeks distributing fliers on vehicles rather than issuing citations that would have been in violation of the street sweeping restrictions. We issued we issued over 80,000 fliers during that two week period. I'd like to also just add in before I conclude this, that the city does have some existing payment relief assistance programs. There is an indigent payment plan which was mandated by the state a while back, and that can be utilized for people who are of low income and need assistance. There's a non indigent payment plan that's available to anyone who requests that the city decided to implement themselves without being forced, without being required to do so by the by the state. And there's a one time towing and parking citation waiver for homelessness. If people can provide evidence of experiencing homelessness where they can have a one time waiver. That's my presentation. I'm here to answer some questions. Speaker 0: Thank you very much. Appreciate that update. There are public works team. And I just want to just, you know, again, just say that I want to thank the entire public works team. I think you really heard the council. You went out and did an enormous amount of outreach. Obviously, the wiring work, the social media work. I know that we've been in touch consistently on on this work. And so I just want to thank all of you. We think you've done a good job. But so why are we here? And, Mr. Modica, I know you and I are having some discussions and you can maybe answer some of these questions that were kind of lead me to where I'd like us to go. And we're certainly I know some of the council members also would like us to end up. So. Mr. Modica, just to be clear, so be we. The amount of citations given out yesterday were double what we normally would on a monday, correct? Speaker 5: That's correct. Speaker 0: Okay. And I think what that reflects is two things, I think. One is I think I, along with many others, were worried that that would act, that that number would be a lot higher. Right. We didn't know how many folks, because here's the reality is we fired for two weeks. And still there are a lot of folks who still did not know about the change. Not everybody is on social media. Not everybody has access to these communication networks. And so a lot of people still didn't know about the change. And more importantly, there's a lot of folks that are greatly burdened by their financial hardship who a a ticket of this type would be very damaging to their own survival and their own ability to pay. There are other other fees. And so I'm in no way I think we need to st we we all understand that support that. But how do we provide some additional relief as we're easing into bringing back this enforcement? And that's really what this conversation is about. And so what where I'd like to see us have I know that currently. Mr. MODICA you've mentioned to me that the city does not have much flexibility when it comes to waiving parking citations. And I think many of us know that when when folks reach out and try to get citations waived or protested, it's a very small fraction of. Speaker 3: Folks that are. Speaker 0: Able to do that in the code. Is that right, Mr. Monica? Speaker 5: Yes, that's correct. Speaker 0: And so and it doesn't provide you with much flexibility in emergencies or times of kind of crisis. To make those adjustments. Is that right? Speaker 5: So we do have some ability to do that. But what we are always very cognizant of is treating everybody fairly. So it is really something that we want to have kind of direction on if we're going to do that. How do we define who would would be eligible? So we really wouldn't want that to be on an individual basis. It's more of a programmatic. So that I think is the discussion tonight. Speaker 0: Right. And so from a programmatic perspective, I think what we would like to see is to provide the city manager with the ability to waive for that for the next two weeks, the ability for the city manager to waive parking I'm sorry, street sweeping citations as it relate to anyone that would come forward with any sort of COVID 19 related financial hardship. And so it's for the next two weeks, as we're easing into it, tickets will continue to be given out. But if someone reaches out to the city to protest or because they didn't or because any of these relate to COVID 19, they didn't get the flier that didn't hear the information. We waive that first citation and the city manager would have the ability to waive those automatically. We obviously know a lot of folks will pay their citations and that's fine, but some won't be able to and some will reach out for help. And this is a way to assist them as we transition, and that will expire after next week. And so for this week and for the following week, we'll be able to waive that's that citation almost as an additional warning. So that would be the main the motion and I know I see councilman's in Dallas as I made that motion. If I can get a second on that motion and we'll go through the. Speaker 3: The motions here. Speaker 0: Can you see a second on the motion? So that's the motion as it stands. And then I'll have some additional comments once we get through the Council as well about some suggestions, effort from public works as well. So that's a motion on the floor. Matron, it's over to Councilman's and Dallas. Speaker 2: There has been a representative of the First District that is a hugely impacted district when it comes to parking and also hugely impacted where with the inability to get direct communication or from city and from staff, I think that this is the only the fairest thing that we can do. I think that a lot of the residents in my district are going through very, very hard financial setbacks, as is everyone. Right. But like you said earlier, a ticket like this of this magnitude can really, really set them back. So having this this program in place, I think, will be very, very helpful not only to the residents in my district, but to the residents in the whole city. Thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you. Councilwoman, I have the second, which is Councilmember Pearce. Councilwoman. Speaker 4: Thank you, mayor. And thank you for your bringing forward. I know the last time we had this discussion, it was robust. Obviously, the second district is highly parking impacted. Also, we have a lot of residents in the second district that are the ones that are struggling with unemployment. And so I support the motion on the floor. I did just want to clarify because I've had lots of people ask and I asked Tom this question earlier. People have asked about reducing the parking fees. I think the parking fees like $70, if we reduce it by 50%, the council would have to vote again to increase it . Is that correct? We couldn't say for the next two weeks, reduce the parking fee and then automatically it would go back up to the normal rate. Is that correct? Speaker 5: That's correct. You would have to actually have a hearing. We'd have to agenda is it for a specific hearing and actually reset the fee? Speaker 4: Okay. I appreciate the the direction of this motion. And I think as the COVID situation continues, we have to continually reevaluate, you know, what's appropriate. I know the last time we talked about this, we talked a lot about the parking lots. I know that staff is extremely busy with a lot of priorities. Has there been any movement on reaching some of those parking lots and being able to say, let's take one of our parking stands, like one of the ones we removed off Fourth Street, give it to them so that they can charge parking in their parking lots , like the parking lot that we talked about. Speaker 6: So Councilmember, I think to address the question, what you're asking about is a privately owned lot and the placement of a parking meter where that private entity could then charge parking rates. We do have the ability to move forward with that. However, what we're struggling with is having the privately owned property owners wanting the city to cover liability for public parking on their lots. Speaker 4: And I understand that that's continue to be the conversation, I guess, and I don't want to spend too much time on it, but it is. What? And when you drive to downtown L.A. and all of those private lots are opened up for private companies to take people's money to park there. Who's paying the insurance there? Speaker 5: They are because they're making money off of it. So we would do that in a heartbeat. You know, if they wanted to charge for the funding and cover their liability costs, that would be fine by us. Speaker 4: Yes, that's what I'm what assuming the whole time is that we would assume that they would be making money, therefore they would pay for their liability. Not that it's just opening the door for anybody to come, but that if we found that ability to put in one of those parking meters, like what we have at fourth and cherry, that that might be a good solution because I appreciate that we have parking that's available, but I know some other council members and, you know, the the north side or other side of my district doesn't have those lots close to them. So I just don't. Any time we talk about parking, I'm going to bring up the private lots and say that my staff is here to help do outreach. If there's another way that we can have the conversation, I'd appreciate it. But and Craig, I think you and I have a briefing next week. We can talk a little bit more about it. I support the motion on the floor. I really appreciate the mayor for bringing this forward, and I look forward to seeing how the process goes. Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilwoman. Councilmember Superman. Speaker 3: Thank you. I spoke quite a bit on this on the 21st, and I have some unique conditions in the fourth District, so I apologize for being repetitive, but this is certainly not a one size fits all. As I mentioned in the previous meeting, zip code and I have no way to go for. It was dense zip code in the city and that's the western half of the forties. I'd like to commend Public Works for doing a great job of outreach. That's not the problem. The problem is there's no place for folks to move their cars to within a reasonable distance. I did point out also that of the the 2500 spaces found in Lodz, only six were located in the fourth District and that's at the Pruitt library. And those will go away when the libraries reopen. I'm. If it doesn't look like I'm going to have support on a on a on emotion. So I would like to bring out one. When someone doesn't pay a parking ticket in Long Beach and you can confirm this. Mr. MODICA After 76 days that gets turned over to the DMV. And then when that individual goes to register. The. Oh, those park. You take it so they can't register their car. Are you aware of that policy? Speaker 5: So John GROSS will talk to us a little bit about that policy. Speaker 6: You broke up a little bit. Council member but in in general, we have a timeframe. I'm not sure whether it's 76 days, it may be, but at some point we do turn it over to the DMV. We have, um, temporarily and DeKoe is, is sitting there. I believe we have temporarily suspended that process. We will. And we've done a number of things to help in the COVID crisis. We don't apply penalties on parking tickets in general, and we have backed off of the DMV process also. So we have done. And that has made a difference to our community, I think. Speaker 3: Okay. So just a couple of points. And if I break up, please tell me. But on April 21st when we move this forward. I for one, but I think other council members were anticipated we'd be in a different place on May 15. A speculation that the safer at home order might be lifted that point since it hasn't. We have the same conditions that we did back then when we instituted the suspension. So it doesn't work. I guess what I would offer if we can officially suspend the policy of sending these citations to the DMV, because I think that's particularly onerous for a period of one year. I could support that. Now, is that is that made as a friendly amendment? Speaker 0: Councilmember. I know that Customs and data says that as the motion. I have no issues with suspending. Would you be amenable to suspending them until the safer at home order is lifted? Speaker 3: Well, the problem with that proposal is that would accumulate. And if someone gets, you know, behind in parking tickets, then they might have a 300 or $400 bill filled up. And then suddenly they can't register a car which might be subject to towing if that car is parked in a public public street at some point. Speaker 0: I don't have I don't have an issue with that. I'm okay with that. I just I don't know the implications of what that means. The staff want to comment on that. Speaker 6: Yes they can. In the short term. In responding to what we think City Council wanted, we have effectively suspended that operation. We have not determine when to turn it back on and that was something we would be coming to council with. But it no longer is in practical enforcement at the moment and and the financial implications to do it after the safer at home order is lifted or people get back more financially would probably be quite significant. My guess is it would probably be over a million, maybe more than $2 million a year in terms of that suspension . So it would be quite a significant impact that would have to be offset. So yes, it can be done. An alternative solution might be simply to ask the staff to come back to council when when they are thinking it is appropriate to begin that enforcement. Speaker 3: Okay. Okay. Speaker 0: So let me do this and I want to go to the other members and I actually like a lot of what Councilmember Sepinwall said. So let me see if I can incorporate some of that into the final motion, because I do have some some small edits to it. And Council Councilmember let me know at that time if that's something that's. Speaker 3: Amenable to you. Okay. Speaker 0: Vice managers. Speaker 3: Yeah. First of all, we thank you for your leadership on this. And I think at this time, any relief we can come up with, as you know, is greatly appreciate. And so I'm happy to be on it. Speaker 0: Okay. So why have you this councilmember pierces at you a second time or no? Speaker 4: No. Speaker 0: Okay. So let me go back to the motion. So let me this. What we have in front of us is and then I wanted to add add something to it. So what we have in front of us is essentially until June 1st, the city manager will have the ability to to waive the entire citations. That would be the entire citation would be waived for anyone that received a citation, that first kind of citation as just a warning opportunity. And then that way that there is flexibility. But any anyone that's coming forward with a COVID related hardship or financial hardship or just that didn't get the communication would have that in place. So that would be the motion in addition to that. So this was going to be part of the the original motion is I'd like this issue to be agenda ized again on the June 2nd agenda by staff, because I think that we need to at that point, review two weeks of data and see how we're doing. I know it's it's onerous, but I think this is a really, really big issue for for working families right now. And we're getting a lot of folks that are struggling on this issue and they're really having a hard time with the parking issue. And so I'd like this to be a generalized as it is the councilmember supervisor friendly. I want to you know, I understand there's some concern from staff there, but can can we at least for now, because we could suspend those can we suspend what the council member was referring to as far as sending those tickets to the DMV, at least through the safe at home? And then when we come back on June the second agenda, you can give us a broader report on that piece of this initiative. And maybe we at that point can have a discussion about extension or what the implications are, because I want to learn a little bit more. So at least at least we'll extend it through safer at home and then we can can revisit that in two weeks to see if there's additional extensions we want to make or adjustments. Mr. MODICA First, is that does that seem okay, manageable for staff? Speaker 5: Yes, we'd like to request that. We either come back on the ninth or the 16th, the way the agenda process works to come back on the second. We need to have our report to you by Friday. So I think you're going to want us to make the regular agenda. So I think you're going to want us to look at what happens between now and the two weeks that you gave us to waive some fees. We then could come back with a report and put that on the agenda for either the ninth or the 16th. And we'd certainly not change anything related to DMV between now and that time and be able to report back on on what that process looks like. Speaker 0: I appreciate that. I'm going to actually ask for the report to come back on the second. Mr. MODICA And only because this two week process that we're waiting to see actually ends on June 1st. And so I think it's important for us to kind of take a side like at least whatever we can put together, even if it's on the supplemental, whatever information we can by the second. I'd like to discuss it then and then Councilmember Super, if that sounds amenable to you, well, we'll move forward on, on your really good suggestion on waiving those making that a policy. And then we can talk on the second about maybe extending that. Speaker 3: Yeah, that sounds great. I really like. But it's. Back to council. And quite frankly, I did not know it had been suspended by the command staff doing that. Absolutely. Speaker 5: And Mayor, we want to just for clarity, we're talking about street sweeping citations, right. To this point, we have not talked about anything else. Is that confirmed at street sweeping tickets? Speaker 0: Let's confirm because the rest of our continuing goings with street sweeping citations. Speaker 5: Good. Thank you. Speaker 2: Thank you. And that sounds good to me. This is Mary. Speaker 0: Thank you. Counts. The woman with that will take the roll call the. Speaker 1: District one. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District two, i. District three. I district for. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District five. District five. Speaker 4: Can you hear me? I. I. Speaker 1: I. Thank you. Speaker 4: I. Speaker 1: District six. District seven. Speaker 3: II. Speaker 1: District eight. Speaker 3: II. Speaker 1: District nine, Ocean Carries. Speaker 0: Thank you. City Council. I think that's going to be a great relief for a lot of folks. Appreciate that. Let's move on to the rest of the agenda. Let's see. Next up is item 16, which is. Stars.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to request City Manager to report on street sweeping outreach program to impacted neighborhoods and impacts on first day of enforcement efforts; and direct City Manager on additional potential programs to waive, dismiss, or lower street sweeping citations during COVID-19 emergency as needed.

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Speaker 0: So let me go to these other items. They should go rather quickly and then we'll get to the other items. Item item 15, please. Speaker 1: Report from city manager recommendation to adopt resolution to execute an agreement with. Job is to receive and expend grant funding in the amount of 2,700,000 to support the Long Beach Cannabis Social Equity Program citywide. Speaker 0: Got a motion and a second. Councilmember Ranga and Councilmember Richard send any comment by either not seeing any. Speaker 4: Kind of text that I couldn't text fast enough. I'm going to recuse myself on this just to be safe. Speaker 0: Go ahead and recuse yourself and just use the Q system, please. Speaker 4: Couldn't text fast enough. I wanted to make sure I talked. Speaker 3: From the from. Speaker 0: The motion in a second. Members, please go ahead and do a roll call vote. Speaker 1: District one district with no. District three. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District four. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District five. I. District six. District seven. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District eight. Speaker 3: Hi. Speaker 1: District nine.

Resolution

Recommendation to adopt resolution authorizing City Manager, or designee, to execute an agreement, all necessary documents and amendments, with the California Governor’s Office of Business and Economic Development (GO-Biz), to receive and expend grant funding in the amount of $2,700,000, to support the Long Beach cannabis social equity program, for the approximate period of June 15, 2020 through June 14, 2021; and Increase appropriations in the General Grants Fund Group in the City Manager Department by $2,700,000, offset by grant revenue. (Citywide)

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Speaker 0: Ocean carry item 20, please. Actually. I'm sorry, I. I'm 19. Speaker 1: Communication from City Attorney Recommendation Declare Ordinance Amending the Long Beach Municipal Code of Temporary Enforcement of Long Beach Health Orders related to COVID 19, declaring the urgency thereof and declaring that this ordinance shall take effect immediately. Read and adopted as read citywide. Speaker 0: Yeah, I see. I see. There's a motion by Councilmember. I think that's your ranga and seconded by. I'm sorry. No, I'm sorry. That's a motion by Vice Mayor Andrews and seconded by Councilmember Austin. Roll call. Vote, please. Speaker 1: District one. District two. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District three. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District four. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District five. District six. District seven. Speaker 3: By. Speaker 1: District eight. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District nine. Speaker 3: All right.

Emergency Ordinance

Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code by adding Chapter 8.120, temporary enforcement of Long Beach Health Orders related to COVID-19; declaring the urgency thereof; and declaring that this ordinance shall take effect immediately, read and adopted as read. (Citywide)

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Speaker 1: Communication from city attorney recommendation declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code relating to COVID 19 paid a supplemental sick leave, declaring the urgency thereof to make the ordinance effective immediately and read the first time and later to the next regular meeting of the City Council for Final Reading Citywide. Speaker 0: Gave a motion by Councilmember Richardson and a second by Councilman Ranga. Looks like Councilman Richardson to have a comment. Speaker 3: You have just one quickly. I want to move to adopt this. There is one word that needs to be updated. The city manager, the city attorney's updated on section e general generous leave. This was the part that was amended. It was updated to bring back. It reads, If an employer has paid, has a paid leave or paid time off policy that provides a minimum of 160 hours of paid leave annually, the employer exempt from any obligation to pay to provide paid sick leave pursuant to this chapter for the employee that receives the more generous paid leave . The one change is where it says to this chapter for the employee she needs to say for to this chapter for any employee that received a more generous paid leave. So the city attorney has a one change and that's okay. Speaker 0: And that's that's obviously substance. That's not substantive. It just keeps the. Speaker 3: Yes, though, this will require two votes. Speaker 5: Mayor, one on the urgency and then one on the ordinance itself. And you are correct, it will remain it keeps it as first reading tonight. Speaker 0: Okay. So let's take the first vote, madam. Speaker 1: District one. I district to. Speaker 4: I. Speaker 1: District three. Speaker 2: Sorry. Speaker 4: I was just excited. Speaker 2: My new button's working in that. Speaker 1: District for. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 1: District five. District five. Eighth District six. Speaker 4: High. Speaker 1: District six. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 1: District seven. Speaker 6: I. Speaker 1: District eight. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 1: District nine. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 0: Okay. And then we'll take the second vote. And I'm first District one. Speaker 1: I district to. I District three. I district for. Speaker 3: Right. Speaker 1: District five. I just try six. District six. Speaker 3: I. I. Speaker 1: District seven. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District eight. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District nine. I know she cares.

Emergency Ordinance

Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code by adding Chapter 8.110 relating to COVID-19 paid supplemental sick leave; declaring the urgency thereof; and declaring that this ordinance shall take effect immediately, read and adopted as read. (Ordinance No. ORD-20-0017). (Citywide)

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Speaker 1: She carries. Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you. Item 24, please. Speaker 1: What from development services recommendation to declare ordinance amending and restating PD 32 Douglas Park Plan Development District Read and adapted as read citywide. Speaker 0: In a motion in a second. Vice Mayor Andrews motion seconded by Councilor Marie Ranga Roll Call. Actually, I'm going to make that Catwoman Mango and have her do the motion. It's in her district. And then secondly, by Miranda's roll call the. Speaker 1: District one. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District two. I. District three. I district for. Speaker 3: Right. Speaker 1: District five. I. District six. District seven. Speaker 3: I think the crickets made the motion. I. Speaker 1: District eight. I District nine. I hope she carries. Speaker 0: Okay. Motion carries. And now we're moving on to item 26.

Ordinance

Recommendation to declare ordinance amending and restating PD-32, Douglas Park Planned Development District (PD-32 North and PD-32 South), read and adopted as read. (Citywide)

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Speaker 3: I know. Speaker 1: Ocean carries. Speaker 0: Thank you. Item number 12, please. Speaker 1: Communication from Councilmember Pearce, Vice Mayor Andrews, Councilman Austin Councilmember Richardson Recommendation to request city attorney to draft resolution in support of AB 664 and SB 893. Speaker 0: Councilman Pearce. Speaker 4: Thank you, Mayor. And this item is in support of AB six, six, four and as written SB 893 as at b893 did not make it. And so I'd like to make the motion to just be a resolution in support of AB 664 AB 664 due to the unique dangers faced by first responders, certain types of injuries deemed presumptively work related. During the COVID 19 pandemic, first responders and health care professionals are required by law to provide vital public safety services. This puts them at risk of exposure and infection. AB 664 would classify COVID 19 and other communicable diseases as as presumptive work related injuries for nurses, firefighters and police officers. This bill has the support of the L.A. Police Protective League, the California Firefighters Police Officers Research Association of California, Riverside Sheriffs Association, San Francisco Deputy Sheriffs Association, California Professional Firefighters, CNA, and many more. There's a belief that these items are going to pass on the floor. We were asked to support our local first responders in supporting this. So I ask that my colleagues support this motion. Thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you, Vice Mayor. And there was a motion. The second baseman, Andres Best Mariners. Speaker 3: Yes. Excellent. I support that. Speaker 0: Okay, great. Roll call vote. Speaker 1: District one. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District two i. District three. I district for. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 1: District five. I District six. I'm District seven. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District eight. High District nine. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: Motion carries. Speaker 0: Thank you. We're down to our last two items. Let's go ahead here for item 14 next, which we'll have a short report. I know. And then we'll move on to our largest item of the night, which would be 13.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to request City Attorney to draft resolution in support of AB 664 and SB 893, regarding presumptive work-related injuries and worker's compensation for first responders and return to the City Council for adoption on June 2, 2020.

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Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you. We're going to our final item, which is item 13. Please read that item. Speaker 1: Communication from Councilmember Pearce. Councilwoman Zendejas. Councilmember Urunga. Council Member Richardson. Recommendation to direct city attorney to prepare an emergency ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal or amending Long Beach on beaches, COVID Eviction Moratorium and the Housing Authority moratorium on Section eight terminations for consideration at a special meeting on or before May 26, 2020. Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you. I believe we're starting here. The maker of this initial motion is Councilmember Pearce and then we'll go through the queue. Speaker 4: Right. Thank you, Mayor. And stop. What you have before you is an additional step that we felt like we needed to take, given the current situation that we have with COVID. Obviously, we know that our state and our federal government and our city is doing a lot to try to provide resources to residents, to small business owners , to property owners in this difficult time. And I think when we started this process, we didn't understand how long it would be or how difficult it would be. But that is really settling in right now. We know that the state and the federal government is working hard to make sure that we have unemployment benefits for many of those people that have applied for unemployment. But we also know that many people have not received any unemployment checks even after applying for eight or nine weeks. And that that is just part of this bureaucracy that we're in. We know that some people have yet to receive their income from the federal government. The stimulus check also part of the bureaucracy that that we have. And I'm not just making those blanket statements, and I will share that. I know half of my building has not received their unemployment checks, and I will share publicly that I am one of them as a council member. As you guys know, we are we do not make full time income. And due to COVID, I no longer have a second job. And I applied very early and I have not received one of those unemployment checks even though it's been greenlighted. So I share this with personal experience. This motion, this item was really written to make sure that we protected those that are most vulnerable and that when we govern for those that are most vulnerable, we know that that everybody will thrive. But the item was really to the point. And so I want to share with everyone that it is my hope that today we are collaborative on this council, that we take into account all of the comments that we've received. I know that I've received about 100 plus letters about concerns for this item, and I've received around 100 probably plus by this time, support letters for this item. When the original item was drafted, it was very different item than what we have in front of us today. And I know that that item is out there, that people have seen it. And so they know that this original item included a very long period for the moratorium that it said that it would go until the state of emergency was over. The item that you have in front of you says, 90 days before we got to 90 days, we were going to push for 120 knowing that we would probably negotiate down. And I'm sharing this with you because I believe that the 90 days that's in this motion is really important to make sure that we create stability for our residents, stability for our landlords. It's stability for everyone that's in this situation so that we know what to expect and we can focus on other things, like advocating for more resources at the state and federal level. So I know that there will likely be some discussion on this. This is one area that I plead with my council colleagues to really be mindful that this council, if we're going to bring this back every two weeks, it is going to be exhaustive. And I don't know about the rest of you guys, but these meetings are definitely heavy. And as much as we can do to to manage that workload, not only for ourselves, but for the residents of the city and property owners, I think it would be important. The second part of this item originally, you know, it has 12 months for deferment of payment. I have some comments to make about that. Let me see if I want to stop my comments and actually make my motion. My context is really saying that I would want to work with everybody, but I want us to be mindful of the impacts and know that is my hope that at the end of this item, at the end of this vote, that we have not only support for our tenants, but support for property owners. And so before I make my motion, I do have a couple of questions for our economic development team. I think that John is still on the on the line. And my question for for John from economic development, before I get into my motion is, can you share with us some of the programs that you are currently advocating for and some of the ideas that you have around support for property owners? As we know that if a tenant's not paying rent, that's impacting that property owner. But we as a city only can can do so much to support them. So stop. That's a question for you. Speaker 6: Yes. Good evening. Mayor and city council members, thanks so much. Yes. So so in economic development, we always look at tenants, landlords and lenders, everybody who's involved with providing shelter, space, etc., because everybody seems to have both an asset and a liability that's in play. And so when we think about tenant protections, we also think about the landlords who may also have a mortgage or they may have a construction loan, or they may have some sort of other liability that they have to also care for, and that also affects their their lenders. So we have been looking at the economic development department at both how what programs are available for for tenants in terms of of rent support relief. Obviously, we're working with our partners and development services on potential HUD funding that will help with rent relief and in protecting tenants so that they can pay rent. There are some programs at the county level as well. Funding that's coming down from the federal and state government. And then, of course, through our Workforce Development Agency, we provide a portion of rent relief through some of the Employment Development Department benefits when it comes to the landlords and the lenders. There actually are a number of programs that came with the Federal Cares Act and they have to do with everything from tax abatement, new programs that help to relieve caps on the the tax benefits that a landlord might have with regard to operating losses that they can carry forward and get credit for in those those programs. There's about six that we're looking at specifically because some of them are a bit complicated. They're buried in the CARES Act and we want to bring them out and surface them for for both landlords and lenders so that they're aware of of what's available to them, even if it is something that comes as a benefit at the end of the year or as part of their tax filing. But the other thing that we're also looking at, which has been a little bit more difficult, of course, is loan programs that might also be available to property owners in the city of Long Beach, believe it or not. We have thousands of business licenses that are for people, business owners who are in real estate. So they either own maybe a residential building could be anything from one unit to dozens of units or in commercial real estate, it could be a very small or very large building. So they have to have business licenses. And we've been working with our partners at the federal government to try and find ways that we might be able to adjust those programs and make those loan programs also available to property based business owners. So there's a little bit of a range there, and it covers everything from loans to tax credits and possibly even some legislative changes. So I'll stop right there and I'll stick around for questions. Speaker 4: Thank you, John. Okay. So I. I want to go ahead and I appreciate that. I'm going to go ahead and make my motion so that the floor can discuss it. So I move as follows. To extend the current eviction moratorium and rent deferment period for 90 days to August 31st, 2020. Extend the current deferral rent repayment program to August 31st, but also include benchmarks that require tenants that encourage tenants to pay at least 30% deferred rent by February 28, which is six months after the beginning of the repayment period, and at least 60% deferment by May 31st, which is nine months after the deferment period. This language needs to be included in the preamble and not in the ordinance. The third is direct the city manager working with the city prosecutor and the city attorney as necessary to bring back a report in in June on the anti tenant harassment best practices in other California jurisdictions. So I want to be clear, this is different than what's been agenda and really trying to get us to a good spot sooner rather than later and saving us a long night with this. So number four is to exclude the following commercial tenants from the extension of the current eviction moratorium ordinance. Multinational companies. Publicly traded companies. Companies with 500 or more employees are definitely open to exploring if that's the right number. The 500 or more employees is set as a small business standard at the national level, even though in Long Beach we tend to think that that number is smaller, say 100 or even 50. So I look to my colleagues to see if that is, in fact the right number. D all tenancies and sub tenants managed by the airport. All tenancies and sub tenancies managed by the harbor department. Number five, direct city staff to work with the airport tenants on a case by case basis to address COVID related impacts and negotiate appropriate rent, deferments or other accommodations in accordance with the FAA grant assurances and other regulations applicable to the airport. Number six, encourage the Board of Harbor Commissioners and the executive and the chief executive of the Harbor Department to work with the harbor tenants on a case by case basis to address COVID related impacts on tenants and negotiate appropriate rent deferments to other accommodating in accordance with the Tidelands Trust and other regulations applicable to the harbor. This motion has been reviewed by the City Attorney and I believe is a motion that addresses many of the concerns that I've already heard. I would like to say that that I'm open to hearing council comments and possible friendlies, particularly on the these the commercial tenant exemptions and some of the other components. So thank you, everybody. I want to thank my colleagues for signing onto this item. We know that this is not the easiest things we've ever done, but really trying to strike a balance to support keeping our small businesses and keeping our tenants that really make Long Beach the place that we all love and call home. So thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilwoman. I have a list. Of course. Let me go through that Councilwoman and dance. Speaker 2: They also like to second that motion and yes, thank you. STAFF Thank you, Councilmember Pearce, for bringing this very important and very hard item forward. As as Councilmember Pearce said, this is very delicate. It is a time right now that we are experiencing that we haven't experienced before. And as we want to find relief for our tenants that are being left without jobs and without an income coming in due to either of directly related to COVID 19 or indirectly related, we also find ourselves struggling because we also need to help out our property owners who are renting renting this out. So I think that the motion has been very, very thought out. Thank you for working with staff on this. Thank you for everybody coming together and trying to really put something forward that will that will help our city move forward. And one of the things that I wanted to comment on is we really want to make sure that everyone knows that this is not we're not supporting a rent free couple of months. You know, this is to evaluate the the condition that we are in right now and to postpone the payment. So I want to make it very clear that this is not a rent free ordinance or motion, but rather is something to bring a little relief to those tenants who find themselves without jobs. One of the things that I would recommend also, and I don't know if we have to add it in as of friendly or something like that, or if it it just comes down to the individual property owners. But I would like to see something that kind of guarantees that the rent will be paid to those property owners, whether it's in the form of a contract with your landlord or something, just to give you know, just to give the the property owners also a. Some kind of peace that they will be receiving the rent from their tenants. I think the that here this motion is for all of us to work together moving forward and I'd love to hear with all my other colleagues have to say on this. Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilwoman. Council woman Price. Speaker 2: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Well, that I have for Councilwoman Pierce. Councilman Pierce. Speaker 0: Councilman Price here. You sound very far away. Speaker 2: Oh, okay. I'm right here. Is that better? Hello. Yes. Okay. Councilmember Pearce, I wanted to just clarify the. Partial payment provisions that you laid out. Can you repeat those for me again? Because I think I missed it. And also, you want those in the whereas clause, not in the ordinance. Speaker 4: Yes. I'd like them in the warehouse clause, not in the ordinance, due to the fact that we I worry that if a tenant is paying full rent and we say that they need to have something paid by a certain amount of the repayment. That they might be able to be evicted if they like. If their rent's $2,000 a month and they're supposed to pay 20 to a month in their repayment period and they only pay 2000. I want to make sure that they're protected legally. And that was one of the concerns that that Rich and our city attorney's office had brought up and said that if we put it in the preamble, that it helps as guidance. So I think I'll reread it for you. I think that would be a great hope to be able to say if we put this in the preamble and then say, you know, that if these if these measures are not met, that then the tenant and the landlord need to negotiate a repayment plan outside of these standards. There's an agreement there, and I know that we've talked about that the last time this item came up. So now that we've had some time to kind of sit with it, so I'll reread it. Extend the current deferment payment period until August 31st, but also include benchmarks that require a tenant to pay 30% of deferment. Six months after the beginning of the repayment period and 60% nine months after the beginning of the repayment period. Speaker 2: Okay. All right. So let me go through the ones that I think might be relatively non-controversial. And then and then I'll I'll share with you my thoughts on the partial payment and see if we can have them accepted as friendlies. If not, then I will probably make a substitute. But let me just start with the things that I think are kind of non-controversial. Well, first, let me just start by saying that I think. As a matter of fact, objectively. Everybody. Everybody. Has been impacted by COVID. And from a financial standpoint, I would say that most everybody in our city has felt the impacts financially. Regardless of the category that we put them in. I believe that COVID has impacted everybody. So when we're looking at helping, you know. What? Like you said, Councilwoman Pierce. Governing for those most vulnerable. Well, in this situation, it's a really unusual situation because the category of folks we generally refer to as most vulnerable, that category has really expanded a great deal. And I will I'll share with you and I know I've shared this with my council colleagues that my husband and I, our first time small business owners, it was a dream of my husband's. We both work full time jobs, still day jobs. But he always wanted to own his own business. So we took a whole bunch of savings that we saved over a number of years, and we invested in a small business. We were not even at a point where we were breaking even when COVID happened. And so while we are grateful for the deferment programs that are available. We also realized that that back rent is going to have to be due at some point. And for us, that's in the 15 to $20000 range, depending on how long the closures last. But at this rate, we're already above 10,000. We have no idea how we're going to be able to make such a huge balloon payment. And I'm sharing with this this with you personally, because you can't get a small business loan in today's day and age without attaching some personal assurances to it. And so it's not as though we can just not pay rent and walk away and not have our our own mortgage and our own income. Personal affected. And I share that with you only because I believe that the most vulnerable community today in terms of the definition, has really expanded. And so when we when we help one group, we really have to think about how that impacts another group and how that impacts their ability to pay their bills because everyone's ability to pay their bills has been impacted. So a couple of things that that I want to include or ask you if you'll accept a friend. Leon is. Well, first of all, in regards to some of the exemptions for commercial property tenants, I would also like to exempt that when it's in the Tidelands area. Because I think the Tidelands Fund is an enterprise fund that's very different than any other fund that we have in the city because we have a fiduciary duty to the state regarding how we spend that money and and really having a direct oversight into the programs. And so I would ask that tidelands tenants be included in the exemptions, but I would ask that the city manager and his team be involved in negotiating mitigation or deferment. Contracts or agreements with the tenants on a case by case basis so that they could limit the scope of the application. We want to make sure that businesses or operations that were already suffering prior to COVID are not taking advantage of COVID related mitigation efforts in order to gain further benefits or further deferment. We want to make sure that the COVID related legislation in terms of deferment, is related to a specific time period and that it's not broader than it needs to be for the Tidelands area, specifically because we have a fiduciary duty to the state. So is that a friendly that you would accept? Speaker 4: It is a friendly that I would accept. And I just want to clarify, too, that a few weeks ago we also gave counsel and we gave city manager direction to negotiate with each lessee that the city had overall. So we also have that in place. But yes, I accept that. Friendly. Speaker 2: Okay, great. The other thing I want to do, and this goes back to the concept of like, look, I think my husband and I would be definitely considered part of the vulnerable community that you've outlined. But I think because because we are tenants. And by the way, I also want the record to reflect that before voting on any business related legislation through the city of Long Beach, I sought and received an opinion regarding my ability to vote on any business legislation in the city of Long Beach. And I renewed that FEC opinion just a few weeks ago, and it was determined from a legal standpoint that I fall under the public generally exception, since any legislation that we would be involved in would benefit a large number of businesses and not mine specifically. So I just wanted to put that out there for the record. But anyway, going back to that, I realize that when we have tenant protections and tenant relief that we put into place, it impacts property owners. And so one of the things I'd like to do is to ask our economic development team, and I'm offering this as a as a friendly to create a to evaluate creating a revolving loan fund for property owners who may have been impacted by COVID so that we can offer them funds through a loan through the city of Long Beach in order to help them with some of their payments. And I want to make sure that that's okay with you as an amendment. Speaker 4: Absolutely. It's actually something that I forgot to mention earlier says perfect. Speaker 2: Okay. I also want to ask staff as a friendly amendment to come back to council by the June 2nd meeting with a report on what options are both for foreclosure relief for homeowners. Housing providers and property owners. Is that something you're willing to accept? Speaker 4: It is something I'm willing to accept. And if I might counter, I think on top of having the staff bring back a report, it might be also helpful to direct the legislative committee to advocate for policies that would extend any forbearance past the 60 days, whether it's for property loans or construction loans, but to really make sure that we in the city are using our resources to to advocate on behalf of them as well. So I'm open to that. And I think that we can go one step further and having our legislative team work on it as well. Speaker 2: Okay. Well, that takes me to my next one. And that would be a report from city staff on the status of SB 939, which helps businesses renegotiate leases due to COVID impacts. Reevaluate AB 828, which prohibits foreclosures and AB 2501, which creates long term forbearance and prohibits foreclosures and auto repossessions. So I'm hoping that you will accept the amendment that staff report back on June 2nd on these three legislative initiatives so that our state legislative committee can take those up once they've received some initial information about these bills. Speaker 4: I think those are great additions. Yes. Speaker 1: Okay. Speaker 5: And this is Tom. I just want to point out, we're going to have to put those on supplemental, because we would have to have the reports done in two days to get them up. And we will do our best to, you know, bring what we can within the week. Speaker 2: And that would be fine with me, Tom, since they're really report items, they're not voting items and they're not ones that we're going to need to do extensive outreach on before taking legislative action at this juncture. So that would that would be fine with me. The first the final it's not the final amendment, but the final amendment in this category is I'd like staff to report back to council on June 2nd on any property tax relief measures that are being considered or have been voted upon in regards to deferment of property taxes by the County Board of Supervisors. Just an update. Did I lose you? Speaker 0: Councilmember Pearce, did you hear that? Speaker 4: I support that. Yes, absolutely. Speaker 2: Okay. All right. So thank you for that. In regards to so now these are these are the ones that we might not have a meeting of the minds on, although I hope we do. In regards to the extension, I'm I'm agreeable to the extension. However, we are starting to see more and more businesses open back up, which means more and more people are getting. Jobs back, hopefully. And so rather than extending this until August, I would propose that we follow the county's model and extended until June and then June 30th, and then have a report back every 30 days following June 30th, so that we as a council can make a determination as to whether we want to continue the rental eviction moratorium. Speaker 4: Um, so I appreciate the the gesture, I would say. Let's talk a minute. Just about the 30 day versus the 90 day. I understand that the county has done 30 days, and that was for areas that did not currently have a moratorium in place and for unincorporated areas. The city of L.A. has 90 days after the state of emergency is lifted. I do agree that there are some businesses that are reopening. But we what I've experienced in my district and I have three retail shops on Fore Street alone who have had landlords tell them, you're allowed to do curbside pickup now, so you need to pay your full rent next month. This is something that is very challenging for them because curbside pickup for a clothing store is not something that is necessarily bringing back business. Right. People like to come in and try on clothes, etc.. I think that it. That it would be so much more beneficial if we did 90 days. So that and with the change that we can come back in 30 like if we did 90 days and we said every 30 days before that 90 days, we had a brief report from staff on it. I'd be open to that. But I I'm trying to create stability for tenants and for landlords so that every month we're not re opening it up for a vote again. So maybe let's let's hear from I, I know that there's always a risk of a substitute substitute, but I really would like to just hear from the council colleagues. And if you need to make a substitute, then you could do that. But 90 days is a hard part for us because we've already changed it back from the original 120 that we were going to put on the on the motion. So. Speaker 2: Okay. And then the the other. So I'm I'm taking that as a no at this point. Speaker 4: At this point. Okay. Speaker 2: All right. So what about 60 days? Speaker 4: 60 days is definitely better than 30. Speaker 2: Is that still a no? Speaker 4: I would very much like to hear from. You know, let's. If we did 60 days and then at 60 days, we that staff brought it back for us to evaluate at that time what we wanted to do. But the idea of a solid jeopardizing it, like one of us having to agenda is it every time that the time limit comes up, I think puts a lot of political pressure on everybody and really is exhausting versus having staff bring forward and saying here's the state of the of the COVID situation. Now Council, you can vote to extend it or not extend it. So. Right, Captain? Yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah. Bring it back on the road. Yeah. Speaker 4: Staff brought it back two weeks before the 60 day, and then we could have a vote at that time on what we needed to do. I would support that. Speaker 2: Okay. And then the the final one that I want to add on here and I need to pull it up because I wrote it out on a piece of paper this morning. And and it's it's for the partial payment. I'll just tell you right now, I'm going to be a no unless we can include partial payment as part of the 12 month extension. So we're not going to extend. Speaker 4: That was part of my motion. Councilmember Price, that you asked me to repeat. Speaker 2: But I think you wanted it in the whereas, not in the ordinance. Speaker 4: Yes. And if we if we could maybe turn to the city attorney and ask him for some clarification on on why that is. That'd be helpful. Speaker 2: Sure. I always love hearing from a Chinese. Speaker 4: If we can hear from Rich Anthony, who has helped us on this, that would be helpful. Tom, do you know if Rich's. I'm sorry. Speaker 3: I'm here. Sorry. This is rich. Um, I had to do this da thing. It took me a while. I apologize. That's okay. Okay. So I take the request by you, Councilmember Pierce, to put the benchmarks, as I call them, or the partial payments in the preamble to mean it is something we're encouraging people to do, but it is not required. You just want to go on record as you think that would be a good idea. But it's not required and it's it's not enforceable more or less. And I think Councilmember Price is saying is that she would like it to be. I have I have no opinion on whether it ought to be enforceable or just a soft encouragement. That's up to you all to hash out. Speaker 4: So my my question for you, which was based on our conversation when we were putting this together, was if we put it into the ordinance. What could happen if, say, a tenant does not pay that 30% by the six month period? Would they be at risk of eviction or at risk of additional harassment? Speaker 3: Oh, they'd be at risk of of eviction. I don't know that they would have already been harassed and been at risk of additional announcement. I mean, know, if it's a requirement, if it's a benchmark requirement, then yes, if they fail to make that payment, they would immediately be at risk of eviction. Speaker 4: And that and that councilmember price is the part that is difficult for me because I know that, you know, as a tenant and I think we talked about this last time, everybody wants to try to pay as much as they can so that they don't end up being evicted and that they're not taking advantage of the system . So trying to strike that balance in between supporting landlords, getting what's what's due to them, but also not putting somebody at risk of saying that if you don't make that payment by that first time, then maybe they have, you know, a tax check that's coming in or, you know, as somebody that lives on very low income, it might be that they can make a bigger payment down the road. Something happens. And so I would hate to put them in a situation where they they might be able to make the nine month, but they couldn't make the six month. And therefore, now they're evicted because of something that wasn't necessarily their fault. And so. That's right. That's why it's it's tricky. Speaker 2: Right. And I get that. I think I think it just might be and I may be right. I may be wrong. I don't know. But it just may be that philosophically we may not agree on whether we want this to be a soft encouragement or part of the ordinance. So with that, I'm going to make a substitute. My substitute is going to be that that there will be a repayment period that will be extended from six months to 12 months, but that the repayment schedule will look as follows 10% owed at the first quarter. 25% owed at the second quarter. 30% owed at the third quarter and 35% owed at the fourth quarter. And that allows for an easy ramp up in the event that a tenant is not able to make these partial payments. That tenant upon providing proof. And documentation of their inability to pay. She'll request relief from the payment plan. And will not have to pay those partial payments upon submission of proof or documentation. So that's the first part of the substitute. The second part of the substitute will be that the. Moratorium on rental evictions will be extended until June 30th, with staff to bring the item back three days following June 30th for the. Oh. I'll wait. Whether it will be, I'm sorry, on June 30th. On June 30th, the Council will receive an item at the at its the meeting closest in time to June 30th to evaluate whether it shall extend the moratorium and not 30 days into the month of July and every 30 days from that point on, the Council can reevaluate. In my substitute, the Tidelands Fund exemption that we discussed, the revolving loan fund that we asked city staff to look into for property owners and housing providers. The foreclosure resolution, foreclosure relief options that we asked for staff to report back on the legislative actions that are pending in the state. Speaker 4: Foreclosure relief. Speaker 2: The property tax proposal is being evaluated by the L.A. County Board of Supervisors. And I do not want. This anti-harassment clause that's in here or this I realize that was no longer part of the. But I do I'm not putting any sort of report back on that because I believe it's fraught with all sorts of legal landmines . So with that, that's my substitute. Speaker 0: Okay. Substitute. Is there a second on that? Is there a second on that? Speaker 3: Supermodel second. Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you. Next up is Councilwoman Mongo. I'm sorry. Oh, yeah. Councilman Mongo. That's correct. Councilman. Speaker 4: Yes. Thank you, Mayor. I have a couple of additional questions. Thank you for the questions that have been brought forward so far. I see that there are some instances that have been brought to my attention where landlords out of a. Significant amount of caution when taking on tenants requested in the commercial world, proof of six months of reserves before providing a lease to imports. And that there are. Tenants who are choosing even though they have the reserves not to pay. And I don't know what the solution might be, but I would be interested in knowing a little bit more about. Councilman Price, in your preamble, is there still a significant encouragement for those that can't afford to pay to pay fully because there are ripple effects to some of these non payments that are detrimental, especially in our commercial markets where they're not backed up by loans from Bank of America or Wells Fargo or any of the commercial organizations who are offering some of this relief. Speaker 2: Yes. I'm personally very familiar with that that predicament for commercial tenants. Yes. I think if if you can. I would like that to be included in the preamble, in the whereas clauses that those who can pay should be encouraged to pay. The other benefit of that as these balloon payments are impossible, impossible for commercial tenants and residential tenants to be able to meet. So encouraging, highly encouraging payment and partial payment, I think should be included. Speaker 4: Also in a particular case or two where I was discussing the return of a particular employee, and she had said that she's in a very tough spot because of childcare issues and other things, but that she was actually more money. Through current unemployment with the supplemental than she was before. And so. This Mummy friend of mine had mentioned to me, she said, you know, I'm kind of thinking about not paying my rent because I don't have to. But I do have the money. But what if I need it three months from now or six months from now? So I really do appreciate the. Security that we're giving and giving a specific amount of days. But I would really like to also encourage that if your income has not been impacted, that you're strongly encouraged to pay. And and even I don't know what to put in there. Maybe that's one place you have some ideas, but. The landlord that they have may not be able to pay their rent. And here is someone who could pay their rent and or they could be paying to a corporation that owns apartments, who then has to lay off a bunch of employees because the rents aren't coming in. So I just don't know. How to how to solve for some of these problems that are real, that are causing these rippling effects. And there's so much fear of what tomorrow will be or how long will be closed. Will we be closed for six months? 12 months? 24 months. People are scared. I've seen holes out there that there are some that support indefinite closures. And so there's this insecurity about payment. What what are your thoughts? Council on Price. Speaker 2: I haven't thought about that. I think those are all very valid points. I'd be open to anything that you want to include in that. I mean, I think it allows us to look at the issue not just in a vacuum, but holistically. But I just haven't given it much thought. So I don't want to throw something out there that I haven't thought about. Speaker 4: Okay with that? I would like to. Substitute. And I would like to add. Well. Speaker 6: We've lost councilmember mongo. Speaker 4: By for rent deferment months and then as. Speaker 0: 1/2 we're. Speaker 4: Supposed to those. Can you still hear me? I'm looking to find some way where those who have six months of reserves can be exempted from the clause so that. The landlords can help those who most need it. And those who have not received a reduction in income or a change in situation could be I need some help from the city attorney on this, but what I want is if there is a landlord that has three tenants and all three choose not to pay, then the two who are most in need could potentially lose their homes too, because the landlord could lose the property and there could have been a partial payment. So I'm looking for some options to help us really drill this down to those who need the help. Speaker 3: This is rich. You mentioned two different things and the first of which was a tenant taking advantage or availing themselves protections here under. That we're not covered impacted. That's not going to happen because the original ordinance that were that were amended now requires proof of adverse COVID impacts. Now, I think there's the section or I should say the example you give. That perhaps is an issue and I'm thinking about how to deal with it is the tenant that has been adversely impacted by the commercial business that's been adversely impacted as a result of COVID. But does have several months worth of reserve. You know, whether it's six or more. They have a lot of money in the bank with which they can pay rent. Speaker 4: And these are big corporations taking advantage of some of our landlords. Speaker 3: Yes. But the motion as that's on the floor now is that companies with 500 or more employees would be exempt. I mean, maybe it's going to be difficult to get into the specifics of exempting somebody who has six months of reserves. I don't exactly know reserves of what. How do you determine what six months of reserve are? Perhaps a simpler way of addressing large companies, taking advantage of protections that they don't really need to be taking advantage of because they have money is by reducing the maximum amount of employees, or I should say the minimum amount of employees that you need to have. I'm sorry. The maximum number of employees that you need to have to qualify. And maybe if you bring the 500 down, that was in the original motion and is in the substitute motion currently on the floor. And I guess you made a sub sub. Is that right, Councilwoman Mongo? You broke it and you were doing that? Speaker 4: Yes. I'm trying to form my son sub. Speaker 3: Right. So maybe rather than dealing with six months worth of reserves, you suggest a change to the 500 or more employees and make it something lower, perhaps a lot lower. Speaker 4: Well, I guess the 500 employees kind of fared on the protections that are already provided by another act. Is that correct? Speaker 3: I don't know. I think so. Councilmember Pearce may be able to speak to that. I think it came from the L.A. ordinance. I don't know why L.A. adopted it that way. Speaker 4: So here's my subsub. Subsub is Councilman Price's motion with some additional warehouses related to. Those who have the ability to pay because their income. Or reserves. I'm going to try to put it in the warehouses so it's not as. Impactful, but still impactful. And that those companies I have specific companies in my district who outlaid a ton of cash for Douglas Park and all these others and elsewhere. Speaker 3: If you can't make the motion. Speaker 5: So we could follow it. I appreciate it because the whereas is the the substitute. Speaker 3: Motion with added recitals will. Speaker 5: Not qualify as a substitute. Substitute motion. There's no there's no significant difference. You're just adding additional whereas is which are recitals and unenforceable. So you have to make it. Speaker 4: I have a change in the payment schedule as well. Speaker 3: I haven't heard it. Thank you. Speaker 4: Thank you. So the warehouses where as a a tenant is able to pay shall and these are on the commercial tenants. I'm going to focus on the commercial tenants. I think the residential tenants are are less they're few and far between and not probably worth attacking at this time. Speaker 3: Remember, if you could make the motion and not explain it, I got to follow your motion. Speaker 5: First and then you can just. Speaker 4: Sorry. Thank you. And then for the schedule of payments, I would like to revise the payment schedule to be. 10%. At. 10% every 60 days. So it would go ten, 20, 30, 40, 50. If that makes sense of the total amount. Speaker 3: Yes. So let's see. Ten two months in 20. After four months, they have to pay 20%. After six months, 30. After eight months, 40. After ten months into the rent repayment period, they have to be at least 50. And then in the final two months, they can pay the remaining 50%. Am I following you right? Speaker 4: The previous one was ten 2530. I was trying to go. I was hoping that at the end of year they would have paid in full. And it sounds like a 50% balloon payment at the end would be detrimental. So let's do. Two months, 10%. Four months. 25%. Six months. 50%. Nine months, 75%, with 100% at the 12 month mark. I think that's probably the. Best way to help people stay on track. And then for the clarification on the proof of no income or no subsidy or in the ability to demonstrate. Their inability to pay on the commercial tenant side. Which should be pretty easy to do if you're not open. But then potentially these corporations would have a difficult time demonstrating their inability to pay. Speaker 3: Okay. I think I understand the subsidies. Thank you. Speaker 4: And I want to thank you guys for working through this with me again. I hadn't planned on making a sub sub tonight. I really have listened to a lot of tenants and housing providers and commercial providers, and I have a lot of fears about how much worse this could get if we don't help people work together to stay on track. And I hope that this also helps tenants negotiate with their landlords a better solution. I have no further comments. Speaker 0: Thank you. Thank you, Councilwoman. Let me go to Councilmember Richardson. Speaker 3: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So and following the conversation on it, I want to say first that I appreciate the movement for where this conversation began, where it is and where it arrived. Under the main motion, Councilwoman Pierce's motion. I see that. And I saw the original file. And I thought that, you know, even though it came down from like five, it came down from 94, and the amendment was accepted to go to 60 with Staff Ridge. And I think I think that makes sense. I think that's what the council needs. I think that's where the council is. It included repayment guidelines. I know that that wasn't part of the original proposal and there was a lot of flexibility and grace in the way it was presented to have some level of repayment guidelines. I think that made sense and I think that's what the council where the council was, I think it considered I heard how it considered a number of considerations and exemptions on commercial considerations on the way it impacts the airport and the port. All of those things are good. I think that it got there. It was all you know, all of these really represent, I think, a collection of the communications we've heard and the discussion we've heard on council, all except for one friendly amendment and for that one friendly amendment to not be accepted and turned into a substitute and substitute substitute motion. Is it really this spirit that we should really be a spirit of collaboration, working together and working? And it didn't really align with, I think, the grace that Councilwoman Pearce put forward. And and I think it was at best earlier. I think it just comes down to philosophical differences. And I don't think this is the time to draw lines in the sand or philosophical differences. I think they're very, very close. Like 90 days, we start bringing it back. Consideration, given the guidelines. I think I think that's where we really are. So I have a question for staff for the city attorney. I don't quite understand what the substitute substitute motion is. Would you mind clarifying what that motion is? I'd be happy to. This is rich again. So the substitute substitute, assuming I mean, I'm not going to read through all of it, I don't think unless you'd like me to. Or do you want me to say how I believe it to be different than the original motion? What do you prefer? I think that would be helpful. Yeah, but just the substantive points, because it just seemed like it was I couldn't understand it was freaking out. You know what? It's not meant to be a justifiable comment, but I don't know what it is. So I'd actually like to read through the entirety of any given. I'll read through the entirety of it and Councilmember Mongo can correct me if I'm wrong. Number one is to extend the current eviction moratorium and the rent deferment period for 30 days to June 30th and direct staff to bring it back in sometime in the middle of June before it expires. Number two, extend the current deferred rent repayment period. And I'm glad we're doing this. The original motion was August 31st, and I don't think Susie's ever changed that, but it ought to be changed. I think the understanding is that August 31st was key to the August 31st and the first part. So I think the motion should be extend the current deferred rent repayment period to June 30th of 2021. So it's a year and it would also include this wouldn't be in the preamble. You have a year to repay if you're a tenant, but you do have five, four benchmarks you need to hit. You need to repay 10% of your deferred rent two months into the period. You need to pay 25% of your deferred rent. Four months in 50%. Six months in 75%. Nine months in. And then the final payment before the year is out. Item number three is out and that has to do with anti tenant harassment and that's no longer a part of this episode. Number four, there would be six types of commercial tenants excluded from the extension of this moratorium. Multinational companies, number one, publicly traded companies. Number two, companies with 500 or more employees. Number three, all airport tenancies and sub tenancies. Number for all harbor department tenancies and Tenancies. Number five Entitlements, Trust, Tenancies and Tenancies would be number six. All those would be excluded. And then five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten and 11. So there are six other parts of it that are all direction to city staff to work with tenants on a case by case basis to encourage the Board of Harbor Commissioners to do the same with respect to providing their tenants with rent relief, directing staff to bring back evaluations, a revolving loan fund, directing staff to bring back a report on possible foreclosure relief. Directing staff to bring back property tax relief measures. Directing staff to bring back a report on ASB 939 eight, 28, 28 and 8020 501. And lastly, having the Legislative Committee advocate for increased forbearance at the state level. I believe that is the service that is on the table right now. Speaker 4: Well done. Speaker 3: So thank you. So I guess I'll say I think what I'd like to see happen tonight is an extension. I think the 90 days, what we proposed, but the 60 days that was accepted. I think that that's where we should be. I think, you know, the repayment schedules would probably be somewhere in the second six months benchmark starting around the second six months. I agree that it probably should be included and where the preamble is. It might be very challenging to put in inside the trigger a cascade of of evictions and other things. If we don't do this, don't handle this the right way. So that's why I think we want to be I don't think that's where the substance of the motion is. I think the motion aligns most clearly with that is the motion. That's why I'd like to get through. Thank you. Speaker 0: Is there a second on that? I think on on council. On Mango's motion. Was there a second on that? Is that it? Speaker 2: I will accept that, Mr. Mayor. Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you. Moving on to. Well, 1/2. That was Councilman Richardson. Next up is Vice Mayor Andres. Speaker 3: If you missed. You know, I really appreciate the just. I want to be clear that I support. For a community like mine in a minority linnet households, because at this time we need to be focused on livelihood and that values. My sincere worry and focus is that we need to have financial literacy in place so that we are not intentionally creating debt. It is sort of rent. I want as a councilor to continue working with our other branches of government so that we can secure federal dollars and protection from our property owners as well as they, too , are struggling. We also need to look for a way to assist our undocumented households that have not been able to obtain resources. They should not be an afterthought. I want to be supportive of a policy tonight that is clear. Came somewhat in alliance with what has come in and other local governments are doing to avoid confusion as to ultimately have a contingency. Thank you very much. Speaker 0: Thank you, Vice Mayor. I have counted Boston. Speaker 3: I thank you and I appreciate the discussion tonight as well. You know, when this. Economic relief policies came before us. First of all, the council jumped at the opportunity, understanding that families were really hurting and people were devastated by not only this health crisis, but with the economic calamity facing our city, our state and federal government. I think, you know, in doing so, we painted a very broad brush. You know, I think there was a lot of assumptions made, and that was several weeks ago. And we still don't have the clarity we really need to make great policy in terms of clairvoyance, in terms of where we are going, what our economy is going to look like a month from now, six months from now, 12 months from now. And so we'll do our very best. I think there are some assumptions that, you know, property owners can necessarily absorb the losses, which I think is false in some respects. But I also think there's some assumptions made that all renters are struggling with rent, I guess, is that that's a reach as well. I think. That we as a city council should be encouraging good faith from all parties of property owners as well as campus tenants as well. And frequent and ongoing communications. I think that that's very, very important here. I want to be careful that we don't create policy that is confusing. With this application and interpretation from the public. And I do appreciate that we are trying to massage this to get to a place where people understand payment schedules, which I support, but also compromise in terms of what the extension level is. And I think 60 days is a good place on the. I do think that there is some clarity that's needed in this. And so I would like to offer a friendly amendment to the maker of this this motion and the motion on that motion on the floor. I think it's important that we we really try to. Understand who qualifies for this benefit. And, you know, again, in an effort to eliminate confusion, I'd like to inform. For the maker of emotion, consider a friendly that allows language in to say that you know those who who who qualify for public assistance of you. I did have something written down here for public assistance after March 30, 2020, due to COVID 19 economic displacement. I think it's very important that we help those who need the help right now, and we target our efforts to help those instead of, again, bringing in broad brush that confuses everybody. We love to help those that are in need. Our governor has given a number that he believes that unemployment can can reach 25%. You know, those individuals need to need our help. They need our attention as as public leaders. And so that's it. Now it's never goal. Would you be open to such a friendly amendment? Speaker 4: Councilmember Austin. That was exactly my goal. I am trying. Thank you for putting that in such great words. My big concern is that we are painting a broad brush and I absolutely do want to help those that qualify for public assistance. Speaker 0: No. We're losing you. Go ahead. Speaker 2: That's a yes. You're absolutely. Speaker 4: Right. It does impact so many people. I can't tell you how many lamb or. Sure. Friendly. Speaker 0: Okay. Great. Next up is Council for Superman. Speaker 3: Thank you. I just wanted to get some more clarification also. But first, I wanted to commend Vice Mayor Andrews. He was the first one to mention the concept of financial literacy. And I think that's so important moving forward that we have some type of educational process here to explain how important credit ratings are and whatnot. And and just the pitfalls of not making these payments and just some type of education piece would be great. So thanks to Vice Mayor Andrews for bringing that up. The clarification I was asking for this goes back to the substitute motion. Councilmember Price. Stated that there had to be some proof shown from tenant to landlord. And this question, I guess is for Rich Anthony. Does that go back to reflect what's in the original ordinance. Um, by, I think it was you had mentioned state guidelines or does that all make sense to for what part in the substitute motion was. It does. It's a good question. Council Member Supernova. But I think so. In the original ordinance, we say that in order to qualify, a tenant has to provide reasonable documentation, I think, or reasonable evidence of COVID related adverse impact. The way that I interpret the substitute substitute motion on the floor is that is a little different in its in its. It doesn't need to read the same as the overall qualification language in the original ordinance. This language regarding providing proof of an inability to pay. Is applicable only to the inability to make those benchmark payments during the 12 month repayment period. And it's a bit of a higher bar. They have to provide proof of an inability to pay. That's the way that I heard it, and that's the way I intend to write it. Okay, so that answered my question. I just feel that language has to be pretty tight so we avoid confusion. Moving forward. And that's all I have. With that, I can support this subset. Speaker 0: Next up is Councilman Price. Speaker 2: Just wanted to clarify that this sub sub includes all of the same provisions that Councilwoman Pearce included in her original motion regarding the title and I'm sorry, the harbor department and airport exemptions with the requirement that city staff work with those individual tenants on a case by case basis to determine rental deferment or mitigation efforts in light of COVID. Does that include that council member Mango? Speaker 4: Absolutely. There are lots of grants at the airport that require it. So. Yes, thank you. Speaker 2: Okay. Also just want to highlight this about the partial payments we want I want that in there because I know there are council members, probably all of us who really don't want to be putting anyone in a situation where if they're not getting any income and they're not getting any rental assistance, they're still being forced to make a partial payment. I think for those situations, if they can provide the proof and I appreciate Councilman Austin clarifying that that's a different situation, I believe that even most landlords would understand and appreciate and have compassion in that kind of situation. So I just wanted to clarify the intent for that is if people just really aren't making any income and they don't qualify for a subsidy, they cannot make that partial payment, then that would be a situation that would require proof. Absent that, it would not require proof. And and I'm totally happy with the 60 days. I think that makes sense. So. Thank you, everyone. Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you. We're going to go ahead and take the subset vote roll call, please. Speaker 1: District one. Speaker 3: Mr. Mayor. Mr. Mayor. This is rich. I'm sorry I lost the train. Win, win. Stacey and Al were speaking. Was there a friendly maid that was accepted? Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 0: There was. Speaker 3: I don't have that. Speaker 0: Okay. Let me just briefly, Councilman Mangum. Speaker 4: Was proof of subsidy. Speaker 0: Hmm. Speaker 4: From March in. Speaker 3: Proof of subsidy. I don't need. Speaker 4: Proof. Payment assistance. Speaker 2: No, no, no. It's proof that they don't qualify for subsidy, which would justify them not making the payment. Speaker 3: My intent was proof of qualified public assistance. So. The point being is that if somebody has been impacted negatively by COVID 19, their job has been they've been displaced, laid off over the hours. They qualify for unemployment, qualify for other public assistance. That should be proof enough to. Landlord. Property owner that they cannot make for rent. Right. They're not making up the fact that they are unemployed because they actually have an unemployment check or have they qualified for unemployment benefits. Right. So. So this is rich again. I get it. What I was just discussing with council member Supernormal. We want to be able to say you're talking only about the benchmark payments. Is that right, Councilmember Austin? No, not the benchmark mark payments I'm talking about. Again, I was talking about us kind of clarifying who we're trying to help. Right. In this policy, we're trying to help those who've been devastated, who've been hit hard by the pandemic and the economic crisis. Those are caught up in the workforce that is declining as a result of this. The economic impacts that and those individuals can can show that, hey, yes, I have applied for it. I've been qualify for unemployment benefits or even if they can even show me a layoff notice from an employer that those type of documents should be. Good enough to to put them in a position where they can now be any a. Rent forgiveness or relief. Position where they are. On a schedule to repay as they can. I get it. So I for the for the purposes of the motion, I think what Al is actually requesting is to provide a little more clarity on how a tenant would qualify for the application of this ordinance, which was not something we were discussing earlier, but it's still appropriate to it. Just this would require this friendly, I think would require a little more specificity to be provided in the opening section of the existing ordinance when it says you need to be able to provide reasonable proof that you've been adversely affected by COVID. If you're a tenant, well, now it's going to say you need to be able to provide reasonable proof, which will, if you can prove that you qualify for other public benefits or you've received a layoff notice, that will be reasonable proof. Speaker 4: I think it simplifies things for the renters. Absolutely. Speaker 3: Does that make sense? Are you good with that, Stacey? Speaker 4: Absolutely. Speaker 0: Okay. Okay. So now we're going to go back to that clarifies the vote. We were on the roll call vote. So. Well, hold on, Councilman Price, is that an additional. Do you keep up again or that I. Speaker 2: I did. Speaker 0: Go ahead. Speaker 2: Okay. So the and I misunderstood that I'm the secondary the motion. I misunderstood that. Councilman Orson I think that's fine. I have no objection to what you're suggesting, but what I wanted to hopefully try to get a little bit of clarification on is for the partial payments or the pay back schedule for those. I had indicated in my substitute that individuals who are receiving no income and don't qualify for anything for whatever reason, those individuals would not have to pay the partial payments. They would still have 12 months to repay. But if they couldn't make the partial payments that I was trying to find a way for those individuals to not have to pay through proof and documentation. So I think the proof and documentation would be that if they can show they're not receiving any income. Through subsidy or work, then they would not have to make a partial payment on that payment schedule. And so that's an A. Speaker 4: And I accept that friendly as well. I think that's very gracious. Speaker 2: Thank you. Speaker 0: Okay. We're going to go then to the roll call vote on the sub sub, Madam Clerk. Speaker 1: District one. A District two. No. District three. I have District four. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District five. Speaker 4: I. Speaker 1: District six. Speaker 3: Yeah. Speaker 1: District seven. Speaker 3: A. Speaker 1: District eight. District eight. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District nine. Speaker 3: No. Speaker 0: Okay. Now we'll take a roll call vote on the substitute motion. Speaker 1: District one. Speaker 2: Name. Speaker 1: District two. May. District three. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District four. District four. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District five. Speaker 4: I. Speaker 1: District six. Speaker 3: May. Speaker 1: District seven. Speaker 3: Nay. Speaker 1: District eight. All right. District nine? Speaker 3: No. Speaker 1: Okay. Speaker 0: Now we're back to the original motion. So this is the. I think we're gonna need some clarity. Consumer Peirce, do you want to repeat? Mr. Attorney, can you repeat the motion that's on the floor? Speaker 3: Yes. Are we. Are the friendlies accepted as part of that motion? Speaker 0: I think that I think the friend I think that council council member Pearce accepted a majority of Councilman Price's friend Liz, with the exception, I think of a couple at the end. But I don't think she accepted anything beyond that because there was a substitute on the floor. Speaker 3: If. Right. Okay. Speaker 2: Can I get a clarity, clarification on what was accepted before the substitute? Speaker 0: Absolutely. And that's why I want to make sure that. Mr. Senator, do you have all of that that we went through what we need to be repeated? Speaker 3: I think I can go through most of it and then I can highlight what I think is what I'm not quite certain of. Okay. Okay. So I'm going to leave the first part. And here's the part that I'm pretty sure of. Extends the current deferred rent repayment period to. Wait a minute. I'm sorry. Hmm. You know what? Let me just start from the top. And it's the number one was extend the current eviction moratorium and rent deferment period. For 90 days to August 31st, 2020. I'm not sure if the friendly was accepted to make it 60 days with direction for staff to bring it back or not. Speaker 0: That was accepted to be 60 days and then after the 60 days there would be a review prior to the 60 days, two weeks before to consider an extension at that point. But it was 60 days with consideration of extension for 30 days. Speaker 3: Got it. Okay. Then number two would be extend the current deferred rent repayment period, the period within which tenants into repay to July 31, 2021. The benchmarks would be in the preamble. They would be encouragement only not enforceable. There would be a direction to the city manager to work with the prosecutor and the city attorney to bring back a report in June on anti tenant harassment best practices. But that would not be included in the ordinance. The exclusion of the commercial tenants would remain the same as the last time I went through this. There would be six different types of commercial tenants excluded, including title stressed tenancies and sub tenancies. I believe that was accepted. And the remainder five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, 11 would be, as I described them, as directing city staff to do certain things with respect to certain programs and also directing the legislative committee to advocate for increased forbearance. I don't think any of those things changed or friendlies were accepted that were discussed between CD3 and CD2. Hopefully. Hopefully, that's a thumbnail sketch of what we're voting on. If you need more clarification, let me know. Okay. Speaker 0: And Councilmember Pearce, do you have a clarification? Speaker 4: I appreciate Stoffer for running through those. I know that everybody had an opinion on the way that the repayment should work, so I really will kick it over to staff to flush that part out since everybody had a different thought in that section. So long as yeah, I think that is it. Speaker 3: That what you want it to be but you want it to be in the preamble, right? Right. Councilmember Pearce. Speaker 4: Yes, sir. Speaker 3: Yeah. Okay. Speaker 2: Okay. Can I just ask for a clarification, Mr. Mayor? Speaker 0: Yes, I had a qualification. Go ahead, Councilman. Speaker 2: Okay. How about the amendments regarding the revolving loan fund for property owners? The report back on the foreclosure resolution with the legislative actions. Speaker 5: Yes, those are accepted. Speaker 2: And Tidelands Fund. Speaker 0: Yes. Those were. Speaker 3: Accepted. Speaker 2: Okay, great. Speaker 0: And I want to clarify also just Councilman Pierce, I think what your what your your motion is you're asking for staff. On the actual repayment plan that staff would come back to present to see how that would actually look, what the payment plan would look like for council to adopt. I mean, considering we're in that first six months, there's obviously very little time to. Yeah, we have it's extended 12. But the payment plan process, it will come back from from staff, correct? Speaker 4: Yes, I'm. Speaker 0: And and I think that the the preamble question, I think I'm not I don't completely understand it. And so I'm assuming we'll get some clarity from staff on kind of where the appropriate place that should go in the ordinance. Speaker 3: Yeah. I feel comfortable that I know where to put it in the preamble. And effectively the direction is to in the future, the council is going to consider making that those benchmark payments enforceable. I think that's what I'm hearing. But for the time being, it's only going to be encouraged in the preamble. Speaker 4: And that in the next six months, because we've got six months until we want to work on what that payment plan looks like, you can bring that back to the Council for us to have a fuller discussion and about where the economy is at. Speaker 3: Thank you. I get it. Speaker 0: I'll go ahead and I'll go ahead. That clarifies it. I'm going to a roll call vote. Speaker 1: District one. Speaker 2: Yeah, I am District two. Speaker 4: Yeah. Speaker 1: District three. District three. Did you get mine? No. There's three. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District four. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 1: District five. I am District six. I'm District seven. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District eight. District nine. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: Ocean carries. Speaker 0: Thank you, counsel. That concludes the item. All the items on the agenda. I don't think anybody has any new business that I see. No one is queued up for new business. And so with that, we will go ahead and adjourn the meeting of the city council.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to direct City Attorney to prepare an urgency ordinance amending Long Beach’s COVID Eviction Moratorium (LBMC 8.100) and The Housing Authority of the City of Long Beach Moratorium on Section 8 terminations in the following three ways, to align Long Beach’s COVID tenant protections with the County and City of Los Angeles: (1) extend the moratorium date from May 31, 2020 until August 31, 2020; (2) extend the amount of time to repay rent from six months to twelve months; and (3) add provisions to address tenant harassment. These proposed amendments would apply to residential and commercial tenancies; and direct City Attorney to bring this urgency ordinance back, with these revisions, to the Council for consideration at a special meeting on or before May 26, 2020.

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Speaker 0: Thank you. Motion carries. Now I will be taking up item 21, which is the Harbor Commission appointments. And I'm just start by just briefly allowing Vice Mayor Andrews so I know the committee heard the items to, to make the motion. Vice Mayor Andreas. Speaker 1: Increasingly so from the last vote. Maybe coming back in. Speaker 0: May not be back yet. So. Okay. Well, why don't we just we'll just move forward. I have a I have other committee members that were part of the committee. So I will believe that the the vice chair was customary. Warringah or council member Pearce, I believe. Speaker 1: Yes. Now I'm back. I'm back on. Okay. Speaker 0: So by Vice Mayor Andrews, you could make the motion, please, as chair of the committee for item 21, the Harbor Commission appointments. Speaker 1: Yes, I moved the bulk sweeper. Your point is that this position great. Speaker 0: And then there there is a second by councilmember summary from the committee. So thank you. So let me let me let me make some comments and then I have folks cued up and I'll go back to the members of the committee if they want to speak. So let me just make some general and general comments first. And I want to first just think the committee for hearing this, of course, and approving and moving the names forward of that. Thank you, Vice Mayor Andrews. And of course, I want to thank Councilmember Ranga and Councilwoman Pearce for for that work today. I'm certainly proud to present to when I see who I think are outstanding Long Beach residents as harbor commissioners for our harbor department at the city of Long Beach. They both have longtime ties to our city, of course. They are both have been also actively involved in our community and bring different perspectives, which I think will be really great to see on the commission. I'll begin by, of course, the other. The first appointment, which is a current vacancy as it stands, is going to be Bobby Olvera. And Bobby Olvera is currently the international vice president of the ILWU. And this, of course, is different than the local work, which he began here over 30 years ago with the LW since 1989 as a third generation longshoreman. He's held numerous roles in the out w course as we probably all worked with him as his capacity as the former president of Local 13 here in Long Beach and in the Los Angeles area. But he also served as the business agent, the chief dispatcher, numerous other roles, including vice president for the local. Once Bobby completed his work here in the in Long Beach and has been a Long Beach resident. He moved on and was elected the international vice president. So he really has a an international and national perspective as it relates to the work that's happening on the docks. And Bobby was also served the city as an economic development commissioner. He was an inaugural member of that commission, which this council approved to his to his work. He currently serves on the board of directors for the Miguel Contreras Foundation and has served on the board for the United Way of greater greater Los Angeles and also just views himself as someone that's really interested in the intersection between labor rights, which is but also a business and port issues. I'm separate of that. I want to also think Bobby for his service. Bobby is enlisted in the United States Marine Corps and I want to thank him for his service to our country and the work he's done there. So congratulations and thank you, Bobby. And the second appointment I someone who I think the city council knows really well, and that is Sharon Weisman. Sharon has been involved in public service in Long Beach for the last 45 years. She recently announced her retirement to add to the city and to the work she's done in my office. But I always say that the vast majority of Sharon's work happened long before she ever worked for me. And while I've enjoyed having her as a senior advisor and a transportation deputy to Metro, we all know that she has been chief of staff to her, to multiple legislators in the Assembly and State Senate, including Senator Ginny, are a piece that is an expert in goods movement and and issues around transit in her work in the legislature as well as at Metro. And is involved in just numerous community boards across the city. She started her career here in Long Beach while working at at Cal State Long Beach and is well connected there. She's currently the president of the Long Beach Library Foundation, of course, has served on the Arts Council of Long Beach and probably been involved in almost every civic organization across the city during her time. And so while we will miss here. Mr. here on the city on beach side and I want to I do want to congratulate her on her retirement. Just congratulations to Sharon, as you've been an excellent member of the city team. And we think and I think your new role and hopefully as a harbor commissioner is going to be a great one to see her work there. So congratulations to both of them. And with that, I want to turn this over to the council and for comments. They're also both on the line if once the council concludes with a welcome to say a few comments as well. So let me turn this over first to Vice Mayor Andrews to chair the committee. Any comments? Speaker 1: Yes, thank you very much, Amir. First of all, I just especially would like to just say that I think that these are great efforts by you and I think you serve. I'm looking forward to working with both Lobby and Sharon, and I thank you very much as these two individuals. Speaker 0: Thank you. And then the second of the motion, Councilmember Ringa. Speaker 1: Thank you, Aaron. I, too, want to welcome our two new commissioners to the court, to the high commission. I've had a long history with both of them, and I'm looking forward to working with them in a different capacity. Speaker 0: Thank you. Then I'm just going down the queue now. Councilman Rex Richardson. Speaker 1: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I think he made two tremendous appointments here. I've known both Mr. Olvera and Weissman for a long time. Miss Weissman has been someone that I've looked up to as as a staff member when I was just coming up as the chief of staff to Steve Neal. And I know our tremendous legacy of service to the state of California as chief of staff, to the late senator and Jenny represents. He has a tremendous history in our city. I know that she's going to serve our community well. Mr. Olvera is has an outstanding legacy of standing up for workers and really has a deep understanding of how the Port of Long Beach and I look forward to working with him and partner with him. And I think that this harbor commission is really shaping up to be a really outstanding board. I look forward to the prospects of what's to come in the years to come. Congratulations to both of you. Speaker 0: Okay. Councilmember Councilwoman Mongo. Speaker 5: Can you hear me? Speaker 0: Yes. Speaker 5: Good. I just want to say congratulations to both candidates. I think they're both exceptional. And I look forward to working closely with both of them. Speaker 0: Councilwoman, Councilmember Pearce. Speaker 2: Thank you. Thought I tried to queue up, but I guess I did that mistake of queuing up twice. As a member of the committee. I also really appreciate these nominations by the mayor. Both candidates have really demonstrated that they have led this city with their values with will show that they are doing what's best for every resident in the city. I know Mr. Olvera in his service to the city. I'm very excited about leadership, not only on economics, but the environment and making sure that we're balancing our port with all of those interests in mind. Same goes for Ms.. Weisman. Being able to see your decades of service. I know that our Harbor Commission is lucky to have both of you. I'm really excited to see how you lead during this tough time. So welcome to the team. Speaker 0: Thank you. Councilwoman Pryce. Speaker 5: Can you hear me? Speaker 0: Yes, we can hear you. Speaker 5: Okay. I want to congratulate both of these appointees. I think you're going to be excellent. I think one of the things that we don't talk about talking about is what a huge industry, the shipping and the goods movement industry is in the city of Long Beach. And I have to say that I myself didn't learn much about it. And the current challenges that we have until I was appointed by the mayor to serve on ACTA and having chaired that committee now for several years, I've learned a lot about the challenges that we face in the movement industry and this is really an unprecedented time and it's going to involve, much like the city, a lot of very difficult challenges and a lot of creativity. So Sharon and Bobby, I know you're going to do great and we're here to support you. And we just know that the next few months and probably years are going to be very challenging times for the port as we figure out how to maneuver some of the challenges that we face both nationally and internationally in terms of movement. So welcome and thank you for your service. Speaker 0: And thank you, Councilwoman Councilman's in Dallas. Speaker 2: Thank you, Mayor. I just wanted to say what phenomenal choices these two are. Congratulations to you both. I think that this is the perfect time for you guys to be coming on, especially what we are facing that not only as a city, as a state, but also as a country. And I think that the work that you have done and demonstrated throughout the many, many years of your devotion to us has literally prepared you for this. And I thank you. And I can't wait to see all the wonderful things that you both will bring to this commission and, you know, go get them. Thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you, gentlemen. Councilman Austin. Councilman Austin. I'm not here in council in Austin. I'll come back to him. Council member supernova. Speaker 1: Thank you. Just like to express congratulations to both of our new commissioners. Thank you to the committee for bringing these nominees forward and not mention ensuring Wiseman's legacy of service was that she ran the fourth District Council office before I came on board. So we'll always be in Denver for that. Thank you. Speaker 0: Councilmember. She did. She did. She did do that. She did a great job. Thanks for. Thanks for mentioning that. Let me see. Is Councilman Austin back on the line? Okay. No, no. Catherine asked him. Okay. I know he's cued up, so I just want to make sure. Let me. Let me go. They're both here on the line. They're both going to make some very brief remarks to just kind of thank everyone. So let me start with Mr. Rivera. Mr. Rivera. Go ahead. Speaker 1: I thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I just want to express my sincere appreciation to you and all the council members for your confidence and your your words today. They both inspire me and humble me. I've got a history with the Port of Long Beach going back to the early seventies, sitting in a Volkswagen while my dad unloaded bananas. So I'm looking forward to the work ahead, to bringing the port some success, bringing the city some success, and with weathering these times that we have ahead of us. Thank you very much to all of you. Speaker 0: Thank you, Mr. Olvera and Ms.. Weisman. Speaker 5: Honorable Mayor and council. I want to tell you what an honor it is to be put forward by the mayor and to be considered by the council. I thank you so much for your kind words. I am honored to have your support and I can't think of a better way to continue to serve the city after my retirement. We all know that the most important thing is the fiscal health of the port. I will always keep that in mind. As we say, the port's the economic engine of the city responsible for one in five jobs. And I will always keep that in mind. I will never forget the harbor department is a department of the city and I will make sure it always acts to benefit the residents of the state as required by law and benefit the residents of Long Beach as allowed by law. So I will work to make sure we continue to reduce our impact on the environment. But equality is part of every decision we make, and we work always to serve the residents of Long Beach. I thank you again for this honor and the trust you placed in me. Speaker 0: Thank you, Mr. Weisman. This finally that counts. Member after I get a chance to reconnect. If not, we'll take the roll call vote. Okay. And why don't we go ahead and do the roll call? Oh, oh, oh. Councilman Austin, perhaps. Speaker 1: I'm having all kinds of trouble today. I'm so sorry, but I do want to extend my congratulations to the newly appointed harbor commissioners. Both of you guys have impeccable credentials, and I know you're going to bring great value to that board. Sharon, I've known for many years, Bobbie, as well. I'm impressed with both of your backgrounds. Obviously, actually having a subject matter expert on port issues. Somebody who's worked at the port for many years, I think is is a kind of value. But also having someone who understands transportation like Sharon does is is is just an added plus as well. And so congratulations, you both look forward to working with you for many years to come. Thank you. Speaker 0: Make it, Councilman. Madam, the roll call, please. Speaker 4: District one. Any high district to add District three. High District for. Speaker 1: All right. Speaker 4: District five. Speaker 5: By. Speaker 4: District six. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 4: District seven. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 4: District eight. District nine. Speaker 1: All right. Speaker 4: Ocean carries. Speaker 0: Okay. Congratulations to you both and look forward to your service on the on the board. And just as a note, I know that Mr. Albers is begins begins as soon as he can get over there with the paperwork and expenses at the end of the the current term, which would begin July 1st. Thank you. Thank you both. And we're moving on to the next item. And so we have two hearings, which, of course, will do first. So let's begin with the first hearing that we have, which is item number nine.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to, subject to review and consideration by the Personnel and Civil Service Committee in accordance with Long Beach Municipal Code Section 2.03.065, confirm Charter Commission appointments pursuant to Section 509 of the City Charter and Section 2.03.065 of the Long Beach Municipal Code; or in the alternative, if for some reason the Personnel and Civil Service Committee does not meet prior to or on May 12, 2020 waive the requirement for consideration and recommendation by the Personnel and Civil Service Committee in accordance with Section 2.03.0650, and confirm Charter Commission appointments pursuant to Section 509 of the City Charter and Section 2.03.065 of the Long Beach Municipal Code.

LongBeachCC

LongBeachCC_05122020_20-0404

Speaker 4: Report from Development Services, recommendation to receive supporting documentation into the record, conclude the public hearing and find the project exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act. Declare Ordinance amending Title six of the Long Beach Municipal Code and Ordinance to remove the provisions that currently regulate the number and maintenance of household pets that may be kept by a residential household. Read the first time and lead over to the next regular meeting of the City Council for Final Reading and adopt a resolution to submit the ordinance amending Title 21 to the California Coastal Commission Citywide. Speaker 0: Let me go ahead and get the staff report done. Speaker 6: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Christopher Koonce, our planning bureau manager, and Stacy Danes, our manager of Animal Care Services, will be available to give the report. Speaker 3: Good evening, Mr. Mayor, and members of the Council. This item relates to the larger strategy overseen by Long Beach Animal Care Services to increase adoption of pets. This particular action involves a change to the zoning code to allow the number of pets to be six, where as it was previously four. The zoning code doesn't really have much to do with the animal care services, so this action would also correct that error and move these regulations into the animal section of the municipal code. So with that, that's the summary. We have a longer presentation, if any council member desired to hear that, but this is all that's necessary for the item. Speaker 0: Thank you. I know we have the comments in front of us have been submitted. I don't believe there's any verbal public comments from anyone that that's required in this hearing. And so we're going to close the hearing and do some council deliberations. Councilman Bongo, I have a motion and I have a second. So that's. Speaker 5: Yes, I have some comments. Initially, when this was brought to the council, it was thought to be a potential in helping us clear the shelters. I heard from the community that potentially they don't want their neighbors to have six pets except for on a case by case basis where we have fosters and other things that are are good performers. And so I'm open to hearing my council colleagues, but I'm also interested in the feedback from this being if this is really necessary at this time. Speaker 0: Let me. Okay, Councilman, let me move to our customers in Dallas. But you've made the motion, correct? Speaker 5: I did make the motion, but I'm open to changing my motion. I'm just here to listen to the counsel and the input. Other jurisdictions typically do it three dogs, three cats, which therefore could also amount to six animals. But under the way that this is written, someone could theoretically have six cats or six dogs or any other multitude of variances. And I don't know that one. There's a necessity for that at this time. So my inclination would be, and again, I'm open to hearing from my colleagues, my inclination would be to give the ordinance availability , but a process that it needs to be approved on a regular basis by the animal control director. We have so many barking dog complaints in our community and the process to alleviate barking dogs is very burdensome on our neighbors and often causes neighbor disputes. And so I am concerned that there would be right now in neighborhoods, often two dogs get along over a fence. That's fine. One additional dog is brought into the mix and mass pandemonium happens. And now if you could put six animals on one property adjacent to another property with 2 to 3 animals, and you're really talking about potential noise disturbances to the community. And if the barking dog ordinance was easier to enforce, perhaps I'd be more open to this. But our shelter is empty on a case by case basis. If Mustain wants to make those allowances for those that are foster partners and others that are really strong animal owners, great. But we also need to be concerned about animal hoarding and other stories we've heard in the news related to animal neglect. That can happen when people get animals beyond what they can afford or are able to take care of. And then as we are going into an economic downturn, we really need to be cognizant of that. Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you for that. I mean, we go to the second. Which customers in Dallas are just. Just go ahead, Councilwoman. Speaker 2: Thank you, Mayor. And just to clarify, Councilmember Mongo, are you trying to make an amendment to this? And support. I actually really support the topics that you just brought up right now. I think that that actually needs to be discussed. So I'm supportive of whatever you decide to go with this motion. Speaker 0: Okay. Let me just keep going through the queue. Can I. Can can we get a little more, Mr. Modica. I understand that. The breakdown and the number went through a process at animal care. And so I just maybe and that there was a community input and there was a whole outreach process that went out to the rescue groups as to how the number came about. Is it possible for you to give some of that back around or maybe Mr. Gaines, can I. Speaker 6: Believe Mr. Stacey Daines, our manager of animal care, is on the phone. So, Stacy, can you can you join us? So. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Give her a call. She's she's here on the phone. We're just probably having technical difficulties getting on. So give us a minute and we'll get Stacy on the phone. Speaker 1: All right. Speaker 2: I look, we're. Speaker 0: Going through the the coolest councilman here. I think some people want to hear the staff report first. But Councilman Pearce. Councilwoman Pierce, you're muted. Speaker 2: Open it up over here. Thank you. Wish you can see me, huh? I would like to hear a staff report if the back yet. Speaker 6: No. We had somebody calling her to see what's going on with getting her on the line. Speaker 2: So I'll say without without the staff report. I do know that this has gone through a process. I so I'm on here and I don't know why I'm not unmuted. Okay. My muted. You're unmuted. Oh yeah. You're up first. Speaker 0: Let's go and get your your report. Speaker 2: Okay. Thank you, everyone, for being so patient. I apologize. So we did go through a process with our rescue organizations. We also talked in depth about this with our task force. And some of these questions came up. And the concerns, I think, that people have are certainly justified, but they're really not related to the number of animals in a location. And what we're interested in doing is allowing folks to have more animals, of course, that they can reasonably care for. And we have we I think we all probably know somebody that has more than the reported number of animals, and they take excellent care of their pets. And we probably may know or have heard of folks that can't really even care for one animal. So when somebody makes a concern or contact animal control regarding the number of animals at a location, we always deal with the welfare issues first, and that's usually how this enforcement goes. So very rarely do we get a call that just says, you know, a citizen is concerned that, wow, there are six dogs here. So we are addressing there are other ways in our municipal code where we address nuisance issues in barking. So we already have an ordinance for that. And then we also there are already state codes that deal with animal cruelty and neglect. And what we find is that a number doesn't have really anything to do with either one of those things. Certainly they can exacerbate a situation, but they themselves don't necessarily cause them. So we are very much in support of, as are our colleagues in animal welfare, about raising this limit to hopefully enable people to have more animals, hopefully license more pets and hopefully reduce some of the burden in our shelters. Speaker 0: All right. Let me go ahead and go to Janine. Speaker 2: Thank you, Mary. Thank you, Stacey. I support staff recommendations. I agree from my experience in the animal world that the number of cats is not necessarily I think six six is a manageable number. And to Councilmember Mungo's point, you know, we want to be able to allow people to foster mother cats with their babies and potentially keep them. So we're not putting them back into the system. So while right now we're at a unique moment. I think that the work has been done. The community has been involved in this process. Perhaps there are some other issues that might want to address about how we deal with barking dogs. But my neighbor's barking dog is extremely loud and he's just one dog. So I don't think it's a numbers issue. I think that the community has already spoken. And I would like to ask I'd like to hear from my colleagues, but I definitely would like to keep with the original motion, I need to make a substitute. Speaker 4: Then I will. Thank you. Speaker 0: Well, is that a substitute? Janine, I'm sorry. Speaker 2: Well, she hasn't changed her motion yet. I just think she doesn't want to change it. Then I'll make a change. Speaker 0: Let's keep going. Constable Ringo. Speaker 1: That's very your. Yeah. I'm sorry. I was disconnected for a little while, so I missed a lot of the conversation. Not sure where we're at right now. Speaker 0: Okay. The motion still on the floor as it is, but councilman mongo may make some changes. We're having a discussion about the number right now. Let me go back to counting, among other things up next and then maybe we'll get some clarity. Councilman on go. Speaker 5: So appreciate the comments of my council colleagues so far. But the community has not been involved. The animal advocacy groups have been involved. And in my opinion, those individuals and animal advocacy are our best cases of the individuals who would be requesting sick animals. And I'm completely supportive of a robust process that allows for animals. But to say that the community has been involved, there have been no public meetings on that except for this council meeting, a council meeting where the public does not have the ability to come and speak on the item. And so at this time, I cannot be supportive of moving forward without regard for a process. So my motion will be that I support changing of the ordinance with a process that through licensing, the Director of Animal Services has some discretion over allowing multiple animals. So let me give you an example of this. A few months ago, I was at the shelter and I asked, why are all these animals in this particular cage together? And they were all animals from the same home. And in that case. The owner could not take all the animals back because she shouldn't have had that many animals in the first place. And so in that particular case, the Danes stated, okay, well, in this case, we're going to let all the animals go back. You don't have to choose between your animals, but you are not authorized to add any additional animals to the other cases like that. However, we need to be cautious of. Animal care. And there's a very big difference between animal care and animal cruelty and the level of which people believe the animals are part of our family and not property has definitely shifted. I'd love to see the ordinance reflect animals being not referred to and referred to in a more family oriented way. But at this time, I'd like to add to the motion the approval of the ordinance with a process that they would administer. It can be a very easy going process, but a process nonetheless, so that we at least have a catalog of who these individuals are, how many animals they have, that they don't have a barking dog complaint against their property already. Because currently if you have a barking dog complaint, even if it has not been all the way through the process with a certain number of neighbors sign. And yes, that is a process. We have the strictest barking dog complaint of many of the jurisdictions around us, but it is extremely difficult to enforce extremely and it comes into a neighbor to neighbor disputes. So if in the fact that there is a case where a person has several barking dog complaints that have not been able to get through that whole process, and maybe we still maintain the limit of four and four animal I have three animals. It is a lot for a family to take care of. And so I would hope that my colleagues will support a process that's necessary to. Yet the 16. Speaker 0: Before I move on, I want to clarify because I think. I think what Stacey's customer is asking for essentially is when come to me, correct me if I'm wrong here, but she's saying that ought to be an automatic a trigger that you can just go up to that number you would need to get approval to go beyond to get to that, not to get above what currently is the number you would need to get essentially a special license or a special approval from animal care to move into at any higher number than what's currently allowable. So you'd still be able to get more animals, but it have to be approved by animal care to make sure that there isn't complaints or issues at that residence. So I think there is definitely could be value in that. And so I captured that. Right, Councilman? Speaker 5: Yes, absolutely. Speaker 0: Okay. So the motion is to keep the staff recommendation, but it's not an automatic move. You actually have to add, I kind of have an approval by animal care. I think that's the motion that. The motion on the floor. Councilman then mongo. Speaker 5: Yes. Thank you there. Speaker 0: Okay. And then there's a second councilman's the house the second that I've changed to do it. Speaker 2: Yes, I second that. Speaker 0: Okay, great. Well, let me move on to council member Austin. Councilman Austin? Speaker 1: Yes. Can you hear me? Speaker 0: Yes, we can hear you now. Speaker 1: Okay. Thank you. I appreciate the conversation around this issue. I did have just a couple of quick questions, because one issue that I think I remember brings up a couple of good points. When we define households under this proposed ordinance, the hearing before us, does the household include apartment dwellings, condominiums, townhomes, as well as single family homes with yards? Is there any distinguishing difference in terms of how many pads can be held in type of living quarters? Anybody as city attorney. Speaker 3: Has currently dropped it. There's no distinction. Household refers to a family unit, so they could be in any type of dwelling. Speaker 1: I think six six pets in tighter living quarters could create a real challenge not only for health and family, but also for neighbors. And so these are. I would love to have animal services director in our department to have some some sort of discretion and in terms of improving that number. With that in mind, in consideration, I think I support the motion or the spirit of the motion before us. And this is I'm open to further comments, but I think what comes out of this is reasonable. Speaker 0: Thank you. And I agree, Councilman, I think this is a good kind of compromise. Councilman Mango's motion is some of the concerns. Councilman Pierce. Speaker 2: Thank you, Mayor. I just wanted to ask for clarity of our animal department, if it makes sense. To have it go through them, or does it make sense to have it go through the existing pet owners vet that they use? I just I want to understand the process a little more because I know when we talked about this several months ago, I believe that Ms.. Jane said that this was already something that was done regionally, was the number six. And I think to her point, it was more about this is about animal care. So if it's about animal care with the appropriate person to kind of give the green light, either vet and not animal control and maybe I'm off. And if I'm off, then correct me. I'm just trying to make sure that we we make this an easy process for pet owners and for the city. That's a question for city staff. Thank you, Councilwoman Pierce. So. I think the motion takes us maybe in a little bit different direction of the I think the intent of increasing the number in the ordinance is that we know that most places allow for six pets, some even more than that Sacramento allows, I think, for up to ten. So we know that people do have more than four cats and we know that they do fine with more than four pets. For many people, having a pet is a self-limiting experience anyway. Like, for example, the Councilwoman Mongeau said she has three and that's that's sounds like that was probably her limit. Some other folks have more than that. And, you know, everybody sort of knows their limit. And when we were on to complaints, it's not about the number. It's about what's going on in the home. So if the motion is to take this in a different direction, then perhaps. Perhaps the question then becomes the standard of care as opposed to any number. So if I can take care of 50 animals and not cause a problem for my neighbors, then why shouldn't I be able to have that? Whereas if somebody can't, like I said before, if somebody cannot even care for one animal, then they shouldn't even have the one. So in a sense, numbers are particular, can be arbitrary. So I think maybe that that's an important thing to consider. So we will have folks apply for each additional animal after the four and up to the six. Then I guess my question would be, why stop at the six? Okay. So 20 everybody right now. Thank you. Thank you for saying so to clarify that the motion on the floor is essentially still allowing for six is just putting a process in place. So I just want to make sure that process is not strenuous because I know how important it is that all of our pets are licensed and that we can track that. And so that would be my my suggestion if I were to vote yes on this motion is just that that process is not something that is burdensome on staff. So really, my question is, is this a process that you can handle that will not be burdensome on you? Or would you prefer the process a different way? I think we need to take a look at it. I think I need to involve other department staff in answering that question to know what that process is, simply because that's not a process that exists. And if we are going to be investigating animal control backgrounds for people and their histories. That definitely would be a process. We'd also need to come up with some criteria of what issues are, for example. Are complaints in. And is that a limiting factor? Because do we tell people they can't have certain animals because they have a particular neighbor who has a problem with them and then their issues are really they just don't like that person. So if I don't want you to have another dog because I have a problem with you, I'm just going to call animal control and make a complaint and then make it more difficult for you to make your own personal, private choices for your life. So I think it's a little bit more complex if we're going to talk about our process, but certainly we can explore that. Speaker 6: And maybe this is time, maybe we can get some clarity on the motion. I understood. I hear two different things. One is more of a of an investigative process where we're really looking to see are people fit to have animals. What I thought I heard the motion was was more keep the six, but you can go up to four and then you just need to put in a application for I want to go above above six. So I think Stacy is trying to figure out how does she make that decision of who is allowed to go above six. So that is something if that's the intent of the motion, then we would need to figure out how to go to I'm sorry from above for him to go to 4 to 6. Speaker 0: And yeah, let me just jump in also. So I don't want to overcomplicate what I think. I think I actually think the motion is, is fairly simple that's on the floor. I think that also it's essentially the staff recommendation with one key difference, which is that instead of I mean, all pets have to be licensed, should be getting licensed anyways. I mean, we know that not everyone does licensing, but that shouldn't there should be licensing. And so I think what the motion is saying is that, yes, you can go to six, but that additional additional pets beyond the four in the process of licensing and getting them approved have to be reviewed by animal care just to make sure that it's not that there isn't complaints or there are other issues. Maybe at that residence, if I needed as much simpler maybe than it is, I could be wrong. That was my impression was that it would be a very simple process, but I have two other people queued up. So Councilman and day has. Speaker 2: You, Mayor? Yes, that's the way I understood it also. So I think that keeping it as simple as possible, I think would address both Councilmember Mungo and Councilmember Pierce's concerns in regards to, you know, not necessarily just giving everybody the go ahead to get six and six pets, but also being careful who those people are who who do have six pets and someone that is not being pet friendly wouldn't be able to get those those six. Six Pets Allowance. But then how do you deny that? But also, that may be a little bit more in the staff, some in the staff deciding what what they want to do with that. So, yes, I think that that's the best thing here, is to keep it as simple and clear as possible. Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilman Mongo. Speaker 5: You impound a large number? Can you hear me now? Speaker 0: Yes. Speaker 5: Okay. And again, we have a process to apply to be a breeder. We have a process to apply to be a menagerie. There should be a process for pets. I mean, what we're talking about right now is a triplex that have 18 animals. And maybe that's not the greatest idea. And maybe some of the considerations are the number of animals on a property. Because when you're at 18 cats, you're almost at a cat colony now. And so there are different neighborhood impacts when you have multiple homes like that on a street and other things. I'm not prescribing any process at all. It can be as easy and as simple as possible, and we can start that direction. And as it gets further along, if we see issues that come up, then we can. Encourage a more strict process, but a process is outside of the ordinance. The ordinance is simple up to six animals through a process. And then let's just leave that to animal control to come up with that process. Another example is you might have an individual who has multiple off leash dog complaints or multiple fence violations, whether animals get out. Those are be examples of potential things that those things might want to consider as a part of her evaluation process. But again, right now, if you have more animals and you have that issue, we still return those animals with no conditions. And so we just want to give her more tools in the toolbox so if problems arise. But yes, as mayor stated, this is very simple. Speaker 0: And I think it's I think it's it's not at all changing the intent of staff in working with the rescue groups, which is to allow folks up to six up to six pets. It just be some process that animal care will come up with. It could be very simple. So I don't really think the intent here has been changed at all in my read of potential negative emotion. Speaker 6: Mayor, this mayor. Mayor, this is the the one issue that it does raise is this is a substantial change. It will have to come back for a new first reading if the motion that's on the floor is passed. Staff would have to come up with some sort of criteria for whatever that process would look like. And then this the ordinance would come back for council to review and approve that with the process included. Speaker 0: Councilmember Ringa, thank you. Speaker 1: So when has the bureaucracy ever been simple? It's you know, it's much more complicated than what it is. It may sound simple, but it's not. You're looking at terms of defining. What would be a good household to have four or six pets. It becomes very subjective at that point. And not only that, but it becomes a point where there are probably some issues related to the property itself in terms of being able to handle it. What if you have an apartment owner who has prepared for what you want? Six. That would not be a very good decision right there. So, I mean, I think that Charlie hit the nail on the head. We're going into a discussion here where we need to revisit the process to ensure that all departments are involved. And I see I see these are the terms being involved in this, in the decision making process as well, in terms of being able to house that many pets in one property. So I'm thinking that we should remain this audience back to animal control and to U.S. attorney for further review. Speaker 0: Okay. There's motion on the floor and I'll go do a roll call vote. Go ahead. Adam. Kurt. Speaker 4: District one. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 4: District two, i. District three. High District for. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 4: District five. Speaker 5: I. Speaker 4: District six. Speaker 1: All right. Speaker 4: District seven. Speaker 1: I have a question. I sort of made a motion, sort of not we don't get into getting into voting here. My discussion that I was saying was to remand this issue back to the city attorney control, because I see that there are substantial changes here in terms of the motion that has been made, in terms of with changes. So if I have to vote for that, and that's what I want to think, but if I can make that a substitute motion, then I would rather do that. Speaker 0: So actually can't smoke, but of course. Yeah. I mean, I think the roll call but I mean the vote has started. There was not a motion that was made. So if you think you need to vote no if you're not. The motions already half way through here so. Speaker 1: That that would be a nay. Speaker 4: District eight. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 4: District nine. Speaker 0: I emotion carries. Thank you. Next item is hearing 32. Or hearing.

Ordinance

Recommendation to receive supporting documentation into the record, conclude the public hearing, and find the project exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act in accordance with Article 5, Section 15061; Declare ordinance amending Title 6 of the Long Beach Municipal Code (“Animals”) to incorporate provisions relating to the number, and maintenance, of household pets that may be kept by a residential household, read the first time and laid over to the next regular meeting of the City Council for final reading;

LongBeachCC

LongBeachCC_05122020_20-0428

Speaker 1: Communication from City Attorney Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code relating to COVID 19 worker retention. Declaring the urgency thereof to make the ordinance effective immediately or at the first time in late April to the next regular meeting of the City Council for Final Reading Citywide. Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you. I have a motion by Councilman Richardson. Councilman present. Is that a motion or is that cued up for comment? I have another person that's trying to second it here. Also in a second. Speaker 5: It was stuck. Speaker 0: Okay, great. So there's a motion and a second. Councilman Richardson, did you want to also do a staff report to start? Speaker 1: Just a quick one, please. Okay. Speaker 0: Go ahead. Speaker 6: Again. Gary Anderson, city attorney's office. Speaker 3: Good morning again, Mayor and council members. The proposed retention ordinance before you tonight mandates that in the event of a change in control or ownership of a hotel, business or commercial property, employing 25 or more employees, employees employed on or after March four, 2020 by the incumbent business must be placed on a preferential hiring list. The incoming successor business must hire employees from the preferential hiring list for the first six months they are in business. Once hired, these employees must be retained for no less than 90 days. The successor business is then required to conduct employee performance evaluations to assess whether to offer continued employment beyond 90 days. Employers deemed to be employees, deemed to be managers, supervisors or confidential employees are excluded from this ordinance at this time. I'm happy to answer any questions. Speaker 0: You may have. Okay. Thank you. Councilor Richardson, the motion. Speaker 1: Thank you. So our move to adopt the recommended ordinance. I have three clarifications. First, we're going to also on this limit include the regular ordinance, not the declaration of urgency, which is consistent with the original motion made by council. Secondly, we want to insert clarifying language that the definition of a commercial property business means an owner, operator, manager, lessee, including a contractor, subcontractor or sub lessee or non residential property in the city that provides janitorial services and employs 25 or more employees. Again, this is consistent with the 25 or more threshold that received unanimous support in the third piece is clarify that during the transition transition employment period, the written offer statement provided to the employee be during five business days and with business days that means any day except for Saturday or Sunday or official state holidays. These are just clarification and that is my motion. Speaker 0: The motion in a second, Councilman Price. Councilwoman Price. Speaker 5: Okay about that. Sorry, I was talking to myself. Okay. I have some changes on page three, seven and 11. On page three, I'd like to substitute the word online. 25. I'd like to substitute the word hospitality for hotel to maintain consistency and avoid confusion from the broader hospitality industry. So that would be a recommendation for customer Richardson That's accepted. Speaker 1: I'm sorry. Speaker 5: For I'm sorry. Speaker 3: Councilman Price. I'm sorry I lost it. Where you at on page? Speaker 6: We weren't following the page in line number that you're referring to. Councilmember Price. Speaker 0: Yeah. Let's go back. Councilman Price, can you give the page and line number again on that? Speaker 5: Sure. If it's actually looked at page two, line 25. Speaker 6: You have that big you. Speaker 0: Okay. Go on, Councilwoman. Councilwoman Price, you have a. Don't drop the call. Councilwoman Pryce. We're checking. Madam Court, can you check with Councilman Price? I think she may have her call may have dropped. Speaker 1: Councilwoman Price dropped off the call. Speaker 0: Okay. Well, can you just. Can the client please just check in with her that she knows that she's. Why don't we come back to Councilwoman Price on her on her items on that? And let's go to the other folks. Councilman Sun has had comments. Speaker 5: Oh, God. Mr. Mayor. Speaker 0: She backed. Speaker 5: Yes. I apologize. I don't know what. Speaker 0: No problem. Let's go ahead and go back to you know. Speaker 5: It's going to I mean, I'm sorry, page two, line 25. Speaker 0: Okay. Speaker 5: Brooklyn hospitality with hotel. Speaker 0: And you had other. Speaker 5: I do. I do. Mr. King, can you explain a little bit more on page six around lines 11 through 19, you have the words in here, quote shall consider. Is that meant to say that they can consider but they're not obligated to offer that person a longer term offer? Because I think the way the language reads, it could be cleaned up a little bit and it wouldn't be a substantial change to make it either discretionary or obligatory. But in reading it, I felt that the language, the words used were contrary to one another. Speaker 3: The intent was to require the employer to make the assessment of the employee, but there's no requirement that they actually hire the employee. That's the intent to actually consider the employee for rehire. Speaker 5: Okay. So can we we make you clarify that I guess this would be a friendly to Councilman Richardson to include some language in there that, you know, it's not obligatory, but it's the consideration of. It is mandatory. Speaker 6: And I think that's on line 16. It says the successor business employer shall consider offering the worker continued employment under the terms and conditions. Speaker 5: Yeah, but I think it needs a further tender that says they're not obligated. Speaker 6: I disagree. It says shall consider. Speaker 5: Okay. If you think that's clear enough. I have several people reach out to me today, but wasn't that clear? But they said the incentives and we all agree that they shall consider, but there's no obligation to make any offer based on that. Speaker 3: That's correct. Speaker 5: Okay. And then on page ten, same note over line one through three. It talks about whether the provisions of this chapter are still necessary based on the city's recovery. Again, the city's recovery might be relevant, but it may not be directly on point to the recovery of this industry. So I want to make sure that that's clear. I don't know that we need to necessarily state that in here, but the city could be doing great or the city could be doing terribly. That may or may not impact this particular industry progress. So I just want to make sure that that's clear in the record, that it's not the city's recovery we're interested in. When the recommendation comes back, it's the recovery of the industry. Speaker 3: That's fine. I guess the only concern I would have would be how do you measure whether these industries, hotel and janitorial have recovered? I mean, because it's going to cover several different businesses. So I'm not sure how we would measure recovery. Speaker 5: Well, we would measure recovery, I imagine, the same way we would imagine the recovery of the city. So really, you know, how we're doing with employment rates, whether they're hiring, whether they have to limit operations, whether they're increasing operation. I mean, I imagine the city manager, when they come back with a recommendation, would have some data sets that they could utilize, you know, room occupancy, for example, you know, the employment need. But I think the point is that, let's say, you know, the fact of the matter is it's not a simple right. You have data points that she would make that determination. For example, let's say the city itself is doing very well in 90 days. Let's just say our sales tax revenue is bought up, oil prices have changed and the city is doing great in 90 days. That may not translate into the hotel industry or the janitorial industry doing well. So the point in the recommendation is that we really want to make sure that we're focused on the particular industry. And I just I think the city manager understands that since this is covid's effect on the city manager that will be presenting the first report will be Tom Modica. So as well as the intent of the body is known, I don't think we need to change the language, but the city could be doing really well or the city could be doing terrible economically. That may have some correlation to how the hotel industry and the general industry is doing, but it may not be completely parallel. That's the point. Speaker 6: This is Tom. I think that's very clear. We got it. So we there's definitely different sectors and they can behave differently. So we'll make sure we report on that. Speaker 5: Thank you. Speaker 0: Okay. Speaker 1: And then I have my my audience here. Thank you for finding the page number. And the line number makes it easy to follow on the first one. I think that makes sense. I think we'll accept that on the third one. I think that's consistent with what we did in the first one. It really doesn't change the word ordinance. It what it does is clarify that we're being industry specific, which I'm okay with it on the second one. I think the language here that's that's here is if the concern is that it's not clear this is consistent with the language in other ordinances on the second one. So I don't have the I don't share the same concern about it being not clear. And so I'm not going to accept that one. And if there are if we I'm sure if we run into additional issues in the future, the city attorney has a process to sort of bring forward clarifying ordinances, but I think two out of three and that we won't accept those two. Speaker 5: And I actually did clarify the only amendment I was making was to the first one, which was to change hospitality to hotel with the other two. I think that I think was clarified. So I wasn't making a request for a like. Speaker 1: Okay. Speaker 0: Let me keep it. Speaker 1: Thank you. Speaker 0: Right. Thank you. Let me keep. Speaker 1: You dropped out, Mr. Mayor. Speaker 0: Now always in darkness. Your next. Speaker 2: I'm supportive of that. I am very supportive. I think it's very important at this time. Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you. And Councilwoman Jeanine. Speaker 2: Councilwoman Jeanine. Speaker 0: I'm sorry, I forgot your name. Councilmember Pearce. Speaker 2: Thanks. Fully support this item. I also want to say how much I really appreciate all the industry's working with city staff and council members. I'm proud of this moment. Thank you, guys. Speaker 0: Thank you. Let's go ahead and do a roll call vote. Speaker 1: District one. I district to. I District three. I just for my district five. Speaker 3: By District six. Speaker 1: By district seven. District eight. Hi. District nine. Motion carries. Speaker 0: Thank you. And then the last is Mr. Mayor. Speaker 1: The Mayor. Before we continue. My voice was muted for item 18 and I just want to record that I voted on that item, please. Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you. Next item 20. Speaker 3: Communication from City Attorney Recommendation to declare ordinance amending.

Ordinance

Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code by adding Chapter 5.53, relating to COVID-19 worker retention, read and adopted as read. (Citywide)

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Speaker 3: Communication from City Attorney Recommendation to declare ordinance amending. Speaker 1: The Long Beach Minimum Code relating to COVID 19 paid supplements or sick leave, declaring the urgency thereof to make the ordinance effective immediately. Write the first time and lead over to the next regular meeting of the City Council for Final Reading City Wide. Speaker 0: Hey, I have a motion by Councilmember Richardson. Can I get a second? Second? Goodbye. Councilman's in Dallas. I'm sorry, Richardson. Speaker 1: Thank you. I want to start just with a brief, brief walkthrough from the apartment. Speaker 6: Thank you, Mayor. Members of the council. Aaron Wizner, McKinley from the city attorney's office will present the ordinance before you tonight. The the issue here is, again, as the other two were, is presented to you both as an urgency ordinance and as a regular ordinance for the council's consideration. Aaron. Speaker 4: Good evening, mayor and council members before you, is the COVID 19 paid supplemental sick leave ordinance? The ordinance at the direction of council is prepared to serve as a gap filler to the Federal Act that was enacted on April 1st, the Corona Families First Coronavirus Response Act. The ordinance works as a gap filler by extending the 80 hours of sick leave provided in the Federal Act to full time employees that have businesses or workers here in Long Beach and have 500 employees or more nationally. The act also, per the request of Council, has a proportional sick leave provision for part time employees. The Act also includes an exemption for collective bargaining agreements and a 90 day report back and otherwise. The language of the ordinance. Tracks that of the Federal Act for which we are grappling. I'm happy to take any questions the Council may have. Speaker 0: Councilmember Richardson. Speaker 1: Thank you. I think the presentation really aligns with city council. Was it an hour long deliberation here? We wanted to fill the gap and cover companies that were 500 employees and both nationally and this ordinance does that. We want to clarify in this that a number of our companies, 500 above already offer a certain program that was lifted up in the conversation. And I think it needs to be clarified here that if a company already provides a minimum of 160 hours of paid sick leave, and that employer is exempt from this process, and I want to make sure that's reflected in my motion. So I'm going to make a motion here, a move to adopt the recommended emergency ordinance. In addition and in addition, clarifying that if an employee has a paid leave or paid leave off the policy that provides a minimum of 160 hours of paid leave annually, the employer is exempt from any obligation provide supplemental leave pursuant to the order of that employee that received a more generous paid leave. And that's my motion. Speaker 6: Mayor and mayor, members of the council it's Charlie Parker and again that that we can certainly add that and that is I believe in LA's ordinance currently but it will require this to come back for a new first reading. Thank you. Speaker 0: Councilmember Zendaya's. Speaker 2: Thank you very much to staff and to all the councilmembers for being open to such an ordinance like this. This is a very crucial time for, you know, for for us. And so, you know, thank you for thinking of all those who who might be sick or might be affected by so much. So thank you again for considering this ordinance and for all of the work that's been put into it. Speaker 0: Thank you. And Councilwoman Pryce. Councilwoman Price. Speaker 5: Yes. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Oh, hey. Can someone explain again the covered employers? I know we talked about franchisee. Okay, Charlie or Gary, can you please reiterate what the city's under your understanding as a franchisee and whether this one applies them to the city of Long Beach? Speaker 4: Councilmember prices. Aaron Wiener McKinley and I'll try to respond to Aaron. No, no, not a problem. I'll respond to the inquiry. So the intention, I think from the last meeting where we were giving direction on this item was to to gap fill the. The Federal Act doesn't talk about the application of the act in terms of franchisees or non franchisees. There's an evaluation that must be made based on the intertwined nature of operations. On whether they will identify themselves within the as having more or less than 500 employees. And I think part of the desire of this ordinance is to get fill. So if there is a selection based on how you understand your operations, that you do not fall within the five, you're not 500 or less employees and would not be subject to the Federal Act. Then you would be captured by the City of Long Beach's ordinance because you've already made that election that you do not fall within the Federal Act. Speaker 5: Okay. Got it. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. I think I have a. Oh, yeah. On page eight. Line 16. I'd like to make a friendly to change the language instead of the words can work from home. My recommendation would be to change it to you have the option to work from home. I think it makes it a little bit cleaner and it provides the employee an option. Speaker 0: Councilmember. Speaker 1: As long as the city attorney says it doesn't matter, it seems minor shouldn't trigger another first reading. Is that right, Mr. City? Speaker 4: Time the option would be at the discretion of employer. And the point of this portion of the of the ordinance is to make clear that the sick leave obligations only apply when an employee is unable to work from home, whether that's the contours of their job duties or their wellness. Speaker 1: Requirements and the. Speaker 5: Like, they were saying, I see what you're saying. Okay. So they they literally it's not that they're given the option to work from home. They're literally they can work from home. That's not healthy enough to do so. Yeah, I got it. Okay. Never mind that. Never mind, then. Thank you. Speaker 0: Okay. So we have a motion in a second on the floor. Uh, let me go with that. It's been amended by Councilman Richardson. Councilmember Pierce. Speaker 2: I'm good. I fully support the motion of this. Speaker 0: Councilwoman Mongo. Councilwoman Mongo. Speaker 5: Hi. Hey, can you hear me? Hello? Speaker 0: Yes. Speaker 5: Oh, okay. I just wanted to verify that there's a clause that allows for employers who are already. Offsetting that provision that that that's included in the ordinance. Speaker 4: Councilmember Mongo, page nine on line 11, it's section 8.110.080 includes an employer offset section and that allows for employers who have provided sick leave hours to have an hour, four hour offset for every hour of sick leave provided for a COVID related reason. Beginning on the beginning of the pandemic, which was March 4th, 2020. And going forward. Speaker 5: Perfect. I appreciate that. That was really important. Have a great day. Speaker 0: Thank you. And now we'll do a roll call vote. Speaker 4: District one. District two. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 4: District three. Speaker 1: All. Speaker 4: By District four, by district five. Speaker 5: Hi. Speaker 4: District six. Speaker 1: All right. Speaker 4: District seven. I District eight. Speaker 1: The vote in your district nine. I. Speaker 4: Motion carries. Speaker 0: Thank you. Thank you for that. Now we're going to go back to the other items on the agenda next to item 11.

Emergency Ordinance

Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code by adding Chapter 8.110 relating to COVID-19 paid supplemental sick leave; declaring the urgency thereof; and declaring that this ordinance shall take effect immediately, read and adopted as read. (Ordinance No. ORD-20-0017). (Citywide)

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Speaker 4: Report from Energy Resources. Recommendation to award seven contracts for as needed encore professional engineering and Inspection Services in an aggregate amount not to exceed 77 million citywide. Speaker 0: Can I get a motion in a second on this, please? Okay. I got a I got a motion. Can I get a second? Okay. All right. I have a motion by councilmembers, and they have said a second by Councilman Price. Any comments? Councilman has. Speaker 2: Sort of. Speaker 0: Okay. Any comments, Councilman Price? Speaker 5: No, thank you. Speaker 0: Okay, then please call the. Speaker 4: District one. Speaker 2: High. Speaker 4: District to district three. Speaker 5: I. Speaker 4: District four. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 4: District five. Speaker 5: Hi. Speaker 4: District six. Speaker 1: Hi. Speaker 4: District seven. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 4: District eight. District eight. District nine. Speaker 1: Yeah, maybe. Yeah. I mean, i, i. Yeah. Speaker 2: District nine. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 4: Motion carries. Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you. That covers that item. Next up is item 16.

Contract

Recommendation to adopt Specifications No. RFQ ER19-138 and award contracts to Burns & McDonnell Engineering Company, Inc., of Brea, CA; Corrpro Companies, Inc., of Santa Fe Springs, CA; EDM Services, Inc., of Simi Valley, CA; Energy Experts International, Inc., of Redwood City, CA; Farwest Corrosion Control Company, of Downey, CA; SPEC Services, Inc., of Fountain Valley, CA; and TRC Pipeline Services, LLC, of Houston, TX, for as-needed on-call professional engineering and inspection services, in an aggregate amount not to exceed $7,000,000, for a period of one year, with the option to renew for four additional one-year periods, at the discretion of the City Manager; and, authorize City Manager, or designee, to execute all documents necessary to enter into contracts, including any necessary amendments. (Citywide)

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Speaker 4: Communication from City Attorney Recommendation Declare Ordinance Amending the Long Beach Municipal Code related to temporary enforcement of Long Beach health orders regarding COVID 19 and declaring the urgency thereof. Read the first time and later the next regular meeting of the City Council for Final Reading City Wide. Speaker 0: And I get them and I get a motion in a second place. I have a motion by Councilman Sunday House and seconded by Councilman Richardson. Councilman and de Haas in the comments. Speaker 2: Very supportive. Speaker 0: I'm sorry, Richardson. Any comments? Speaker 1: No comment. Speaker 0: Our countryman prices queued up. Any comments. Speaker 5: Kieran? Speaker 0: A price. Speaker 5: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I just wanted to thank Monica and Taylor from the city attorney's office for working with me this week to get the language to become more narrowly focused and for their efforts in putting this together. I really appreciate it. Thank. Speaker 0: Thank you. Councilmember Pearce. Any comments? Speaker 4: No comments. Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you. Speaker 4: District one. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 4: District two. I'm District three. Speaker 1: No. Speaker 4: I district for. Speaker 1: All right. Speaker 4: District five. Speaker 5: They? Speaker 4: District six. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 4: District seven. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 4: District eight. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 4: District nine. Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 4: Motion carries. Speaker 0: Thank you. And then you can now read item 17. Speaker 2: Is. Speaker 4: Communication from city attorney recommendation declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code relating to the sale of unclaimed property read and adopted as read citywide.

Emergency Ordinance

Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code by adding Chapter 8.120, temporary enforcement of Long Beach Health Orders related to COVID-19; declaring the urgency thereof; and declaring that this ordinance shall take effect immediately, read and adopted as read. (Citywide)

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Speaker 4: Communication from city attorney recommendation declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code relating to the sale of unclaimed property read and adopted as read citywide. Speaker 0: I got a motion in a place. Okay. There is a motion. Actually, I didn't get a. Okay. Councilman concerns and they have set in motion. And Councilmember Pierce to the second councilmember today has. Supportive Counselor Pierce part of. Okay. Did you have any comments? Concern, Richardson? I think that was zero. Speaker 1: No comment. Speaker 0: Okay. Okay, then let's go ahead and cancel your anger. Did you have any comments on this or was that the last one? Speaker 1: Good to go. Speaker 0: Okay, then I'll go ahead and do a roll call of District one. Speaker 4: I district to. I District three. I'm District four. I District five. Speaker 5: I. Speaker 4: District six. Speaker 1: By. Speaker 4: District seven. District seven. Speaker 1: By. Speaker 4: District eight. Speaker 1: Right. Speaker 4: District nine. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 4: Motion carries. Speaker 0: Motion carries. Thank you. That concludes the rest of the agenda. Let me go ahead and. On just new business. I just do want us to. Speaker 6: Say, I think we're missing an item. We're missing a couple of items, items 12, 13, 14 and 15. Speaker 0: Huh? You're right. Those actually are not even on my roll call order here, so I will go back. Speaker 1: To those items. Speaker 0: Hold on 1/2. I'm just looking at the. Okay. So item item 13. Speaker 6: Item 12.

Ordinance

Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach municipal Code by amending Chapter 2.78 relating to the sale of unclaimed property, read and adopted as read. (Citywide)

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Speaker 0: Item 12. Speaker 4: A report from Health and Human Services recommendation to submit a renewal grant application to HUD for the 2020 Continuum of Care for Homeless Assistance Program citywide. Speaker 0: Do we want a quick report on this? Speaker 1: Yes. Speaker 6: Okay. Kelly Colby from Health and Human Services will give the report. Or I'm sorry. Theresa Chandler from our deputy city manager will give the report. Speaker 5: Hi, this is Lisa Salmon. So we received this as a funding that we receive every year from HUD to renew our permanent supportive housing, transitional housing and supportive services for folks who are experiencing homelessness. But this grant, we have been awarded 9.3 million, which to date is the largest amount we've been awarded from her thus far. And so we're very excited because we're able to add one more permanent supportive housing project into the group. So that's where we are today and we're really excited to move forward with this project. And if it. Speaker 0: Thank you. There's a motion by councilors in the house and the second by Councilor Richardson councilors. And they asked. Assumes that they have any comments. Speaker 2: Very supportive and I'm glad to hear the great ministry said thank you. Speaker 0: Councilor Richardson. Speaker 1: Very supportive as well. Good work. Thank you. Speaker 0: Got to rearrange, get a job, anything. Speaker 1: Good to go. Speaker 0: Okay. A roll call vote. Speaker 4: District one. I district to a hundred. District two. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 4: District three. Speaker 5: I. Speaker 4: District four. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 4: District five. District six. I District seven. By District eight. Speaker 1: All right. Speaker 4: District nine. Speaker 1: All right. Speaker 4: Motion carries. Speaker 0: Thank you. 13, please.

Contract

Recommendation to authorize City Manager, or designee, to submit a renewal grant application, through the Long Beach Department of Health and Human Services, to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), for the 2020 Continuum of Care for Homeless Assistance Program; and Authorize City Manager, or designee, to execute an agreement, and all necessary documents, subgrants, and any amendments changing the amount of the award or extending the grant term, with HUD to accept and expend grant funding in an estimated amount between $9,000,000 and $11,000,000, for the period of July 1, 2021 through June 30, 2022. (Citywide)

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Speaker 4: Report from Long Beach Airport recommendation to adopt resolution to enter into a contract with some place management to continue construction management services for the Phase two terminal area improvement at the Long Beach Airport in the amount of 3,947,343. District IV. Speaker 0: And again in motion in the second, please. Speaker 6: And actually, Mr. Mayor, this is one we'd like to give a staff report on. Speaker 0: Let's find a motion in a second, please. Still need emotion. Okay. Thank you. Mention this over to Mr. Modica. Speaker 6: Thank you very much, Mr. Mayor. So we would like to have a report on where we are with our terminal project improvement project and the Phase two. The staff has put a lot of work into reviewing that project and bringing you a recommendation on how to continue certain aspects of it during this COVID crisis. So I will turn it over to Cynthia Guidry and her team to walk through a quick PowerPoint presentation. Speaker 2: Good evening, honorable mayor and members of the City Council. I will do a brief staff report on this item along with Stefan Lum. He is our Phase two program manager. So hopefully it's cued up. Before you just start out, I'll give you a brief status update on Long Beach Airport. I felt it was necessary to just provide a little bit of a landscape of where we are as the backdrop of where we are for the Phase two terminal air improvement program. So as you know, due to the coronavirus pandemic travel and the travel restrictions that we have, the industry is really feeling a tremendous impact to to all the airports as well as to the airlines at Long Beach Airport. We have an over 95% decline in passenger travel. And although we have been really pressing hard to increase our safety protocols, social distancing protocols per the Long Beach Health order, it is definitely a different experience at the airport as you come in and out of the facilities. Can you. Thank you. We have been working very closely with the airline community to really look at the the impacts to to the airport as well as the surrounding businesses. We anticipate at this point a very slow recovery period, and that's very common among the industry. But specifically at Long Beach Airport, our revenue decreases have really been been hit from all sources. We we've estimated it roughly until the end of this fiscal year, 10 to 20 million and revenue impact to the airport. And that's really related to the decline in the number of passengers coming in and out of the airport, as well as all the different services that they would use, such as renting a car or the concessions, those type of things. Right now, the airport is spending a tremendous amount of our reserve cash. We were in a very good financial position pre-COVID. But, you know, if you save money for rainy days and it's pouring right now, and so we are looking at our operational expenses and reducing as much as where we can. And as you know, we were very fortunate to receive 18.4 million due to the CARES Act fund that the federal government expended out to the airport and various industries last month. However, that that amount is really going to only cover us for the next roughly 6 to 7 months. So with that, I have step in line and I want to turn it over to him to really talk about specifically the phase two program where we are and the answer item that we have before you. Thank you. Speaker 3: Thank you, Cynthia. Honorable Mayor and city council members. I'd like to, uh, give you a little briefing on the Phase two program adjustments that we've been working on since since the COVID 19 impacts to our revenue. What you're looking at here is what we call scenario five. We've been evaluating and refining multiple scenarios to primarily focus on two two main items, manage and mitigate the airport's cash expenditure and position the program in the best position possible for a flexible future flexibility and for future success. Some of the primary items you're seeing right here is, uh, we're going to be continuing with the Seabus project, and that's due to be because it's primarily TSA grant funded. And we are going to continue the ticket in Berlin ticketing facility to a logical, hard stop, basically slab on grade. These impacts are going to have a 6 to 12 month program. Overall program schedule impact. And it could be longer or shorter depending on future economic conditions. I do we do note that we're delaying our baggage claim project about 17 months due to the fact that we do have existing baggage claim facilities and that is a project we can defer to manage our cost expenditures. We do want to note that there are exit ramps that are included in the contract that are available and there are certain decision points that will have to be coming up. The first one being in the first quarter of 2021. And that decision point really is, is the airport in a position to move forward and and restart ticketing after you see it? We take a we take a slight pause after a quarter for 2020. Answer advisory on doing business as simple as management will continue to provide construction management services for the service and ticketing facility. As we move forward and as we move forward, will evaluate the Phase two program needs at that time. So today's actions in next steps. Our recommendation for Council is for the approval of the answer advisory contract for the Phase two Construction Management Services. Our next steps for the airport is to collaborate with Switzerland builders that the design builder on this contract and all their subcontractors on any schedule changes. And these the three sequencing. We will continue to monitor the economic conditions and our revenue scene. If flights return within 6 to 12 months and will inform council if any exit ramps need to be implemented, and then the final next step is to basically execute the airport's capital program that provides the best flexibility and remains viable and puts the best puts the airport in the best position for success. Speaker 1: Thank you. Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you very much. I'm going to. I know we had another person in motion. I know it's in the airports in five. So if we don't if there's any objection, all that country motion after the the motion or the motion. Mr.. Any objection and customers in Dallas will will second that our customer mango. See proposed. Speaker 5: Changes. Can you hear me now? Speaker 0: Yes. Speaker 5: I appreciate the airport for bringing this forward. I met with both Tom and the airport earlier in the week, and I'm supportive of the decision. We do need to be cautious as we move forward, and I appreciate the cautious steps we're taking, and I hope the council will support it. Speaker 0: Right. Thank you. And councilman's in the house. Speaker 2: I just wanted to say congratulations, Cynthia, on this great project. I know that there's been a lot of bad news happening, and it's so nice to have something refreshing like. Like a project like this. I know you've been working on it for a very long time, but, you know, just seeing that it's moving forward is it's really exciting to me. So congratulations and look forward to supporting this. Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilmember Richardson. Speaker 1: Thank you. And I support the plan. Speaker 0: Thank you. And with that, we'll take a vote. Roll call, please. Speaker 4: District one. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 4: District two. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 4: District three. I district for. Speaker 1: My. Speaker 4: District five. Speaker 5: I. Speaker 4: District six. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 4: District seven. By District eight. District nine. Speaker 1: All right. Speaker 4: Ocean carries. Speaker 0: Thank you. Now we're going on to the next item, which is actually what I'm going to do that I'm actually going to go back to. I'm 16. That actually requires a second vote, which we didn't take. So let me go back to 16. And Adam, you've got the second vote on that item. Speaker 4: Second vote for item 16, district one. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 4: District to. Oh, I'm sorry. We need a motion. A seconder. Speaker 0: Waiting for that. I get the motion. The second speaker. All part of the initial motion here like this. The motion by Richardson second by Sunday has a roll call vote. Speaker 4: District one. District two. I'm District three. First District four. I District five. District six. Speaker 1: II. Speaker 4: District seven. Speaker 1: Five. Speaker 4: District eight. District nine. Speaker 1: All right. Speaker 4: Motion carries. Speaker 0: Thank you. Item 14. Speaker 4: A report from Parks, Recreation and Marine. Recommendation to award a contract to Park Wood Landscape Maintenance to provide landscaping services for Queensway Bay for a total annual contract amount. Not to exceed 756,572 for a period of three years and amend interim units contract with green tech landscape to increase the contract amount by 160,947.

Resolution

Recommendation to adopt resolution authorizing City Manager, or designee, to execute all documents necessary to enter into a contract, including any necessary amendments, with Anser Advisory, LLC, dba Simplus Management, LLC, of Cypress, CA, to continue construction management services for the Phase II Terminal Area Improvements at the Long Beach Airport, in the amount of $3,947,343, for a period of three years, with option to renew for two additional one-year periods, at the discretion of the City Manager; and Increase appropriations in the Airport Fund Group in the Airport Department by $3,947,343, offset by funds available. (District 5)

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Speaker 4: A report from Parks, Recreation and Marine. Recommendation to award a contract to Park Wood Landscape Maintenance to provide landscaping services for Queensway Bay for a total annual contract amount. Not to exceed 756,572 for a period of three years and amend interim units contract with green tech landscape to increase the contract amount by 160,947. District to. Speaker 0: There's emotion motion. Can I get a second? And the second. Just go ahead and do a roll call vote. Actually Customs and Excise. Did you have any comments? Speaker 2: No comment. Pearce No comment. Speaker 0: Thinks so. Richardson Oh, okay. We'll cover. Speaker 4: District one. I district to. I. District three. I district for. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 4: District five. Speaker 5: Hi. Speaker 4: District six. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 4: District seven. I District eight. District nine. Speaker 1: All right. Speaker 4: Motion carries. Speaker 0: Right. Thank you. Motion carries an item. Speaker 4: Item 15 Report from Public Works. Recommendation to Award a contract to Harry H. Joe Construction for the North Health Facility Tenant Improvement Project for a total contract amount not to exceed 2,563,666. District nine.

Contract

Recommendation to adopt Specifications No. RFP PR19-122 and award a contract to Parkwood Landscape Maintenance, Inc., of Van Nuys, CA, to provide landscaping services for Queensway Bay, in an annual amount of $657,889, with a 15 percent contingency in the amount of $98,683, for a total annual contract amount not to exceed $756,572, for a period of three years, with two one-year extension options, and a subsequent three-year term with two one-year extension options, at the discretion of the City Manager; and, authorize City Manager, or designee, to execute all documents necessary to enter into the contract, including any necessary amendments; and Authorize City Manager, or designee, to execute all necessary documents to amend interim Munis Contract No. 32000595 with Greentech Landscape, Inc., of Whittier, CA, to continue providing grounds and landscape maintenance services for Queensway Bay, to increase the contract amount by $160,947, for a revised total amount not to exceed $260,947, for the current term of the contract to July 30, 2020. (District 2)

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Speaker 4: Item 15 Report from Public Works. Recommendation to Award a contract to Harry H. Joe Construction for the North Health Facility Tenant Improvement Project for a total contract amount not to exceed 2,563,666. District nine. Speaker 0: Right. There's emotion. Can I get a second, please? Speaker 1: Mr. Myers, I'd like just a quick, brief stack of boards or project. Speaker 0: Dirk was going to get started. Report, please. Speaker 6: Great. Craig Beck, director of Public Works. Speaker 0: Yes. I think you may remember city council. This is an. Speaker 1: Important. Speaker 0: Project that we have before you this evening. It's for the North Health Facility. It's necessary to do a number of improvements that will improve both the efficiency from an energy perspective and also from an operational perspective. As you may know, we've been working up there in the Halton Park community area, completing a brand new community center and doing retrofit of the old. Speaker 1: Auditorium and building. Speaker 0: And completing. This will continue to provide needed services in the north Long Beach area. We have a very competitive bid. It's about $500,000 under the engineer's estimate. So we believe that we're in a good competitive marketplace right now, and we recommend your approval to. Speaker 1: Move this project forward. That concludes my report. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'd like to just add a comment. Speaker 0: Yeah. Go ahead. Speaker 1: Okay, thanks. So I'm proud of this project. It did it. This facility was a center for families and youth, and it actually had to close down and move out all the all the staff because it was in such poor shape. It used to be a site of an old development center as well. And so now that we've identified these grants and we're able to move forward, it allows us to bring a clinic in North Long Beach at the Highland Park site, a workforce base and more community meeting space. That Highland Park that really changes the function of out in part from just a focus for seniors and teens, but now a resource for the whole family. Resources, health resources, clothes and family. So it's a really important project. And I want to thank Craig back in the Health Department for what they've done to be able to creatively get this done with with really no impact to our general fund. But. Speaker 0: Thank you customers. And they have sent comments. Speaker 2: Good job. Speaker 0: No comments of the council member. Your anger. That's very ringa. Okay. Roll call. Speaker 4: Can we get the mover and seconder for item 15, mayor? Speaker 0: It was Richardson and the rest. Speaker 4: Thank you. District one. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 4: District two, i. District three. I district for. Speaker 1: I. Speaker 4: District five. Speaker 5: Hi. Speaker 4: District six. By District seven. District eight, District nine. I motion carries. Speaker 0: Great. Thank you. With that, we are going to go ahead and go into new business. So as we as we conclude, I want to start by closing the meeting in honor of someone that meant that many of us knew.

Contract

Recommendation to adopt Plans and Specifications No. R-7156 for the North Health Facility Tenant Improvement Project and award a contract to Harry H. Joh Construction, Inc., of Paramount, CA, in the amount of $2,330,605, with a 10 percent contingency in the amount of $233,061, for a total contract amount not to exceed $2,563,666; and, authorize City Manager, or designee, to execute all documents necessary to enter into the contract, including any necessary amendments. (District 9)

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Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you very much. That concludes the consent calendar. We do have one hearing, so I didn't 23 and so we'll go ahead and hear that item, please. Speaker 1: Report from financial management. Recommendation to receive supporting documentation into the record. Conclude the public hearing and adopt resolution amending the master fee and charges schedule citywide. Speaker 0: Thank you. I can turn this over now to staff. Speaker 5: We will have a short report from the finance department. He's making his way up to the microphone. Okay. Mr. John GROSS. Thank you. Good evening, Mayor and members of Council. This is a request to amend the FY 20 master fees and charges schedule for the midyear adjustments. It's really very minor this year for departments that proposed a total of two fee changes and 25 fee deletions. We are keeping the changes to a minimum at this time. Examples of fee changes include a decrease and the Department of Motor Vehicles collection charge from $4 to $3 to align with rates. And we're also eliminating a fee, for example, for criminal background and facility investigations for towing operations. And these duties are now performed at the employer's cost by the police department and California Highway Patrol. We're also eliminating parking fees for lots that are no longer owned and operated by the city. And that's because my report available for any questions. Speaker 0: Thank you. I don't see anyone. Keep it for questions. Can I get a can I get a motion to approve the hearing, please? Okay. Councilor Murang'a, can I get a second? And comes from Councilwoman Price. Seconds in motion. Thank you. I don't necessarily think that you have any any comments. Speaker 3: No, just. But I. Of you know, I used to work at a polling operation, used to be the superintendent of polling operations. What is that? Oh. You see a little red understanding. Speaker 5: For towing operators to be licensed towing operators. We in the police department use used to do background checks that's now being done by the California Highway Patrol. So we no. Speaker 3: Longer have a fee. Heston. Thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you. And Councilman Price. Speaker 2: I have no comments. Thank you. Speaker 0: Again. Councilmember Pearce, I think you just were queuing up to motion, is that right? Speaker 4: Thanks. Okay. Speaker 0: Right. Let's do a roll call vote and I'm quick. Speaker 1: District one. District two. I District three. District three, high district four. Speaker 0: I. Speaker 1: District five. Speaker 4: I. Speaker 1: District six. District seven. By District eight. District nine. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 1: Motion carries. Speaker 0: Thank you. That concludes the hearing. We're going to go ahead and transition now to item 25/1, which is our COVID report worked. And I'm going to give staff an opportunity to get set up here just a few just a minute.

Resolution

Recommendation to receive supporting documentation into the record, conclude the public hearing, and adopt resolution amending the Master Fee and Charges Schedule. (Citywide)

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Speaker 0: Thank you. That concludes the hearing. We're going to go ahead and transition now to item 25/1, which is our COVID report worked. And I'm going to give staff an opportunity to get set up here just a few just a minute. And as they do that, before we begin, just note for the council that this is a very large presentation. It's one of the longer presentations that staff probably has made to the the council in a while and has a lot of important information. So I'm going to let staff just give them a minute. I know they're getting set up and then we'll start this in just 30 seconds. So and I'll and I'll open it up and then I'll pass it along over to Mr. Modica. And then I want to make sure council that you can see the, the summary on your screens so you have the report in front of you. So thank you. Text message. Okay. I think the team is ready for the presentation. So I'm going to do some opening remarks and we'll go right into this into this report and an opportunity, I think, for a lot of questions and comments and input from from the council. I want to just begin by just noting that we are in a certainly this city's largest health crisis that we have seen in decades and likely our largest economic challenge as a city since the Great Depression. Long Beach has always been a city that has led that has had a great team of employees and and and really in managers and community. And so this is certainly testing that in in the weeks that have gone past and in the weeks ahead of us. I want to thank our incredible, incredible team for their amazing work on this. They have been amazing to watch. And as we know, first and foremost, this is a health crisis. And the men and women at the Long Beach Health Department, along with their partners in in the fire service at the police department and across the city, have been really great to see how this effort has really been a city led effort, but really one that's been in partnership with the entire medical community or hospitals of the work that's happening in. And the retailers are providing access to food. And of course, our partnerships that we have with the County of Los Angeles and and the CDC at the federal level. And so it's really been an entire group of folks that have worked on this as a as a city and as a community. One thing that I've been proud of is that our effort has really been around health and around ensuring that we listen to experts and that we're being guided by the science and by the data. We've forged partnerships because we're listening to what to our internal experts, and that includes the team at the Health Department, but especially Dr. Davis and her team of just these specialists and others. And we have the city through our through our management team is not rush a process, but really gone through the process in a way that I think has been great to see, which has been focused on looking at data. And we're going to see a lot of data tonight. This council has also worked really hard to encourage input from the community because we know at the end of the day we want to have a lot of input and a lot of information. And so you have seen and you're going to hear tonight about the the economic recovery group that Mayor Foster has been involved with. You're going to hear about a survey that has that has over 15,000 responses from the community. You're also going to hear about all the things that are being discussed. We had our economic development committee, of which three of our members are a part of. They had a great committee meeting. I'm bringing in experts and talking about how we grow the economy. And many of the council offices have also hosted their own roundtables and conversations with businesses and surveys, with businesses to hear from them, which I know I'm sure we'll hear about from council members tonight as well. And so all of that information, everything we're hearing, all of that data really informs the work of the Lombard Health Department and the city. And but we know that at the end of the day, the calls that are being made and the final decision decisions must rest with the health experts and the medical advice. I think that is what's guiding us as we move forward and as we reopen our community. We strongly believe that's what should center us. We know that. And I think it's important to remember that our safer at home order and health order is through currently through May 15th. Of course, we're going to hear tonight that the governor has placed reopening plans and that some some municipalities and some counties will begin moving at their own pace. And certainly that's going to begin to happen. And we're going to hear tonight, I think, from our team about looking at what the data actually speaks to and which is very impressive. But it's still chair shows the challenges we have ahead of us. And so I want to thank Mr. Modica for your leadership. And we look forward to this presentation that you're about to give with the team. And so with that, I'll turn this over to our city manager, Tom. Speaker 5: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I think that was a very well put introduction. Like you, I'm just constantly impressed with the team that comes to work every single day to help keep the community safe. Their efforts have been unbelievably impressive and also very, very proud of our community as well. We'll talk a little bit about what has happened over the last couple weeks and months. It has been really impressive to see the Long Beach community come out in force and by and large really do the right thing in order to help keep COVID 19 from spreading. And the results really are palpable. And we're going to see that today. And we're definitely headed in the right direction. We still have a ways to go, but things are looking good, and we're going to show that to you with data. So it is going to be a long presentation, as the mayor said. We're actually doing something we I don't recall us ever doing, which is we had so many things to tell you and so many slides. We actually created a slide appendix because there wasn't enough room to put it in this slide show presentation and still be somewhat concise. So we have additional detail. We thought those were important things the council can see and those are attached as well. But the overview we're going to be going over are really cover the following things. We'd like to talk to you a little bit about our emergency operations and how they work and how we're set up and how we are delivering and accomplishing all the things that you're going to see. We're going to have a review of our COVID 19 data. So we have a data team that does nothing but really look and parse out data, and you're going to see the results of that work. You're going to talk a little bit about the governance framework and then also line up how Long Beach data compares to the various framework components that he has laid out. We're going to talk about the community input that we received. And so the council has that. We're going to go through some of the financials. We're going to talk about next steps. And really, today is a chance for us to hear additional input from the city council. The city council has been very involved. I talk to them regularly all the time. It seems about every single day of answering questions, getting input and getting feedback, but we have not had a chance to do that as a body. And so today also we we know you are hearing things from your constituents that you want to be able to make sure are being considered. And so that is what part of today is as well to give guidance and thoughts to the EOC, to our health officer, to city management as we navigate this together. So I'll talk a little bit about the timeline. So it would take several screens to be able to show all the things that have happened. But these kind of eight points talk about the major parts that have happened. So we declared our local health emergency. We were one of the earlier ones to do that on March 4th, and then we had our first three positive cases on March nine. So we actually had a whole week to plan before we got our first positive cases. On March 10th, the Council took the action to ratify the emergency declaration, and then March 14th is when we first saw what we called community spread, where it was no longer travel based, but it was spreading in the community . On the 18th, the Council took some very bold action on approving 25 different ways to or it was a request to really look at our resiliency program and it was 25 different items. And then the city instituted our Safer at home order on March 19th. We had our first fatality on March 23rd. And that brings us to today, where we put in a number of things to safeguard the community and to respond. We are in what's called an emergency management structure or the incident command structure. It is a federally NASH or a federally recognized system on how to deal with emergencies. And under the charter there is a position called the Director of Emergency Services. It actually is the city manager, and below the city manager is the team that does all the work. That is our emergency operations center. We are stood up at a level two and they have been working around the clock. The emergency operations center is guided by what we call our agency administrators, and those are really your major department directors and executive management who are providing some of that guidance on a daily basis as we implement the emergency actions. And you hear a lot about a GIC, a joint information center, and that really works for the EOC and is what provides all of the information to the community in the media. And they work seven days a week every single day. We have had a maximum 102 city employees actually assigned to the EOC. Our response to the emergency is actually several thousand employees who are all working either at home or in their assignments. But actually at the EOC, it's 102 covering 40 job classifications and covering 16 different departments. And the amount of resources departments have volunteered to stop doing what they were doing. To go help out has been really impressive. Some of the accomplishments, these are actually broken into the sections that we have set up our emergency structure and there's a logistics section, planning operation and finance. And so we've distributed 1.5 million PPE. We've given out 31,000 N95 masks, 16,000 gowns, 9000 cloth and sewn masks, 860 deliveries across the city. In our planning area, they've developed a really robust hospital bed availability dashboard that allows us to really monitor how our hospitals are doing. We analyze every day what our workforce is doing and whether we need to pull them from one area to reassign them to the emergency. In another area, we created a data group with digital dashboards and data summaries and predictive analysis. We have our operations section has stood up seven testing sites over the past couple of weeks. We are now testing 1000 people a day and you're going to hear that later today. Why that's so important. We've managed four shelter sites. We have a number of different contingency plans, all in operation and development. And we have done multiple food distribution sites. We have a whole section set up on finance to make sure that we can get reimbursement. And we actually have received $3.6 million in FEMA reimbursements to date. That team really makes sure that every dollar is accounted for every hour and all the paperwork is in place to be able to get that 75% FEMA reimbursement. And so one of the things that we have all realized during this time is just how unique we are as a city where just about every other city in the state of California at this point really is relying on their health to partner on the county health department to make those health decisions and doesn't have the same sort of resources that Long Beach does. We are one of only three operated, city operated local health jurisdictions in California. Our health department is actually quite large. We have 340 staff in the health department. They do over 40 programs in nine sites throughout the country or city. And we provide on a yearly basis our public health services that 350,000 people a year. So what do they do? They implement local health orders. We have a doctor on staff, Dr. Anissa Davis, who is our local health official. We have a lot of this is informed by our federal, state, county and local effort experts. We look at data, we look at case investigations, and we do things called contact tracing that you hear about tonight. We are a leading supporter of our skilled nursing facilities. They are under state regulation, but they are supported by our health department and we help them and provide PPE and testing for the residents in the staff. We actually have our own warehouse where we do distribution of PPE and supplies for Long Beach medical institutions. We have a rapid assessment clinic providing free health care. We have mobile hospitals that we have actually distributed to three of our local hospitals. We now have COVID 19 drive up testing centers with walk up access a thousand tests a day. We have our own public health lab that allows for 24 hour turnaround results, the fastest results anywhere. And we're testing symptomatic first responders as well as nuns, as well as medical providers and long term care staff. We have done pop up homeless shelters and project roomkey housing and isolation sites. We support older adult information lines and support systems and education of our businesses. And we're also creating business recovery playbooks and and working on things like hospitality recovery. And of course, we also look at some of our disadvantaged populations and we really use an equity lens, and we'll talk about that later today. We have a joint information center, which is really the public information arm of our EOC. And so they're responsible for the media relations, the press conferences, releases, advisories. There is something going out every single day, even on Saturday and Sunday, three press conferences a week that the mayor and Dr. Davis do. And those are very well seen. I believe the latest one had I believe the number was 45,000 views, which is which is very robust. Engagement. These are not impressions. I want to make the distinction. These are actually engagements. We've had 751,000 people engage on Facebook. So not just view, but actually make a comment, make a share. That's an incredible amount of activity that's happening, 188,000 on Twitter and 63,000 on Instagram. And Instagram has really exploded in terms of our following. We also have been tracking website and we'd encourage everyone to go to Long Beach Dot Gov, COVID 19 and it's working. We've had 750,000 page views and 608,000 of those are unique. And so we find and we track where people are going so that we know exactly what type of information they're looking for. And that helps us customize our response. We have set up call centers, a seven day a week call centers, our 570 info line and 5704 biz line. And so 200 or 2800 calls into our info line and 681 calls into our business line. What do people ask us about exposure? And testing is by far the biggest at 78%. They ask about our city services, businesses, employment, and they want to know things about what are happening at our parks or beaches. How do I get help? How do I access resources? How do I get masks? All of those things are answered by our city staff seven days a week. We also do it in multiple languages in English, Spanish, Canadian, Tagalog. We translate documents so that press releases are translated into those, into those languages and sent out. We have staff that actually answer the phone and and call in, can call you back. We have multilingual website pages. We have multilingual trends, location staff that are dedicated to the GIC. And we have a lot of community partnerships with our African American community, Cambodian and our Latino leaders. We also realize that we need to be looking at some of this response through an equity lens. And that's something that the council, as has indicated, is important to them. And so while everyone is impacted by COVID 19, we know that individuals who are already disadvantaged and underserved are affected and even higher proportions. And so, you know, COVID 19 is a burden on everybody, but it comes on top of some of those existing racial, economic, health, education and gender inequalities. And so that actually multiplies that disadvantage. And so we presented the equity toolkit to the EEOC and really done some training. The Office of Equity is embedded into the EEOC structure, and that was something that the Council wanted us to follow up on. And so I want to turn it over now to Kelli Colby, who's going to really walk us through the data and talk to us about, you know, what is it that we're monitoring and seeing out there? And then also, how does that line up with the governor? And then you're going to hear from John Keisler to talk a little bit about the community input. So with this, I will turn it over to Kelli Collopy, our director of Health and Human Services. Speaker 6: Good evening, honorable mayor and council members. So we're going to take some time to walk you through the data that we've been tracking very closely throughout throughout this pandemic. So the first slide, this is our most up to date slide in terms of number of confirmed cases. We have 789 confirmed cases, 48 people currently hospitalized, 38 deaths, and 494 folks who have recovered. Of those who are positive cases, 53% are female, 47% are male. 15% are under the age of 30. And then sort of for all the other age groups, it's sort of a range between 16 and 18%. So really, the the positives, the positive cases are pretty evenly distributed across all of our community when it comes to age groups. You can see when you look at the zip code maps, 90803 and 90807. Those are the locations that tend to have the greatest number of long term care facilities. And we do have increased populations in some of those long term care facilities. So that is demonstrated through these maps. Our citywide case per 100,000 is 160. When you look at the when you look at our trends in positive cases and our deaths, what you'll see is that we continue to track below L.A. County for both the positive cases and for our deaths per 100,000 population. So we are higher than the state of California, but below both. The city of Los Angeles and the county of Los Angeles for our cases and need to be quite a bit below Los Angeles County in our deaths per 100,000. Now, when you look at the total hospitalizations, we started at a much deeper curve in terms of our deaths per hundred thousand. But we've started to flatten while L.A. County is increasing. The slide, you'll see we sort of passed out the difference between our community. The COVID positives within our community compared to long term care facilities. So the way this works is, is that we report on a specific date, the number of cases that we get in. But those cases may reflect testing up to five days prior. And so what happens through here is that we go back and redistribute these to the days when they actually had the test or when their symptoms occurred, whichever the date are that we have. And so you'll see that in terms of our positive cases for long term care facilities, none showed up through through the last three days , no new cases but the that they were distributed prior to that. And when you look at those in the community, we had very low numbers so far reported in the community. When we look at the community versus long term, long term care facilities, what you'll see is that for the among those that are positive cases, you'll see that 72% of those folks are in the community and 24% are in long term care facilities and 4% are in other, which is sort of Borden cares and other institutional settings are group homes for hospitalization. You'll see that 63% of those who are being hospitalized come from community, 32% from our long term care facilities, and about four and a half percent in our other board, in cares and in long term care. Sorry, Borden cares. And then among deaths, you'll find that 81% of our deaths are from long term care facilities and 19% are from the community. So you'll see that our long term care facilities are are overrepresented in a significant amount in the in the deaths from COVID. The slide here. So for those who are positive in the community, 20% have been hospitalized. For those who are positive in long term care facilities, 32% have been hospitalized. And for those who are positive in the other group homes, 33% have been hospitalized. When we look at the deaths of those who are positive in the community, 1% of them have died in long term care facilities. For those who are positive for COVID, 6% have passed away. And no, there have been no deaths in Born Cares and other group facilities and group homes. We're also breaking out our data by race, ethnicity. And what you'll see is that we see African-American and Pacific Islanders are overrepresented in the total number of in the total number of cases. And I'm sorry, that says percentage hospitalizations, but it's actually the number of cases. And you'll also see that the same as within within hospitalizations. When we start to look at our deaths, you'll see that African-American whites are also overrepresented in the number of deaths, and partially because what we find is that for African-Americans, they're more susceptible to the underlying health conditions such as lung disease, heart disease and diabetes, which most are most impacted by COVID. For our white population, our white population, or among older adults in the long term are more overrepresented in our long term care facilities. And so that is where you're seeing the information, the overrepresentation for deaths among the white population in the city. This is a trend line. And so what you'll see here, this is the number of cases within the city they are based on when it was an episode date, so not when the tests were reported to us. The orange line is a seven day moving average and this is what the state is looking at and others to determine whether your case rate is in decline. And so what you'll see there is that orange line shows that we are since sort of the middle of April, we have been in an overall decline moving forward in the cases. When we look at this, we look at the transmission rate. So anything over a one means that your cases are growing and anything under one means that your cases are declining. So you hear often about the doubling rate and how many days is the doubling rate, or given that we are no longer above one as this thing where we are in a decline and there is no doubling rate. So you'll see that in mid-March. So March 19th was was when we put in the safer at home orders. And you'll see from there the numbers started to decline and have been declining essentially since that time. So that is the number that we'd like to see. So those are the data. And I'd like to go into the governors services key strategies to reopen. The governor has six key indicators focusing on the ability to protect our communities through testing, contact tracing and isolating for those who are positive or exposed the ability to prevent infection and people who are at risk for severe COVID 19. The ability of hospitals and search and health systems to handle the surges. The ability to develop therapeutics. To meet the demand that is held. And that is not something that we are doing within the city. Will leave that to our federal to our federal partners and private labs. So that is that's an area that we're not tracking on. Number five is the ability for businesses, schools and childcare facilities to support physical distancing. And number six is the ability to determine when to reinstate certain measures. So if, for instance, we start to see large increases as we start to loosen orders, what measures would we look at to start to tighten back down again? You also laid out a roadmap which has stages. So right now we are in the current stage of stage one, which is a place of safety and preparedness. And so that is the safer at home order. And during this time, they're sort of calling it stage one. A is all the preparation that it takes to begin to move to stage two, stage two, as lower risk workplaces gradually opening up with adaptations. The governor, as you heard, discussed the sort of the opening of retail with drive up. That is sort of what they're calling the soft opening of stage two. There are a lot more areas of stage two to be focusing on, but that would be the starting point. Stage three is your higher risk workplaces. That would also be open with adaptation, and stage four is the end of the stay as the statewide stay at home order. And that is something that would not really come into play until we have a vaccine or other sort of medications that can treat and treat COVID. And it is something that they see as something much further out. So our progress on the indicators, first of all, our ability to monitor and protect our communities through the testing, contact tracing and isolating. What you'll see here is our trend, our growth trend and the ability to test. So we started out with our public health lab with ten tests in early you know, in early March. And since that time, we now have the capacity to test nearly 1000 people per day through all of our drive up sites. So we do have we have a small site at the health department that is prioritized for health care workers, first responders and long term care facility staff to make sure we get the quickest turnaround possible to ensure they don't go back to work. And then we've got these sites that the Long Beach City College, the PCC campus, the real high school, Jordan High School, St Mary's, the New Jordan Plus site, and the new Long Beach City College Veterans Stadium. So once again, we can test up to a thousand per day to date through those drive ups. We've tested 7263 people. And then if you include all of our hospitals and private labs, we've tested over 12,500 folks. So it's a it's we've actually tested more than 13,000, but we're pulling out those who are not from Long Beach. So it's the 12,500 numbers, those that are from from the city of Long Beach. When you look at our contact tracing capacity, it really is crucial that you have contact tracing to slow the chain of transmission. So those staff work with COVID 19 patients to identify their contacts during the timeframe when they're infectious. And then they work very closely to contact all those folks and work with them to quarantine. They call every day now to determine whether people have symptoms and follow up. And if people are in quarantine and don't have capacity for food or access to resources, then we support by we support in any way we can to help people continue to quarantine and to isolate. And they estimate that you need somewhere between two times and three times the number of new cases each day for contact tracing capacity. So if we had 40 new cases in one day, we would need a capacity of 80 to 120 people to respond. And so we have developed a surge plan. We are working very closely with the EOC and deploying our city staff as disaster services workers to be able to participate and support the contact tracing capacity as we can't open the city any broader until this is in place. We're also looking at potential state resources. It's just being brought up within the last couple of days that they may be able to supply some resources and we'll be working with them to see what shows up. The state is also providing a contact tracing app to all jurisdictions throughout the state. They plan to pilot in early May, which is right now we're waiting for the pilot to roll out and then are hoping for full implementation by either late May or early June. In terms of quarantine and isolation capacity. Generally, we people quarantine and isolate safely at home. But there are people who don't have a place to live, people who are experiencing homelessness or those who live in locations that are overcrowded and it's not safe for them to quarantine or not possible for them to quarantine or isolate at home. We have 124 bed site through Project Roomkey that can be utilized for both people who are experiencing homelessness or for those who cannot safely quarantine at home. We are in ongoing negotiations with additional motels to make sure that we have just to ensure that if we need surge capacity, will we be able to turn those on? And there is a the state has an agreement with a local hotel to support first responder responders and medical staff who can't isolate safely at home. So the next indicator is the ability to prevent infection in people who are at risk for more severe COVID 19. The first is looking for people who are experiencing homelessness. So we currently we currently have about 1200 people who are unsheltered. And our last point in time count that that do not have places that do not have shelter. And so what we have been able to do so far as the city, we were awarded $1.1 million from the state. And those dollars are being utilized to leverage the project roomkey access and other sheltering capacities as a as a match for FEMA. We opened on our first shelter. In addition to the winter shelter was the Silverado Shelter. The winter shelter then moved from the old to the old North Library. We opened King Park, then our first project, our project Roomkey. That first project, Roomkey, is approximately 135 beds and it is currently filled to 120 beds. That space is very specific to people, to people who are older, older adults, and those who are have underlying health conditions that make them more susceptible to more severe COVID. We also have the isolation and quarantine site that I shared earlier. As of last night, we had 71% of our total total occupancy for all the beds. So our maximum capacity right now is 294 and our occupancy last night was 208. Older adults are also a focus. We have 51,000 over 51,500 people over 60 over the age of 65 in Long Beach. 18% of those folks live in poverty. 52% live alone. So we've been asking people to stay at home and to self-quarantine. And there's a lot of needs of support. The Healthy Aging Center continues to provide our Senior Link's case management to older adults who have multiple health issues and social needs. We go out and we do a home visits and other things working to really provide the services they need. The Healthy Aging Program manager is also working really closely with the non-medical senior residential facilities. So we have a lot of senior living apartments in the city of our Mitch and our program managers working very closely with them to answer questions, provide guidance and support, support safety and health in those facilities. And then we're also that program manager is also the liaison between the senior residential managers and the Our Communicable Disease Program, so that they have so we can really provide the building, manage their direct contact for their questions. Our EOC is working closely with nonprofit organizations who are engaged in food distribution. Now. We implemented an older adult resource resource line for those who are self-quarantining, so that if they need supports with food or medication or other things, we can help link them to the various services. Our long term care facility cases. We currently have 236 cases in our total in our long term care facilities and 31 deaths. The long term care facility cases are 30% of our total cases across the city. So far we've had 19 facilities total. We've had at least one case. Eight of those have not had any additional cases in the last 14 days. So we see that as an area of no transmission. So at this time, we have 11 facilities that have one or more cases. When we compare our sort of long term, long term care facility to Pasadena and the county, where you'll notice is that our case rate for positives is low per 100,000 is lower than both the county or Pasadena. Pasadena is having a lot of issues within their long term care facilities. The state of California, there is a much lower rate. When we look at our death rate. We're similar to L.A. County overall and far below Pasadena. Moving forward. So with our long term care facilities, we do outreach and education regarding all the protocols for safety. We have spent a lot of time over a number of years working closely with our long term care facilities to ensure that they are safe. We have re over 93 long term care facilities in the city. And so we just want people to understand that, you know, you're seeing different you're seeing different and skilled nursing facilities in others with cases. But as a proportion of the overall long term care facilities in the city, it's really, you know, approximately 20% of those facilities. We are testing all staff and residents and sites where there are cases. So we want to make sure that that we're capturing all that we're capturing everybody and that we can effectively quarantine and isolate within those sites. Um, we do, if, if, if there is a facility that has positive cases, we make sure that we sort of, we set aside areas for people who are positive. We set aside area for people who are have been exposed but are not currently positive. And then we set aside area for people who have not been exposed or are not positive staff do not cross the lines between those three. So they are assigned to one location so they cannot carry it from one place to another. We are providing PPE to those long term care facilities when they are low. We're prioritizing lab results of the residents and staff. All those are being run through our our health lab to make sure that the turnaround time is quick. Um, and we, we implemented a health officer order specific to long term care facilities that limits entry, requires face coverings and temperature screenings for those who are entering, as well as a lot of these other protocols. We're also spending time really focusing on more vulnerable populations overall. You know, we've you've heard earlier about the overrepresentation among our African-American population, also among our Pacific Islander population. And so we have a group we have an African-American outreach group that is focusing on there where there will be a city hall or Spanish city hall or. Sorry. Yeah, city hall. That is coming. I'm sorry. Town hall meeting coming up. And then we'll also be meeting with our native Hawaiian and Pacific Islanders on Friday. The key focus for all of these is how do we really get out the message around safety and prevention, the importance of it, and how to do it? How can we increase access to testing and health care for populations that may not have access otherwise? How do we effectively isolate and quarantine? How do we create those spaces to prevent spread? Priority is given to older adults and those with underlying health conditions. And then how do we really start to focus as things turn back on for the economy, for our in our economic recovery? How are we making sure that we have representation and leadership from all these populations with an equity lens to really ensure that that everybody is represented in our economic recovery strategies? We look at our ability of the hospital and health systems to handle surges all of our area. If you add all of our capacity together across all the area hospitals, we have about 1500 patient beds available daily. This does fluctuate based on daily staffing, current needs and projected situations. The bed usage is as average less than 50% of that of those beds. So there is capacity there. And the area hospitals have averaged between 50 and 55 COVID positive patients daily. And then that does not include the VA is not included in those numbers. We have surge capacity of an additional 400 beds on top of that, 1500 at the hospitals, as well as 100 beds at the convention center as an alternative care site. Over there are 225 ventilators available at our Long Beach area hospitals. And they've been averaging about 30% of use in the month of April. We look at our hospitalizations. That civilization reporting rate is similar to that for cases so they the dark bar is sorry the the light bar is when hospitalizations are reported to us. So we will you know, we will say today we have 40 hospitalizations, but we often find out sometimes that people have left already or that there's new hospitalizations and it takes time for the data to capture, to catch up. So the the dark bar actually shows the most accurate and current data moving forward. So we again, we continue to be sharing with you what we hear each day and the most current data for that day. And then also we go back and sort of fill back in where we understand what the data look like to help us for policy making and decisions. Speaker 0: Kelly, this is this is Robert, the mayor. Garcia, just want to just can you go back once like this one, to make sure that we just highlight this for think it's really important? And Kelly, correct me if I get any of this wrong, but I think I think this slide is really, really important for for obviously not just the council but for the community to take a look at. And I know this slide and this data point really guides a lot of the questions on how you kind of transition back into the economy. If you look at the hospitalization rate in Long Beach and you particularly look at the last two weeks, last 20 days or so. It's really I mean, you're going to have you have ups and downs, but it's really generally a flat in flattening of hospitalizations. And I think that particularly the last few days, we obviously hope that trend continues. There's not enough data yet, but we hope that trend continues. And I think that when when you hear the governor often talk about what he and what he views as the amount of time that's appropriate to look at hospitalizations and not see a spike, he typically says that a minimum of 14 days, which you really want to look at. And so I just wanted to provide that context. If I got any of that incorrect. Kelly, let me know. But I think you see here, obviously more than 14 days and you do see a pretty steady R rate that it's going to go up and down on depending on the date. But but fairly steady, is that right? Speaker 6: KELLY Yes, MAYOR, That is true. And we haven't we really haven't had a lot of spikes. We were we were at 61 at one point in earlier, you know, like about a month ago. But, you know, since then we've been right in sort of the mid 50 and high 40 range for some time. So we have been able to we haven't had anything that you see like in New York or other places where it's just overwhelmed the system. We've been in pretty good shape in terms of capacity. Speaker 0: And this is a chart that I know that that I that I really look at often. I think that everyone should be looking at this this this data often because obviously other data points like the positive rate obviously will always continue to go up. And there's certain there's certain charts that are more difficult to to gain valuable insight as to how you're doing within that moment. And I think this really speaks to how we are doing today, but also how we've been doing for the last two, three, four weeks. And so I just want to thank you for the work here. And and I do appreciate the the difference in the hospitalization as reported and the updated number, because I think we know that sometimes there's a lag time. Hospitals might change their data. And so I appreciate that. Not only are you are we reporting what's reported to us on a daily basis, but then as as those numbers change and as hospitals make those changes, you can see those, too. And so I really appreciate that Kelly and your team are doing a great job with that. So I'll turn it back over to you. Speaker 6: Thank you, Mayor. So the next into the next indicators, the ability for businesses, schools and childcare facilities to support physical distancing. We have a lot of different groups working on this, so certainly our health officer, through the emergency health orders, has been focusing on outlining what, you know, what the practices are. Um, through the EOC, we have a resilience and recovery group focused also on early childhood and youth services capacity. And then, you know, we've been in contact with the school system and will be working with them as well. There's a human resources group that is looking at city staff returning to work, an economic recovery advisory group that John will be sharing more about for the really looking at the local economy and business practices there. Our environmental health team is also working on a business playbook for reopening in connection with the advisory group. And the hospitality task force is looking at opportunities there. We are hosting City Council community forums for Community Input and EDI and our committee is looking at economic and financial impact. So there there are a lot of different areas where we're looking at how we, how we ensure the physical distancing and all the different needs to keep people safe when when businesses are opening. The next is the ability to determine when to re-institute certain measures of the stay at home order. This is really an area that we while we've been working on the indicators about when to turn on. We have we're still working on what those indicators look like. So if we start to if we start to see growth in, you know, higher growth in cases or higher growth in hospitalization rates or deaths, like at what point do we say, okay, we need to we need to like we need to tighten back down a little bit. So we do have a team that's getting ready to start working on that moving forward. So then the, um, the State Department of Public Health has been working to identify what measures we need to be looking at to be able to sort of accelerate into phase two. So we've got this opportunity of sort of a soft opening and then they're providing, you know, when the numbers start to look right within different communities, then they're talking about this ability to accelerate into phase two, to open things a little more quickly. They're really focused on some of the rural communities that may have had one case and other places that, you know, that are that are ready to go. But we've been looking at those indicators. And as of this morning, these are the indicators that they're looking at. And the indicators I've been meeting have been moving a little bit. But right now, the the trend is so the trends we have look at in terms of a new case goal would be no more than one case per 1000 people in 14 days. And so we are already at that. We've met we've met that goal. And then the next one is no more than one death in 14 days. We are not at that goal. And so that is something that we'll be working with and really has a lot to do with the long term care facilities. But when you have community spread, even if our deaths are low in that community, many of those those workers who who are in long term care facilities need to be protected. And we need to make sure that we're focusing we continue to focus on our community to make sure that they are safe when they're walking into our long term care care facilities. In terms of the testing goal, it's 1.5 tests per thousand testing capacity. We have far exceeded that goal. The other one there is that you have to be within 30 minutes and urban I'm sorry, 50, 30 minutes within an urban environment to a testing site. And we've certainly got that covered across the city. The containment goal is that you have contact tracing, staff capacity of 2 to 3 times the number of new cases. We are not at that, but we are working on that as I've shared earlier, and that you have sheltering capacity for about 15% of your people experiencing homelessness for the city of Longreach, that's approximately 300 people. We are at 290 something, so we're very close to that. And when the year round shelter opens in June, we will meet that goal. The isolation goal is the ability to quarantine and isolate people within 24 hours of a test result. That relies a whole lot on your contact tracing as well as safe, safe locations for quarantine and isolation. So we're working on building the capacity to be able to quarantine and isolate. We do have the quarantine and isolation site and then the hospital capacity goal is that that you have the physical and workforce capacity to handle a 35% surge based on current numbers. We have those. We have that capacity and that is met. Speaker 0: So Kelly, before, can you go back one slide? Again, this I think it's important. I just want to make sure that the public, particularly business owners that are asking this question, understand this indicator, what you're talking about. Exactly. So you want to add a little a little a little more color to it. So what what the governor has essentially said is that, you know, the state limit orders. Cities cannot go beyond the statewide orders, obviously. I mean, the governor has a baseline and city must follow those. And so a lot of a lot of folks, for example, ask us, you know, can you please open restaurants up tomorrow? Well, we legally can't because the statewide order says that that is later in phase two. And the earliest any of phase two can begin. Of course, we know is is later this week as a as an early point and that only a limited amount of businesses would pick up drive thru manufacturing. The second part of what he has said is exactly what you're talking about. He has said, however, if counties or cities want to accelerate their reopenings and I've heard this question, well, you know, the governor said some place some some locations can maybe go faster than what the governor has said. Is that possible? The answer to that is it is possible. But, A, with all of these indicators and a minimum have to be met. And so I just want to share that because there's been some confusion about us being able to automatically move ahead of the state order. And that is not that is not possible. And you have to, at a minimum, meet all the indicators. And then once indicators are met, you have to submit those to the state for for state partnership and approval to move forward. And so it's a complex process, but I want to make sure that we understand exactly what these indicators are speaking to. They're really speaking to a speeding up of the state mandate. Did I get any of that wrong? Speaker 6: KELLY No, that is correct. So at each local level, people will have to complete complete a plan to indicate how they meet all the different criteria. And they have to attest that they can meet these criteria and post it and then work with all of the businesses to make sure that they can meet the safety protocols and others that we'll be moving forward. So that, you know, really what they're looking at is they're providing an opportunity for areas that have very low cases, particularly in rural areas that have had, you know, only one or two cases to be able to demonstrate that they have met all of these criteria and maybe to be able to move forward more quickly. The urban environments, the story it's going to take longer is the is basically where we're standing right now. Speaker 0: Right. Thank you. Appreciate that. Let's keep going. Speaker 6: Okay with that, I'm going to turn over to John Keisler and he's going to share about reopen language. Speaker 5: Good evening, the mayor and city council. I'm going to talk a little bit about this reopen L.B. survey that was conducted over the past week, which has been an effort, among many other efforts, to collect public input about the reopening process and so on. On April 28th, we actually opened the survey. There was an announcement through a press release and through a number of our different news outlets, as well as social media and many of the city council newsletters. We were able to garner 15,000 responses in just a few days. And so we have a number of different insights to share with you today. But we wanted you to know that the survey just closed yesterday at 5 p.m., and so there will be an effort to dove deeper. That is happening right now in some extensive data sets which require a lot of disaggregation. So in short, 15,258 total survey responses were received and 63% of the survey participants identified as female. Many of them also over 60% identified as workers. We tried to break down the survey so that we could collect information about zip code, about gender and about race, so that we understood more about the priorities of different communities throughout the city of Long Beach. That data, as I mentioned, will be available in the coming days. What was interesting also is that people identified in terms of their age and that we had over 60% of the response coming from people under the age of 49, and that could have been attributed to many different factors. We're trying to understand that better. But in in short, the fact that this was distributed in just a seven day period online meant that people who were responding to the survey had to have Internet access, of course, and that if we had a chance to open the survey for a longer period of time, one of the recommendations that we've seen, first and foremost, is that we would be able to print that and deliver it in hardcopy to every household in the city of Long Beach. The survey was also translated into Spanish, Kulmiye and Tagalog. We are still seeking responses in those additional languages because of the translation occurring about 24 hours after the the initial survey was opened. We are going to keep the survey open for a little bit longer. For Spanish, come on in. Tagalog. And so if you've received recently either a press release or an email that shows that the survey is open for certain languages, that was an intent to to broaden our diversity and include more survey respondents. And so the survey really targeted three different groups workers, residents that may not be employed currently or business owners. And the reason for that is that we wanted to make sure that we asked different questions. For instance, if you are a worker, did you feel do you feel safe in returning to work at this time? Or if you're a business owner, do you feel safe reopening your business and what the city might do to assist you in making you feel more safe? We also included residents who were currently working with a different set of questions because they have obviously a different set of concerns. And so if you received the update from the city manager this afternoon, you can find this survey posted on our website. Now, most of the city council with the summary as well as the list, the full list of questions and the full list of of answers that were provided by these three different groups of workers, business owners and residents who are not currently employed. And so some of the interesting takeaways about the survey response of of the 15,000 plus participants was that outdoor recreation was number one. By far, over 60% of the respondents selected outdoor recreation as the number one activity that they felt could be reopened and not risk in additional transmission so long as certain certain precautions were taken. Beaches, parks, small scale retail and office work followed. Those all had more than 7000 responses in favor. And then from there, there were 23 total options that residents had to choose from public events. Large public gatherings, concerts, movies. And senior centers ranked the very lowest as things that the residents felt were ready for reopening. Something else that I think is that stood out and that's important is that we received a tremendous amount of written comment as well. And so as an example. Of those 15,000 plus responses, over 114,000 different activities were selected and rated. 21,300 plus. Comments were also received through an open ended question, which asked them, What do you feel that you can do or residents can do to to be safe? And what can the city do to help that? And what was interesting about that, and the slide that you're looking at is what's called word meaning. Obviously, there are hundreds of thousands of words in the responses that we received in just these past seven days. And so our data scientist took a crack at just trying to surface the words that were most used. And so on the left, what you're seeing is steps that residents felt that they could take. And in an open ended response, the word that popped up the most was home, stay home and wear masks. And so they felt that as individuals, these were the things that they could do most. You see washing hands. You see other very familiar numbers, like six, six feet perhaps. And then the second one on the right is steps that workers, business owners and residents felt the city could take to create a safe reopening environment. And of course, these are different words because this focuses on city efforts. So the words testing as an example, really jump out at you because that's the role that the residents really felt that the city could take in making them feel more safe. So we're going to do additional mining of this data. We're also going to be diving deeper into zip code based responses. We're going to disaggregate some of of the specific responses about the open ended suggestions that they provided, and we'll be able to publish that data later, just as it is an example, to try and download this much information in a quick time period. We weren't able to then provide it in a format that would be useful or make sense for the public. So that will be posted in the coming days. And then in addition to the the reopen lab survey, we've had actually a number of recent opportunities for input, including our Hospitality Recovery Task Force. We've had economic development and Finance Committee meetings to talk about and give a chance for public input from various business owners and stakeholders in the community. One such group, the Economic Recovery Advisory Group, is an informal advisory group that was actually identified by our city manager in partnership with former Mayor Bob Foster. And the purpose of this group is really to provide ideas and approaches about how we can restart the local economy in the safest way possible. Now, it's important to recognize the committee has been very clear that there's nothing we can do that's ahead of the governor's order or the health orders that are established at the local level by our own health officer and Lisa Davis. But the members that were assembled because they had an expertize in a broad range of activities, industries, sectors, and so we had doctors, we have small business owners, labor representatives, education leaders, among many others who have expertize and experience to really advise the city manager and city staff in what is possible with regard to a safe reopening of many of these different activities. So so over this past weekend. And we were able to distribute this initial report from the advisory group there. The initial report covers some of the major conclusions about what we should start first. And so if you're working at home, you know, one of the recommendations is to stay working at home. You saw that actually come out in the residents response from reopened lab is that that's something we can we can continue to do if you know you know staying home does not get in the way of making money or providing for essential needs. Also, to begin with, sectors are least likely to start a second wave of transmission. I think that popped up pretty strongly in the reopen L.B. survey, providing protective equipment and protocols, and that's for businesses and and event or venue operators. Robust testing was another major recommendation which came out in both reopen L.B. as well as from the Economic Recovery Advisory Group and then making sure that form follows function that every economic sector needs their own unique and specific protocols. It's not a broad brush here. Each size and space and type of activity needs its own protocols to make sure that we're able to comply with the recommendations from the public health officials. And then finally and Kelly just covered a lot of this is the real time data on hospital and ongoing medical infrastructure to both monitor, test , trace and to keep reporting on the trends that that have emerged. And so the the recovery group restart Long Beach recommended four different stages. You'll see that they align with the health officer and the state recommendations and guidelines. And that report is also now available through the city manager's web page for reports to the mayor and city council available to any member of the public to read and follow up with with the with the group. And so in terms of the four stages that are recommended by the state, by the governor's office, in terms of stage one, two, three and four, they're really about moving from lower risk activities to higher risk activities. You can see that many of these recommendations actually were corroborated or reinforced by the survey data that we received back from businesses and residents. And so the good news is, is that it seems like the community is moving forward collaboratively and collectively with a very common understanding of the challenges, but also the opportunities to reopen aspects in in a staged and phased way. And so with that, I'm actually going to turn it over to city manager Tom Merkel to talk about financial impacts. Thank you very much, Shaun. So, Mayor and Council, I know we've gone quite a while. There is a lot to unpack and give you information on, so I'm going to wrap it up. I want to talk a little bit about the financial impacts. As we know, this is an incredible time for finances for every single organization and Long Beach is not immune. And then we'll talk a little bit about next steps. And then again, we're really here tonight to present you information, to give you a report on everything we've been doing on on your behalf, but also then to really listen to the council. So for financial impacts, we had put out a memo about a month ago about our FY 20 shortfall and future shortfalls, trying to predict, you know, what we thought the impact was going to be. We do have some updated numbers now. And as we had suspected back then, that was an initial first blush. I think we had estimated around 14 to 21 million in that range in the general fund for this year. We do believe that's going to be higher in the 25 million to $41 million range. I know that's a large range, but there's a lot of unknowns. And so we believe there's been more severe impacts to sales tax. Our top our our hotels are 5% full rather than 80% full measure is taken some reductions as well because it's sales tax based. We've seen a large reduction in parking citations in our parking garages where people are no longer going to park. Oil actually went negative for a little while, and so now it's hovering around the $15 a barrel rather than the 55 that we budgeted and the 65 we were experiencing $65 a barrel. And then, of course, there's unreimbursed pandemic cost. We have we have not updated our shortfall for 21. But I did want to remind you that was already pegged at about 9 to 16 in the last memo. And we believe that's going to get worse. There are going to be out year impacts as well. And that we will come back to you on. And it's still very uncertain what's going on out there. We are watching a number of other cities. We're in a slightly different financial position because we're in a federal fiscal year where they are in a state fiscal year. So their fiscal year starts in July, our start starts in October. And we do believe that the economic situation could make it more likely that shortfalls will be worse than projected rather than better. We have also provided you some information on what this response has cost. So our financial section tracks every hour that is spent and every dollar that is allocated for this. Some of those are within existing budget, so we have a total of $13.9 million tracked so far. Some of that you'll see the Labor 10.5 million are budgeted positions, but they are no longer doing what they were doing before. They're now COVID related. So we account for that. We have $3.4 million in non-Labor expenses. And so there's a memo, if anyone's interested in the details on this, we have that out, but we're expecting about a 75% reimbursement of eligible cost from the from FEMA. But we are expecting about 3 to 6 million in our financial projection that it would be un not reimbursed. Language has been aggressive in asking for large city funding from the Federal Government. We don't quite qualify from a population standpoint, but we certainly qualify from an effort standpoint. We have 470,000 people rather than 500,000. And we are asking aggressively and our mayor is leading that charge at the federal, state and local level to get funding that could help us offset some of those unreimbursed cost. So as your city manager, I'm required to put in place things to balance the budget. Once the Council adopts a budget, it is our job to manage it and we have seen a huge drop in the last two months. And so we are putting in place plans and we will be coming back and revisiting the steps we are taking with the Council before the end of May. But that includes a hard hiring freeze and cutback in non-essential expenses. We are going to be creating list recommendations to defer non-critical capital projects. We also think we need to reconsider those summer activities. We may not be allowed by the governor's order to do those and the programs impacted by the pandemic. We were about to hire additional police and fire and we are going to recommend deferring those for the short term so that we can get a better sense of that and also build some of those savings to close the financial year. We are looking at emphasizing full time staffing over part time staffing. We also need to restart our 21 budget process, which was supposed to start May 3rd or March 3rd, and we had to suspend due to COVID and then we're continue to project these updates. I also need to tell the council that this has impacted our entire organization. COVID 19 and saving lives is by far our number one highest priority. And so we've been reassigning staff in very significant numbers. We have large numbers of staff who are not physically in the building, who are working remotely. And so as a result, non-critical functions have been delayed and stopped. The council has been incredibly patient and understanding with that, and we want to make sure the community knows that too, that some of the traditional things that we do as a city have been impacted. We've had to stop. Our whole FY 21 budget development process, and now we need to restart it, which is going to result in a different type of process. And of course, we have initiatives that the Council gives us, and we've had to slow those or suspend some of those as just because of workload. And so these are our last two slides I want to kind of talk about next steps. Really, tonight we presented you with a lot of information and now we want to start listening and get input on our emergency response where you think we may need additional focus, the things you are feeling that we're doing well. And then of course, what you're hearing and your thoughts on the restart efforts. We will continue to work with L.A. County on the health order. That work is happening over the weekend and this week. We have not put anything in place about what reopens, at what time that work is ongoing. And we do expect some changes to the order before May four on or before May 15th. So May 15th is really the date that we have targeted is when our order goes through. Until that changes, it will be May 15th. We may make some slight changes related to recreational opportunities. We may make some changes regarding retail. And so those have not been decided yet. But May 15th is is the date that the current health order runs out. And our philosophy, when we do make some of those changes is to do what we've done with essential businesses, which is providing businesses with direction on how to effectively be safe and then allow them to put those measures into place that are appropriate for their business and sit in space. And so communication is going to be critical in all of this. We know we need to talk to everybody who has questions. We also need to make decisions based on data and medical expertize. And we also need to make sure that we're in alignment with the county as much as possible for regional consistency. And our goal in all of this is, of course, to keep the mayor and city council informed, like what you're doing tonight. And so with that, I know that was a lot. And we appreciate your time and your patience and we're available for questions. Speaker 0: Thank you very much, Mr. Modica, and just a great presentation, just a lot of information to just thank you to you and the entire team. I do have council members that are queued up, so I'm going to just begin going through the queue. And if you're if you want to speak, please queue up on the messaging system. And I'm going to I'll begin with Councilwoman Pryce. Speaker 2: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I want to thank staff for that very comprehensive presentation. I think there's a lot there for us to absorb and obviously some of the stats and the data we've seen. But we didn't see this presentation too far in advance. So there's just a lot of information to digest. And I know staff knows that and appreciate that. So I want to thank our health department director, our city manager and his entire team, including all the department heads in helping put together this presentation. I know that it was a collective effort and I appreciate the update and I want to thank our mayor for really advocating for the city when it comes to large city assistance. I think it's it's it's quite a shame that we are just shy of that large city threshold. And looking at the group that the mayor has put together who are advocating for assistance from the federal government. Our city is obviously the largest of that group and clearly has a lot of the same demographics and dynamics that many large cities of 500 that meet that 500,000 threshold have. So I really do want to thank the mayor for his advocacy, because if he's successful in that effort, I think that can be huge for us in terms of the deficit that we have ahead of us and how we're going to be able to deal with a lot of these impacts. I appreciate the mayor's comments regarding the city's ability to accelerate a little bit what the governor is doing. I know that a few weeks ago we had our council, our regular council briefing with the city manager. And through that process, we talked a lot about council members, every single one of us wanting to be involved in this discussion. Every single one of us wanting to have a seat at the table and wanting to make sure that our residents and business leaders and their needs are represented in the discussion. And the city manager really did encourage us to not not wait for this council meeting, but to go out and seek input in whatever way we could. We wanted to we saw fit from our residents and business owners. So I know that several of my colleagues took advantage of that opportunity, and I'm grateful that they did. We also did in the third District. We had five focus group meetings via Zoom, and then we we published a survey that we received over 1000 responses to within 24 hours. So I was really pleased with the with the interest. But what all of that told me is that people are very interested in having a voice. People are at the point now where they want to have a meaningful discussion about what the next steps look like. They're there. They're ready for that. And and I really do think it's important and I'm not trying to say that we haven't been, but I think we're at the point now where the city needs to be a little bit more aggressive in terms of our discussions about what reopening looks like. And to the extent that we can get to a place where we're able to meet the indicators and move forward. Speaker 4: That's obviously. Speaker 2: Should be our goal, and I know that. Speaker 4: That is our goal. Speaker 2: So I guess my first question would be for Miss Colby in regards to the indicators, what indicator and or indicators are we missing before we can move forward and submit an accelerated plan to the governor's office regarding the stages? Speaker 6: Councilman the the indicators primarily. But the first is that you can only have one of the indicators is one death in 14 days. At this time, we haven't met that. And so that is something that we'd be tracking on. The next is the capacity to contact Trace. So to really actively be able to trace and they estimate that each person who is positive at least has ten contacts. And it requires a team, you know, to to follow up and to try to follow up with all of those contacts. And then if it's a close contact, that's the quarantine and the default, which is those quarantines as well as the person who's isolated. It is a significant responsibility, and that's an area that we're working to build our capacity right now. And then I think the I'm trying to remember, I don't have any more than one check. I'm finding the rest of the indicators. So those are the two the two primary. And then the the ability to quarantine within 14, within 24 hours of a positive test also is based on the need for that contact tracing. We have met our capacity in terms of the the the housing for people who are experiencing homelessness. And then so those are the those are the primary ones. Now, these are indicators that were announced today and then so they may change some, but that is really the focus area. So I think those are the two key areas. This one is continuing to focus on the deaths. I think we have a lot of other capacity and and the ability to really build up our contact tracing and making sure that we are quarantining and isolating effectively so they don't have further outbreaks across the city. Speaker 2: So what I'm hearing you say is that there are two critical indicators that if we can meet those. Obviously the ability to quarantine would be the ability of the individual and those identified through contact tracing to have been impacted. They would need to self-quarantine, correct? Speaker 6: That is true. So there are two pieces. One is that we can identify them quickly and then work with them to make sure that they are quarantining and then the ability to follow up if they do not have a safe place to quarantine. So for instance, if you are in a household where you like, let's say you have a large family and not that many bedrooms, it might be difficult for someone to quarantine. So in that case, we would we would determine whether we could move them off site and provide a place for them to safely quarantine or isolate to ensure that they were not exposing and infecting the remaining members of their household. Speaker 2: Muted. Okay. So in regards to the death, the death indicator, the one in 14 days, how are we seeing any trends and how far do you think we're. I know you're speculating and a little bit of tele reading here, but how far away from that are we? Speaker 6: Well, we had a death reported last night, so we're still 14 days out if we had no more deaths over the next 14 days. And I think that there is a lot of conversation about what that looks like with our long term care facilities. And so really, our focus is continuing to work very closely with our long term care facilities to support people there in their safety and in their health, but also working very closely with the employees of those facilities to ensure that they're not being exposed in their communities and walking in there. And those facilities, they are you know, they're taking temperatures, their tests, they're doing all those kinds of things and following all the right rules. But we want to make sure that that we're making sure that everyone who is involved in those communities is healthy and is not exposing not exposing people. So there is more work to do there moving forward. Speaker 2: Okay. So in regard to that indicator and this this question's really coming out of me not knowing. So it could be a very simple question. But in regards to that indicator, no more than one death in 14 days, is there any subcategory of whether the death occurred in a long term facility or in an area where it couldn't be contained or could be contained any any sort of further definition on the breakdown of either the category of individual who passed in terms of vulnerability or the conditions that may have led to the spread of that particular individual's situation. Speaker 6: It's interesting, I asked the very same question this morning, too, on our state call, and at this time there is no subcategory. So there that is that is the that is the number that they're holding with it there. You know, each of these conversations, they change a little bit over time. So the indicators may change a little bit as well. But at this time they are holding that there is no sub category. That is the indicator. Speaker 2: Okay, I got it. All right. So that's a key indicator. And until we're able to get to that two week period, we couldn't really ask to accelerate anything. But it's quite possible that the governor may himself advanced two additional stages, even without us meeting that indicator. Speaker 6: That is correct. Those indicators are specific to accelerating more quickly than the governor's orders. Speaker 2: Okay. And with a lot of those indicators and I think I know the answer to this question, but do those indicators are the city indicators or county indicators? Are they steady because we have our own health department? Speaker 6: Yes. Their health their local health jurisdiction indicators. So because you have a city health department, it's city focus, not county. Speaker 2: Okay, got it. The second indicator regarding contact tracing are the contact tracers. Are those folks who work would be working within the health department and are these paid physicians? Are they volunteer kind of internship positions? And how how are we going about recruiting? Is that even an issue? Speaker 6: They can be any of those. And so what we're doing right now is we are looking. There are about I think it's approximately 200 folks across the city who have been identified, who could be who could move to support various efforts, be reassigned based on the disaster recovery or disaster service worker criteria. So all city staff are considered disaster services workers. So in this where we have capacity to be able to to reassign people, we are looking at those folks as as a population. We would also, you know, volunteers are also possible as well as the possibility of hiring. When you are looking at a pipe, you know, when you're looking at a workforce of 80 to 120, there will need to be some folks hired to be able to manage and lead the smaller groups moving forward. So it really is a mix. And we are you know, we do have a proposal in and we're working closely to be able to assign people so that we can at least, you know, get the first group started early next week. Speaker 0: Councilwoman. Anything else? Speaker 2: And myself muted. So I was talking to myself. How far do you think we are from meeting that contact tracing indicator? As a city. Speaker 6: We need. We're looking at the need to bring on some between 60 and 80 people to be able to start to meet that indicator. It also depends on how many new cases we have. So if we continue and the number of cases declines and we have ten cases, then we would need 30 folks. If you have 20 cases, you need you know, you need 60 folks. So it really it just it all depends on what the number is. And we realize it's going to be up and down. So we're focusing on trying to get in somewhere around 60 right now as we've been seeing approximately 20 cases per day being reported . If we have any increases, then we would have to increase that capacity. Speaker 2: So in regards to that issue, do you are we these are going to be temporary positions through the city, I'm assuming, and are we advertising for them? Is there something the city council members can do to help disseminate information, to recruit these individuals? Speaker 6: At this time. We've been focusing on internal staff, but we can certainly create a job description or a, you know, a request for support for folks to be trained and others and be able to move forward. That is something that we can work on. Speaker 5: And Councilmember, this is Tom. This would actually be an area, you know, also, given the budget that we're going to have, you know, huge amounts of of of staff that are going to be impacted. And so we want to be able to also see that this is rather than adding on staff and trying to pay people that we don't currently have on payroll, we would be reassigning folk, looking at less critical areas and basically saying you're now a contact tracer rather than what you were doing before. Speaker 2: You for that. Okay. Thank you. I really appreciate those answers from the health department because I've had the same same questions. I will tell you, I think from a mental health perspective, our residents really, really are anxious to have some recreational opportunities open back up with specific social distancing measures in place. What I've heard repeatedly from people is that the bike path on the beach being closed has really eliminated the desire for many people, especially with young kids or folks in the older population to ride bikes. Because even though we do have a lot of great bike paths, bike lanes throughout the city, not every road has a bike lane. And a lot of people don't want to share a traffic lane with a vehicle or have a vehicle with in such close proximity. So the bike lanes, I mean, to me, it seems like bikes are a very natural social distancing mechanism because, you know, there's a limitation of how close you can get to another individual and for how long of a period of time when you're on a bike. So I think what we heard loud and clear from our residents is that the beach path, the bike path needs to be opened back up. I will say I did notice that there one of the questions I get a lot is how come the neighboring county is doing things that we're not doing? And of course, you know, the governor has weighed in on that. But just yesterday and today, we saw that several speech cities were able to present plans to be able to accelerate openings based on plans that they have provided. And I wonder, you know, have we done that? Have we submitted plans for golf courses, tennis courts, the beaches? And if other cities can do that or could we not do the same thing? Because I. I don't know what their indicators are. Speaker 1: Perhaps I can't believe that. Speaker 4: This would be true, but. Speaker 2: Perhaps Orange County, for example, has met all the indicators and has sufficient contact tracing in place. And that's why they're able to submit plans to to reopen some things in advance of the governor's orders. But I guess the question I would have for I guess it's not the final question for our health department is why can't we do that? Why can't we submit plans, even though we haven't met all these indicators to at least open up some recreational opportunities? Speaker 6: So the the way that at least what we're hearing from the state is that people are submitting plans, but the state isn't in itself right now. I mean, these criteria that just came out came out this morning. They're they're new. So whatever the plans are that they're submitting, they're not related necessarily to to these pieces. There are, you know, some other things people are looking at in terms of PPA and others. But, you know, there is concern in this city about the opening of a lot of the beaches and other things. You've seen a lot of crowds and others. And so, you know, there's there is a lot of pressure to open. People want to be outside and we want to make sure that we are that, you know, that we're making sure that we're not creating opportunity for for for large scale increases. So we are moving in what we feel fits within our data, fits within our capacities moving forward. And we're holding pretty tight to that. So I'm not I don't know exactly what the other plans are necessarily, except that they're putting forward some strategies for how they believe distancing can work. But but if you know, the there isn't a place right now under the governor's strategy for a plan that exceeds what is out there in terms of the orders. Speaker 5: And can't remember this is Tom. So recreation is one of the areas that the governor had started to say that you could take some some changes in. And so that work is happening this week. We are looking at some meaningful changes to recreation. We totally agree that, you know, people are looking to be places that are safe and be able to be outdoors. So we've heard that for a while. We do not have exactly what that will look like yet. That is work that is continuing this week. But we have heard that very consistently. And so our goal is to is to have that plan and really work on it this week about what can meaning what kind of meaningful change to recreation can happen and how soon it can happen. Speaker 2: Great. Thank you. I think, you know, I'd like to to say that overwhelmingly the residents that we've talked to in our survey would like tennis courts, golf courses and the bike path opened back up. So to the extent that we can consider those. I'd appreciate it. And then the final kind, I want to let my colleagues weigh in. So I'm going to I'm going to end it here. But in regards to the the deficit that we're looking at, I'm just. Just this fiscal year, the 25 to 41 million. And I'm trying to pull up our the document here that Mr. Modica referred to the FY 20 shortfall. You know, I think I like some of the priorities that the city manager has already identified. I imagine we'll have a lot more conversations about this in the weeks and months ahead, especially at the below sea level led by Councilwoman Mungo. But I think that really having the city manager identify what projects we can defer, infrastructure projects, capital improvement projects we can defer would be critical at this stage because I think that would allow us to see kind of where we're eliminating what is not necessary and really being able to focus on the basics. For me, the priority for the entire city would be what are the basic core services that every resident in this city is entitled to? And I know we're all going to have different opinions about that. Some of us may think art is a core service, and I'm a huge fan of art, so I'm just using that as an example. Or maybe libraries are a core service. You know, we're all going to have our different opinions about what a core service says, but at the end of the day, we're going to need to be able to have quick response times when residents call 911, because that's a matter of life or death. We're going to be able we're going to have to be able to address infrastructure needs throughout the city. And I'm sure there are a number other core basic services, you know, trash and street sweeping and things that we identify as core services that the residents should be entitled to by virtue of their tax dollars that provide the revenue to the city and the return on for their tax dollars. So I look forward to those discussions. I know there's going to be a lot of difficult conversations to be had. And I want to thank city staff and I want to thank my colleagues for allowing me to speak first and take out take up as much time as I did. I apologize for that. It's a very, very dense topic. So I tried my very best to be efficient. And I want to thank staff again for giving us this information tonight. Thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilwoman. I want to just add two things that I think you brought up that I think are important, that the commissioner you mentioned contract tracing, which is really important. I just want to also add that the state is developing an app and a technology that will allow the idea of tracing and contact tracing hopefully happen in a very efficient way and in a way that will also take less actual bodies, hopefully in the future. And so that's just more of a FOIA for the council. So hopefully will be developing. Some of the top tech firms are working on this. Our contact tracing app and and system and then in. Speaker 5: Mayor if I can can I add to that. So Long Beach Health Department has been really pushing the state to say we want to be one of those pilot sites and we expect to be one of those by the end of this week. So to really be a model, to be able to test that out. Speaker 0: That's that's exactly right. And we're working with the governor to be one of the first groups to do that. And it's going to be you know, it's going to be hopefully a great way of doing this work. And it will really get people that are infected to be able to contact, you know, who they've been in contact with. It'd be a great way to trace everything through technology, and it could really make a dent into positive cases if it's done, if if it does what we think it's going to do. So we're very hopeful about that. And so I just wanted to mention that. And then the second thing is for for for the public as well, because Councilman Price is right. Two cities petition the governor on beach openings and they did so because beach beaches is a is something that that's in the current stage that's at it's allowable and the petition them after the governor closed them down and so I think Kelly, I think you clarified that pretty well. And I just wanted to add that as well. But we are excited about the contact tracing. And so I'm thank you for that. And the next up is Councilman Richardson. Speaker 3: Thank you, Mayor. This was an incredible presentation, so I have a lot of thoughts and comments here. First, I'm glad that we're at the place where we can have a full conversation about reopening the economy. No one wanted to be in this place where the economy's closed. We want our schools back open. We want our economy back in operation. And we understand the importance of public health. This is a great presentation, and I have to say most of the communications that have come out of the SEC, most of the communication that's come out of sitting members of the European agenda have been have been great. You know, I see the link language accents are coming out in four different languages. I know that that takes you know, that's that's incredible. But I want to make sure, you know, I want to I want to just recognize that. Thanks for highlighting that we're a local public health jurisdiction. You know, we typically have to when we're not a public health emergency, it isn't the first thing we think of. And I hope that moving forward, we can, you know, understand the value of having a public health jurisdiction here locally. We've got I'd say we have we have the best local public health response in the state of California with who we have in leadership with our city manager, but also Kelly Cosby and Dr. Davis. They're doing an incredible job. And that's why here across the region, council members, at least six or seven council members from other cities and six Southern California counties have called me about different pieces of our response, and it makes me proud that we have that. But also, we have a responsibility to maintain this. I think what we've done around testing has been great. Thank you for raising that up and it moves really, really quickly. We saw that we had a problem and it was disproportionately impacting certain communities moved really, really quickly to get sites set up. I think that we see, you know, that builds a lot of trust and confidence with our with our community. So I'm very grateful for both the Jordan the Jordan high drive thru as well as the Jordan Plus site. And I think the way we've been able to rally and the way the EOC has been able to rally around some of the other things to help secure community like the food distributions, the food with the other partnerships with different food agencies, the nonprofits. The way that the COVID relief fund has supported a lot of nonprofits has been tremendous. And where we're doing the food distribution. Jordan High Park just on Saturday, where we can feed up to 2000 people with a box of groceries for the week. So all of this, I understand how much of it was fiscal challenges then, but I think, you know, folks are really rising to the occasion. I want to take a minute and just say, you know, I don't say this enough, but I made our mayors doing an incredible job in the way that he's been out there consistently , three times a week on video, his social media. He's been a tremendous leader for the city. And I just want to make sure that, you know, while we're having this conversation, you know, I get an opportunity to say thank you to Robert. The city council is doing their thing. I see that some councilmembers invited me to, you know, have different conversations. And our city council committees is our dinner committee had a really good meeting or another meeting soon. The first meeting we heard from John Keisler, we heard from Health Department, we heard from the nonprofit sector, we heard from the hospitality sector and we heard from restaurants. And we had some really good feedback, particularly about some pieces that the city maybe has talked about, but we haven't done anything on. For example, you know, a lot of restaurants are dependent on delivery fees. And, you know, it was highlighted that the delivery fee issue, you know, sometimes given 30% of their sale, which is their profit margin away to delivery companies. And, you know, originally the marketing plan for the delivery companies were this is an addition to your business. Therefore, give us a piece of this additional business. But now it's it's core to their business. And we need to think about what we can do to either incentivize or regulate how how these programs engage with our small businesses. And we also have to think about, you know, another things come up is, you know, technology to help people queue from home due to when barbershops get open. You shouldn't have to spend 2 hours waiting on a haircut or whatever their cue system is. We can look at that. We should have our I.T. department, our Technology Innovation Department, take a look at how we expand into some of these these platforms. Our next meeting is Macy's, May 15th at 3:00. We're going to hear an update. We have a finance report on the city. We're going to have we're going to hear from the manufacturing sector, which has reached out to the committee for us to engage them. We're going to hear from the Arts Council and Arts community about their specific impacts. You know, I think they're going to have an opinion on whether or not, you know, arts. Are essential or core and then labor. We're going to hear from Labor LA County voters and Labor is going to speak to both the concerns of essential workers as well as laid off workers because they have opinions as well. And so this is really just serve as an opportunity for people to engage in this time where it's really difficult to engage with leaders. And so thanks to the committee members and city staff for the support that that work. I also want to lift up I thought I did a credible job introducing this presentation and all the staff brought their pieces together. But I think Tom really said that it set the tone with it with, you know, how sophisticated and how much work it's going to take to get into this. And I think this is a you know, I really appreciated the way that he referenced equity and the issues from a standpoint that are taking place in our city and and that it would be to 29% of the deaths in the city are African-American, but African-Americans make up 12% of the population. That's that should get our local government attention. And I should say that we should place an equity lens in all our decisions. And thanks to I want to thank the entire city council for helping reinforce that this is the direction as we sort of get into rebuilding our economy, rebuilding our city. These are core competencies that our city is going to need and core competency that we have to sort of reflect for others. Now, I know that, and I'm going to get into some questions. I know that when we reopen or start the process of reopening, some people are not going to come outside still. You know, we're talking about seniors. We're talking about people who live in who are in vulnerable circumstances. From a health standpoint. They're going to be confined for a long time. And we want to make sure that we're making plans and take into consideration, you know, what we're doing to help support these people. So that's going to be my first question. So I'm telling you again, when we open, fingers are going to be your fingers are going to stay in for a while until we see, you know, a change in the virus or until we see a vaccine or different therapies for the vaccine. Can you speak to how we're going to help support our vulnerable populations, our seniors and those individuals as we get into this reopening process? Speaker 5: Yes. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I am sorry. That was from way back when. Thank you, Councilmember. So one of the things that we weren't able to get to, we talked about how there is lots that we just couldn't put in the presentation. Are some of the efforts at our EOC to really coordinate a lot of the volunteer efforts that are happening out in the community? Our nonprofits have really stepped up to serve. And so we have, you know, hundreds of volunteers and groups that are out there that are supporting seniors. A lot of them have gotten funding from our disaster relief fund, from the coronavirus relief fund. And so that has raised over $1,000,000. We have over 60 groups who have been funded and seniors support. And bringing food to those who need it is a big part of that. We are coordinating that through our EOC. And so we actually have dedicated phone lines in our GIC where seniors can call and ask those types of questions. We also have Global World Kitchen, who is delivering to these major kind of senior facilities. And then the governor has announced a new program last week. It's not quite set up yet, but the ability to purchase restaurant quality meals from local restaurants and connect those to the seniors who are living by themselves and get most of that federally reimbursed. And so we are very cognizant and we're not encouraging seniors in if they're able to stay at home. We're not saying you should be coming out now. We still want them to be, you know, kind of limiting their movement for sure. And so we we realize that they're going to need support to be able to do that. Speaker 3: Okay. Yeah. I just want to make sure that, you know, we think we do what we can from a quality of life standpoint from them and from a public health standpoint. So the programs that we're seeing that are coming together around food support and food delivery for seniors, I think as we think about reopening, we think about figuring out how to leverage CDBG or other things to make those programs who just came together. We need to make them more sustainable because this is going to happen. We may need that program for a year. So let's just make sure that we think about what it takes to make that happen. Also, quality of life means some people are going to be, you know, we got to exercise bike. I don't get it on it as much as I as I should. Our girls, you know, they like watching yoga on YouTube. The reality is our Parks and rec folks, if folks are in the house and may not have it, frankly, they may not have bike paths in the neighborhood or tennis courts in the neighborhood, and they need to do what they have to do. So let's figure out how, you know, just because we're locked in the house or some people are going to be confined for a long time, we don't forget them. We can't do concerts in the park. But you know, you know, these are nice Instagram concert or verses, right? We can make sure that we have entertainment happening online or whatever it is that our Parks and Rec team does. Well, let's figure out how we adapt it, because some people are going to be in house for a long time. We have Zumba classes that we have. Let's just think about how we can make sure we manage at a very low cost, the quality of life of what happens. And it really doesn't cost a lot of money. We're talking about just giving opportunities for folks to our own channels and to engage with people. And I also would say I love the idea of the business playbook reopening playbook. I love that idea. I think and I think about we have different when you go to the planning desk, you'll have different handbooks for every different industry. I think we if we're going to do one, I think we definitely need one for childcare in private and private schools. You know, the public schools are a big organization. They're going to do their own thing. But a lot of the childcare providers who receive no public funding and we're going to need to give some guidance to them because they don't know how to plan for the future. And a lot of these childcare providers are who are essential workers and our workforce is going to depend on as we open up and I know that childcare providers are included in stage two of the reopening. So I would hope that we have, you know, some some guidance in the playbook for them. Additionally, another thing that I'll recommendation would be we've learned a lot about and we work with, we're going to have to change some behaviors. What I don't want is if people don't wear a mask, we're slapping them with $1,000 fines when we need to really be focused on education and trust. And so, you know, we've talked with our city prosecutor about programs. We did the past program where we treated young adults differently than than, you know, people over 26. Those are the types of practices that we've done in the city that we need to lean on right now. What I don't want to see a bunch of people when we come out, we're going to have a requirement, masks and social distancing. And some people are not going to follow the rule. And we have to just be mindful that we don't want to create an additional problem for that individual, which, you know, I don't want to get into all the context around it. But we know how to do this in the sense. In terms of the reopening timeline, I think there's been a lot of conversation there. That's all good. I think as we relate to contract tracing, the conversational contract contact tracing, we need to make sure that we are figuring out ways to contract with community based organizations and individuals who, you know, who are trusted messengers already in the community. Because, again, it's going to be about trust and confidence with the community. So if we need to track down ten contacts or someone we know or someone who knows, our community is tracking down our neighbors. I think that's incredibly important. And then we should think about, you know, whether we can leverage CDBG or other things that are tied to, you know, geographic areas to see if we can tie this to some sort of CDBG program. Great. And then I would also say, finally, we should probably figure out this is a good long presentation. I know it's overdue, but we got to get back to some sense of normal. We have I know we get different too from boards and memos. The manager does a good job briefing individual council members. For the sake of the public, I think we need to have a more regular cadence on how we receive these comprehensive updates. Now, I don't know that they mean for the time that we spent in the city council meeting, but I but I'd like to understand some milestones in time. Maybe you can speak to some milestones that you think we can expect more comprehensive updates. So can you speak to that a little bit? Speaker 5: Sure. So, yes, we definitely want to have the opportunity to keep the council involved. Things change so rapidly. By the time we write something down, it seems like it changes the next day. So we do like to look at things. You know, we're going to be continuing to do our daily press releases that we get to everybody. Our GIC operates seven days a week. But we do think it would be wise to take some time to put together larger reports backs. I'd like to make those kind of benchmark focused. I don't have those yet what those would be. But we do expect in the next week or so for the county and and the governor to kind of lay out when they think the other stages are going to happen. So I think some appropriate times to report back is if we see a major change in our indicators. If we are getting close to where we're able to accelerate through a phase or if we believe that there is going to be in a short period of time a major change and going through a phase, I think we also need to prepare for the fact that we may have to go the other direction. We hope not. But if we need to see and we start to see a resurgence to really get in front of the council and make sure we're educating everyone on what those data look like. So I'd ask you to let us do a little bit more thought about what those look like. And and we can be doing more regular memos. We publish our data every day on on the data dashboard, but we can assemble some of these other indicators and do those through some memos as well, and then get in front of the council if we're going to be doing any kind of major changes in the data or, you know, going either, you know, forward or hopefully not backward. Speaker 3: Okay. And so I'll close with this and then I'll make a motion to receive a file because I know we need that. So I know that there's a lot of conversation that needs to take place. And I know we have to understand what reopening looks like. I, I, I think we should want to reopen. Right? This is, this is what we should want to do. I also understand that, you know, we're going to have a tough time in terms of the budget. I would say to a director, city staff would be be really mindful and thoughtful about how we consider, you know, what's important and what's core and what is. You know, if we if we get the police and value one on one aspect over the other without a real conversation about context, like saying reopening certain things, but, you know, closing down other things and limited to 911 services. I think that sort of exacerbates the behavior that kind of got some large news in a position where right now, if you don't have parks and libraries and tennis courts and beach, that you don't have those things. So to say, you know, let's limit infrastructure investment or whatever it is during this crisis, but maintain this essential core service. I don't think that's the city that we are today. Maybe that's who we were in the past, but that's not the city we are today, the city of the future. So I would hope that, you know, we're going to take all you know, all of these things in the context, especially since our districts are just so diverse and so different. Every district has different needs and we're really, really diverse. And so we should embrace that diversity and make sure we make plans that are really respected, what the needs of all of our communities. And so I'm I'm I'm glad that we received filed this report. And. Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you. I have Stacy's queued up next. But Roberto, I know, just seconded the motion. And Councilman Mangano, so you want to second it in your comments? Councilwoman with the mood. On the mood, yes. Speaker 4: I moved in, seconded it in the text thread and the beginning. So happy to do it right. Speaker 0: Councilwoman, got your next. Speaker 4: Great. Thank you. A couple of quick things. Thank you. Councilmember Richardson, I appreciate the comments you made regarding watching yoga and all of those things and how little money it can take. It could actually take no money. There are so many current city assets, whether they are nonprofit partners or local businesses that are doing this. And they would love to be elevated on our platform through our social media that it wouldn't cost us anything to kind of get them and their name out there during this time to feature a fitness of the week or whatever. But I'm really cognizant that the staff of these departments really need to maintain working in the EOC and working on the contact tracing. To that end, I'll also say that there are lots of community members who would be happy to do the contact tracing as volunteers, so I'm not sure how we would facilitate that, but I'm open to exploring a few of them. I've started to text people that I thought could help us kind of navigate through, and if I get some answers back, maybe I can recue at the end. And we kind of talked about the 14 days since a death tracking context and that there's no secondary category. Ms.. COPLEY Are you able to tell me you mentioned that there was a death on May 4th. Was there a death on May 3rd as well? Speaker 6: No. There was no reported deaths the day before, so there was one. My second was that we had one report. I don't have the dates in my head, but we reported one overnight and then we had two days prior to that with that one. Speaker 4: Right. So if there's not more than one in 14 days, you wouldn't actually need I don't know what staff member said. We need 14 days from yesterday. That's not actually factually correct. We need 14 days from the second death, which if it was two days ago, that means we are 12 days away if we don't have another death. Is that accurate? Speaker 6: I believe that is accurate. Speaker 4: Okay. I just wanted to clarify, because I know people it is not 14 days without a death. It's a 14 day period with only one death. And I would strongly encourage our health officer and our EOC to potentially make a proposition to our state health officials or our plan to kind of be guided by community. So I guess I have another question around the deaths. If an individual is a Long Beach resident but is staying with a family member in Riverside. And taking care of them or what have you. And they pass. Whose numbers are they counted under? Speaker 6: Encountered in the location in which they're living, in which they're the residents. Speaker 4: And I think that that's huge right now. I have four people that live on my street that are currently staying at other locations, and I don't know what that percentage looks like, but I think it's really important that the death had the context where it was contracted or where is it suspected to have been contracted and where were they at the time? If there are Long Beach resident who passes away in Palm Springs or San Diego or Riverside, I think that that needs to kind of be added. And I know that you're not the one who makes these rules up, but I think that we as a city need to continue to advocate for that . The data needs to tie directly. When looking at your slides and I don't know which side number, I think it was maybe 23. It talked about the long term care facilities and the number of cases. And one of the things that it didn't differentiate here, but I think you've differentiated for us in the past is the number of patients that have it versus the number of staff that have it. And I think that that's also very different because the patients are homebound versus the staff who are circulating back out into the community. So just something to think about that. Yeah. Yep. And then in the slide related to the positive test case results, you'd mentioned the days delay in reporting. And while I appreciate that the Health Department has a 24 hour return on tests, we do use some testing sites and agency. There are test result dates. Did you explain what those are so that people can have a little bit more context to that slide? Speaker 6: Yeah. So the so the health department turnaround is 24 hours. Our sites that are the drive thru sites at this time are approximately 48 to 72 hours in turnaround time. The Jordan Plus site is utilizing a private lab. So I believe the turnaround time might be a little bit longer there. The sites that are so our hospitals and medical providers and others are using some private labs. Some of those turnaround times might be five or six days. So it depends on on where it's coming through. So we might say that we learned today that we had 20 new, you know, 20 new positive results, but that could those 20 could be spread across five different days of when they were actually tested or when they were they their initial symptoms came came on. Speaker 4: Okay. So that's really important, too. So when you showed the chart the last two days, it showed zero. But the health department only gives ten tests a day still. Or is that increased? Speaker 6: Now, the health department right now is we're up to around 50 to 60 because of our long term care facilities. Another so we are doing much more testing at the health department specifically for the high risk individuals. Speaker 4: So that just let everyone know that of the 1000 tests a day, only 50 to 60 are getting results within 24 hours. So when you look at that chart that shows in the last 48 hours, there's zero new cases. That's zero new cases of the 120 tests, not of the 2000 tests. And I think that that's also really important because I, I hear a lot of hope in people when they talk about our tests are coming back so negative and all of those things. And when I subtract the number of total cases versus the number recovered, the number of cases among which is low. And that is true. And. But I think that the context of when these reports are coming back is really, really important. I want to thank you and your staff for all the hard work you've been doing. It is just another reminder that everyone needs to take their census. We are 30,000 people who probably lived here and were undercounted away from being able to have a possible full cost recovery of this epidemic. And. And so if you have not taken your census, please take your census. If you're a member of the media and you're watching or listening today, please do an additional reminder to take the census. 30,000 people. That is a fraction of a council district. That makes a difference in in potentially $85 million that would have come to Long Beach, if that's the number I heard Tom mention a few days ago. I also think it's really important that the death rate you mentioned, Ms.. Be, is among those tested. And there are thousands of people in Long Beach and elsewhere that may have COVID or have COVID and have not been tested. They shelter in place and they decide not to go to a testing site. And so when you say that our our death rate is 1.2%, I think it's important to have an asterisk there that says 1.2% of those testers. We actually are still are we getting every single report from all the private testing that's going on back into our data yet? I know we were working on that. Are we are we there yet? Speaker 6: We are. So the the the private labs are all reporting into cal ready. And those data come to us. And for quite a while we were not getting the negative reports. We're getting the positive reports and not the negative reports. We now have a better idea for how many people are actually being tested across all the different protocols. So we're currently so far, we've we find that we've tested, you know, over 13,000 people across the city. So and then the number of positives is that 790 number of that 13,000. Speaker 4: And over what duration have we actually gotten the negative results back? Because the amount of time that we did not get the negative results back would have in fact skewed that data as well. Did we get the back data on negatives as well or was it on a go forward basis? Speaker 6: You know, I'm not sure about that. I'll have to look. Speaker 4: And if an L.A. County city resident goes to a Lakewood testing site or a Fort Carson testing site or any of those that's coming back to us in the in the data from the state. Speaker 6: Yes. There's the positive. The data going to car ready. So anyone with a Long Beach address would come would be counted as a Long Beach resident. Speaker 4: Perfect. And then. Let me just mark off some of the things I have here. So our numbers, even without the total number of cases being known because of not everyone wanting to get tested, are below the city of Los Angeles, below the county of Los Angeles, including our hospitalization rates. And so I would just encourage you the reason that this city chose to invest a considerable amount of money, arguably not enough over the past 15 years in having our own health department is so that in times like this, we can stand apart and use our data and make our own decisions. So thank you for the work that you've been doing. I feel like you've really stepped up to the occasion and we just need to now see that same leadership in moving forward with our protocols. I know that social distancing is the best word used across our country, but to kind of speak to what Councilman Price said about the mental health of our residents, we really need to talk about physical distancing and not really social distancing. We really need to bring people together socially through other means and technology. And so I appreciate that we're working hard on that. I also want to say that and to Councilman Price's point, we kind of talked about golf courses and beach paths and all of those things. And the barrier to getting all communities in the city access to those is really the fact that our parking lots are closed and that is a decision that the city has made and I am not in support of that. I have one of the largest parks in my district and I have the city's largest park and the gates have been closed. And that is not fair to residents across the city who use that service. We as a city have made the choice to close that parking lot. It's come for us to open it. I also think it's time for us to encourage those who do not act appropriately, physical distance, to be told they cannot participate in the park and to be asked to leave, and that there can be a methodology for which we similarly monitor the bike path. And I feel like in my communities the residents are really monitoring each other and I think that that's been very helpful. So. Mr. MODICA We talked a little bit about that. The city is the one in judgment of outdoor recreation and that a plan would be coming. But what what context can you give us? Are we talking about the Billie Jean King tennis courts over in central Long Beach? Are we talking about opening up our fields where kids could again run and play soccer as long as they don't touch the ball and they're playing with a smaller group of people where they're not getting close together, like, what are we talking about that can really get people out of the house? Because right now what I'm seeing is the parking lots of Long Beach Unified schools are asphalt and kids are playing soccer and other things far apart at their parents guidance and under supervision. But but that's not the play areas that we've really invested in and should be available to our residents. Speaker 5: Yes. So thank you, Councilmember. So we are looking very acutely at this type of question of recreation. So that work is happening right now. And the governor has provided some guidance about the types of activities that cities can decide could be turned back on. But he's also asking us to make that decision based on kind of the data and the medical decisions. So that is a role that our doctor plays for us and helps guide us on those things. I don't want to get into a specific list, but the things you mentioned are all being reviewed. We are going to be looking at our park parking lots. When is the appropriate time to kind of to lift that? And again, we are hoping by the end of this week to have some some good answers for you on what recreation could look like in the city again. I think we are going to be cautious. I don't think you'll see the city staff propose that we just open everything all at once, that we do want to make sure that our residents are doing any activities that we do on a recreational basis safely. And as you mentioned, that they would need to be spread out and that if we do see resurgences where people are coming together, we're going to have to take action. So there is a long list of governor kind of approved recreation. I think anything related to balls that are being touched and shared, those are going to be a lot more difficult than sports or activities where people stand far apart from each other. And again, we've never closed our parks for walking and and being able to actively kind of pass through. That is something that we always kept open. But we did restrict the parking lots for a while to really encourage people to not drive because that was part of the governor's stay at home order. So I think those times have to have changed somewhat. Again, we are sitting down and really looking at the data this week and we hope to have some meaningful answers and changes at the end of the week. Speaker 4: Well, I appreciate that. I guess I would only say that it would be great if we could open up a forum. And I know I've stayed in contact with a lot of the leagues that are in our district. Related to what? Social distancing, I'm sorry, physical distancing and other measures they can put in place to protect the youth to play. It's also important to look at the fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percentage of any youth that are contracting it. I don't know. I can trust the news media that's on television anymore because I hear conflicting things depending on which channel that I'm clicking through. There was some discussion about something that's in the the lungs of youth that really make them almost. Just so resilient against COVID that perhaps if you had baseball and they wore gloves and after each inning they threw them in the trash or whatever you have as an option. I don't know that. I think that the use providers really need to bring to us what that looks like, even if it's soccer and the rule changes that the kids can touch the ball with their hands any more. They can't throw the ball in, they can only kick it in, etc., etc. And the goalies wear gloves, which they already do. And those things are something that that our our youth are really missing out on. And to get what our neighbor calls, they do an evening walk every night where they say they're getting their crazies out because the kids are trapped in the house all day doing homework and schoolwork and they just need to get out and about. So the sooner that you open that, the better. I don't think I can encourage enough that we really need those facilities open. I know you've heard that from me at least three times a week since this has started. And if opening the parking lots is a component of our concern because of the distance. I appreciate that the the Fifth District has a lot of parks that people can walk to, but I just don't think that that's fair and equitable city wide. And perhaps we talk about coning off every other parking space to give people the space to get in and out of their cars and things like that. But and we just need to give people that access to our parks again. And I don't know what else I can say, but also within I talked a little about baseball. Within tennis, there are often people in the same household that want to play tennis together and they're already in the same household. And if those two people have the same ball, that wouldn't make that big of a difference. And so it wouldn't make any difference. It's the same situation. So just to keep those in consideration and then to again, if our numbers are great and our real hold back is the long term care facilities, then maybe we need to submit our own plan to the governor to be rejected or reviewed. We need to take a lead in moving forward and protecting the jobs of our neighbors. And people without jobs for a long time is another form of health crisis. People who can't pay their bills. That's another form of health crisis that's on its way. And we just need to work harder. And I really appreciate you discussing the restarting of the budget. As you know, many of my budget oversight committee meetings were canceled due to lack of staffing available from the city side to really support the reports that were necessary for us to move forward. The longer we wait, the tougher the decisions are going to be. And so we really need to get behind that and get behind it quickly. With regard to the governor's phase two, I look forward to as many businesses being open as possible. And for us really to tack down on the businesses that are not enforcing the social distancing, the physical distancing, I'm going to use physical distancing over and over again because I really feel like the social isolation of our our neighbors is just too high right now. But that physical distancing, then, then individually, let's let's take on those businesses. And then also, as we do open, I just want to add one context. We had a business in the district that was allowed to be open. It was an essential business. And they did have a rep, an employee that got COVID. And I think that those procedures that need to be in place when a member tests positive are really, really important. That particular business decided to close down and but every single staff member, regardless of if they were on that shift in their home for 14 days and then they went through and did some testing and evaluation of symptoms of all of their employees before they reopened. And they they kept the entire business closed for 14 days. They are a business that at multiple locations, they chose not to bring in people from another location. They really took it seriously. And I appreciate that. And I think that we need those kind of guidelines on a go forward basis to know and understand where we can go from here. So thank you again to my colleagues and all of the things that we've each contributed to listening to our community. And thank you to the mayor for the consistent reports. The only thing that I'll oh, I'll just say is once again an ending. We pay for our own health department because we have our own data and we are our own unique organization. So let's not be in a rush to follow the county or what they're doing. Let's stand on our own with our own data and our own circumstances and situations. Let's use the data and make good decisions. And in closing, I'm just thank you to all of the workers that have been working for weeks upon end while others are staying at home. And to all the moms and dads that are parenting right now and the teachers that are going into the community, I just can't say enough of how proud we are of everyone and how grateful we are to have you as neighbors and that everyone's really come together. So and thank you again and I look forward to the budget meetings so we can have some idea of a future. Thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilwoman. I'm going to turn this now over to Councilmember Pearce. Speaker 4: Thank you, Mayor. I had some assumption that I would. Everybody else would have gotten before I came down. I want to first start by just thinking city staff, thinking you, mayor, for your leadership. Council member Richardson said it right. It's moments like this. I think you really shine. Making sure that Long Beach is a city of the future. Making sure that we have great representation regionally, even at the state level and at the federal level. So I really appreciate the time that you guys are taking, and I appreciate every staff that's out there working every day . You guys are the front line workers that so often we don't talk about. So we know about our grocery workers, our nurses, our firefighters, our police officers. But I know that our city staff is also key in that first responding. So I really wanted to just say how much we appreciate you. I know it's an easy times. I know there's been cities that have had to take drastic measures. And so being a city employee at this time can't be easy, but really appreciate that the approach that our new city manager has taken and really trying to reallocate staff to do things like the testing and the tracking. And I want to just say that in the beginning. I also wanted to say that Long Beach isn't like other cities. We're not Orange County. And Saturday I, I take food to some older adults in Costa mesa, and I took the coast this time and it was packed and nobody was wearing a mask. Probably 1%, if even that. And it was packed. And I looked at their numbers because I was curious, why would a population not be worried? Well, they don't have numbers like we have. Their density population is not like ours. They don't have an urban core. And so their numbers are going to be different. And so there are expectations of how they live. Every day is going to be different than we do in a city of nearly half a million people in the space that we have. And so I think it's really important, and I think that that can be taken, you know, to understand that Long Beach is very different. The Fifth District is very different from North Long Beach. But we are our whole system and really thinking about how we approach coming back online in a systematic way where we are all part of the same system. And that really brings me to the conversation that the Health Department had today. And so I know every week we ask for a lot of numbers. We ask for those numbers to come in differently. And I really appreciate the fact that we have been laid out in front of us today. I want to ask you to reiterate some of those, but I do have a couple questions and I have some thoughts I'd like to share. First, this question is really for our health department. I had spoken with our health department director previously this week and talked about our long term care facilities and a lot of requests for people asking us to shut those down. And I know you talked about it, but if you could elaborate about what the state's thoughts are on these long term care facilities and how we are trying to flatten the curve inside those facilities when they I've been in many of the ones in my district, I've been in the one that has the highest numbers many times , and I know that it's a very different space. And so I'm wondering if the state has any other thoughts on how we're going to address those facilities at the state level. If staff could elaborate. Speaker 6: So right now we have state consultants that come in and are working with us and working specifically with some of the long term care facilities. And the key focus is really the UN is really the focus on the practices internally about how, how we're working with those facilities. Um, there are some folks who, and we've seen them in some other jurisdictions where they are moving some folks out and trying to create some space. But the people in our long term care facilities are incredibly frail. So, um, you know, we, we're sort of like that. We're not, as we look at the population that we're serving, we're not sure that that is the right step to take. And so what we're doing instead is creating the safe spaces internal to long term care facilities. So, you know, as I mentioned before, there are there are a set of rooms that are very specific to those who have been tested positive. There are set of rooms that are very specific to those who are who have been exposed but have not yet developed symptoms and then etc.. And for those who have not been exposed and those are very they're very discrete areas within the long term care facilities, the staff do not go back and forth. So if you are if you are working with those who are COVID positive, who have been exposed, um, then you are not going across to, you know, to any of the other rooms and really doing everything we can to tighten down any sort of other exposures. We are doing screenings as folks are coming in to make sure that, you know, that that the people are not coming in ill, they're not coming in with fever, fevers and other sort of things. And and then when we hear of of a case, we are testing as quickly as possible to be able to turn around. We also want to make sure that there is sufficient capacity for for PPE. One of the other things the state is looking at is the ability that long term care facilities have two weeks worth of PPE available to them were they to have to have a positive case or any sort of outbreak. So it's it's also working to make sure that they have all the things, just like our hospitals and other health care facilities to be able that they can be safe and respond as well. Speaker 4: Great. Thank you and thanks for walking through the different spaces that have been designed inside those facilities. I know one of the things we talked about that I'll say publicly just I think as we talk about separating out, we've had a lot of conversations about isolating. And this is a population that that remains in the same building. And so how could the state help us have these people more self isolate without being in the same building? And I know that we have spaces and we've really tried to get some of these hotels to step up to allow us to have quarantine space. But even if it's taking the healthiest people out, I know that this population, though, is struggling the most with the underlying causes that are really respiratory and so many of the other causes that the CDC has talked about. And so I just wanted to say that for my constituents that are also concerned with these facilities, that we are working very closely with the state. And I think that you're having those conversations every day. So really appreciate trying to address that. I'm going to dove into I'm going to talk a little bit about this being a case study, and then I have some questions about the reopening, and I'll try to be as brief as I can. But, you know, these are this is a unique moment in time. So for a very long time, we've had conversations around people that haven't had access, people that live a different life, life expectancy differences. In my district there is in between a six and a seven year life expectancy difference from my constituents that live on Ocean Boulevard in downtown and those that live on 10th Street. And they are that life expectancy difference is what we talk about when we talk about equity. And so in the health department, our health department comes forward and shares with us a data that says that African-Americans and Pacific Islanders and people are older adults, are the ones that are most impacted and then says it is because they have the underlying conditions. The CDC has said that individuals with chronic medical conditions like heart disease, diabetes and lung disease, the same diseases listed as premature deaths by air pollution. So when the CDC is telling us that COVID is something that that happened, but that there are cases where we could have done better to stop the spread and it's not necessarily washing our hands. It has to do with what's in our air. And we know that what's in our air impacts those that live along the 710 that live along the four of five. These are areas where you can look to and see higher cases of asthma, higher cases of cancer, and that these are the very people that are dying at a higher rate are being impacted, a higher rate than the rest of our city. And so my my plea today with my council colleagues, our mayor and our city staff is that as we come back online, when we talk about public safety, we really challenge ourselves to say public safety is about making sure that we're saving a life. Public safety is making sure that people live as long as they can without negative impacts. And for me, that means that we have a health department, which it's great to hear council members support for our health department and making sure that that stays funded. But it also to me means that we have to rethink some of the things that we do, not only in this area have we tried to ask individuals to step up, but for the city to really be aggressive about our efforts around public safety and around climate change. And I know that's not something that a lot of us have been talking about, but I bring it up because the CDC, I've done a lot of research in the last couple of weeks. The CDC draws a direct correlation. Harvard just released a study that says that in Manhattan alone, just up until the beginning of April, 400 people died in addition to what would have because of the particulates in the air. And so I see that whenever we talk about coming back online or we talk about bikes, when we talk about parking spaces, reducing the number of parking spaces. I hope that we can be thoughtful about how we come back. And then as we were talking about where to spend our resources, you know, I had a great conversation this week and I won't name names someone in the city that talked about a joint purchase agreement that we have for 11 solar projects in the city. And what was great about that is we went into a purchase agreement and that the city now is locked into a 2% increase every year for our energy at those facilities as opposed to a six or 8%, which is what is projected. And so how can we really have a holistic, systematic look and say, these are some things that we can do differently as we come back online? It is a difficult task, but I think the team that Thomas put together, the fact that everybody is working across departments and departments, that they haven't worked together before. I have hope for that. I also want to say, I think that there's when we talk about public safety, my office was already starting to talk about reimagining public safety again with this idea around how do we extend life and how do we make sure that people have access to the resources that they really need? And so I appreciate that you guys have listed a long list of things to possibly be cut and that some of those are police academies and fire academies. I would like to have an understanding, and I'm sure you guys plan on doing this, but of how many officers we have, how many firefighters we have, how many people that are working with our homeless, do we have an understanding that if we cut some of those areas, does that mean that we're going to lose out on grants? So we know our health department historically has been funded by grants. I know our fire department has some grants that that they depend on. And so I'd like to understand that when whenever heard this item, when you guys come back to us is really making sure that we're not just taking a quick approach. I think Councilmember Richardson said it well, you know, we need to make sure that we're being holistic and thoughtful about where we cut and how that impacts those communities that have suffered the most over the long term. And really what's happening right now is when African-Americans, Pacific Islanders and our seniors are being more affected. It's not the districts that they live in that are paying for it. It's all of us. It is on all of our shoulders. So how do we make sure that we have a systematic approach that is thoughtful and forward thinking in that? So that's my soapbox. I'll get off my soapbox now. I'm not done, though. So on the reopening, I think it's important to talk about what it looks like cost May 15 and being mindful about how we communicate that. Tom We've had conversations about communication, and I expect that we'll see great things in that area. I have some concerns about what it will mean for some of the workers and the renters whenever they get offered their job back at 10 hours a week or 15 hours a week. What does that mean for them with their benefits? I mean, I've. People aren't getting a phone call back in two weeks. People still haven't received checks that have applied for unemployment. And so I want to have an understanding of that. I don't know if that means that we have a rep from EDV kind of share with us what that means so we can ensure that the safety net isn't pulled out from underneath people. I have a family member that that is a singer and she has been doing songs for churches over a video like this and she lives in Texas. So May one, they lifted the order and then the church said, Well, you have to come in and we're not going to pay you. Well, she has an underlying health condition. And so how are we going to make sure that when things reopen that we're not putting people back at risk? These are questions that I think have to be answered before we send off any reopening plan. Well, I love the idea of having a plan and understanding of what it means for each business. We have to really think through those impacts and what's going to happen three and four steps after we reopen. I also have questions around office buildings. I know in downtown we've really struggled to try to get at capacity. And if we're coming back and we're having people work from home more, I think there needs to be a good balance in that. And what I would advocate for from somebody whose my ex-husband transitioned to work at home several years ago, and it had an impact. It has an impact on people's mental health. It has an impact on how many hours they work. I know many of us are working longer hours because there's no break to get up and go get your kid or do something else. And you're constantly trying to to get everything done and then you get in a groove. So recommending that people go back to work, maybe in the office two days a week, and that that's how we social distance, but that people still have a community connection. I would look forward to seeing some of those conversations to be had. I love the idea and I'm sure we'll talk about later about outside spaces and dining. I think that's fantastic. And then I will. One question on finance. Let's make sure I get them all. The other question I would say is I've, as I've talked to others, is as we're talking about our budgeting, understanding that oil is something that is fluctuates, that it went -$40 a barrel, and now our our budget is dependent on that. How do we have a five and ten year plan that coincides with our climate adaptation action plan so that we are not reliant on those funds in the same way? And if we are that those funds are being used in a way to neutralize the impacts of those funds. And I think. Office buildings stay at home. Libraries. I love libraries. I'm anxious about how porous books are. It makes me anxious. I think that that's so I really guess I don't have many more questions. I really appreciate staff. I look forward to a lot of hard work that we have in front of us. I know it won't be easy, but I'm very, very proud of the entire team that's worked on this, from economic development to our health department , to everybody that goes out and does a little things every day. So thank you guys very much. Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilmember. Thank you for your I think you raised a lot of great points. Appreciate that. Let me turn this over to 1/2. That the Q I think it's council members. COOPER Not 1/2. Council member, supra. Yes. Thank you. Speaker 3: Okay. Thank you. Appreciate the mayor's work and the presentation. I'm just going to cover some issues that haven't been covered and I'll be very specific and hopefully very brief. So the first item I'm going to go back to John Chrysler's presentation and it happened to be slide number 56. If you guys recall, it had the words steps residents can take and steps the city can take. And on the right hand side, it was under steps the city can take. And the largest word on that graph was testing. So I would like to look at that word from a business or through a business or economy lens right now, and that is for businesses reopening. I think we're going to have a real need for there to be a testing that's available for asymptomatic and non essential workers. So, for instance, if you want to reopen your restaurant or let's say a hair salon, you might want to get your crew tested. And so that would be critical that we step up and provide that to the non-essential workers and asymptomatic workers. And also the turnaround time, I think the last quote I got was 72 hours. So, you know, within California labor laws, this is not something the employer would do. Is it wrong? You would be on the clock to do this. So I think it's imperative that we do this efficiently and get the results back right away. The second point was on page 63 or slide 63, and I think Councilmember Pearce just touched on it and these are, you know, actions in response to financial budgetary situations. And I think we can all look at these the hiring freeze, you know, and. Speaker 0: Reconsider summer activities and. Speaker 3: Programs. But the one that was mentioned that I think I'd kind of take a hard line on was defer summer police and fire academies. I think that this would kind of be off limits for me. And I'll just speak to the fire academy that training centers in the fourth District. So if, in fact, we do this, this is the epitome of kicking the can down the road or planning to a future generation of council members. I think the impacts of this will be felt for a long time and it's very difficult to recover from and a missing academy. The other part that bothers me a great deal is these are first responders. This is a population that is susceptible to COVID 19. And heaven forbid if you ever had an outbreak within our first responders, you certainly wouldn't want, you know, reduced academies or reduced replacement forces overall. So those are just two drilling down, just kind of getting to particular isolated items. I noticed in the presentation they really weren't mentioned in detail before. I certainly have interest and everything else that was mentioned, but I just wanted to cover those two points for now. So that's what I have. Thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you councilmember super now appreciate that and councilmember you know. Speaker 3: A man. Well, the maps. Speaker 0: You're on, you're on. Speaker 3: Okay. I couldn't access a roundabout in person. You know, as we all were listening to the presentation and we all made our list of topics that we want to touch upon. And I want to thank all my colleagues ahead of me. I had to cross out a lot of my little asterix and point all the time. So I'm not going to take a very long time because only the questions that I had were asked and there was response to. But one thing that did come up very much at the high point and they circled it, underlined it in all that it is our health department. What a wonderful department we have in the city of Albany. And I remember a few years ago we were actually making some drastic cuts. Because we need to work. We need to balance the budget. I wasn't on the panel, obviously, but I was working for the health department at the time. And it was it was horrible that we were looking at having to make something drastic cuts the Iraqi it. What a valuable lesson we have now that we're doing this in this stage here. And so I of that when I first got elected and I said, you now we need to institutionalize our health department. They're 95% crap funded. So they rely a lot on outside sources to do their work. Epidemiology, which is what we're dealing with now, is huge. And I think our department has been basically almost, almost eliminated. We need to bring it back. So when it comes down to it, it's all about. Everything that we are talking about tonight, everything that we're considering for the future. Has to do with test. And the amount of testing that we do will determine where we will how we're going to roll out in stages one, two, three and four, because it's all determined, tested, and it is simply not enough of that going on right now. I asked the city manager the other day. About how we do the testing and the testing available for for everybody. And, of course, there's not at the present time, the testing that is only taking place is for essential employees. And workers and. Myself or my kids or anybody else who feels that they want to take a test, they will have they have to go either to a company facility or the city has opened up their testing to everybody, but not alone. So the questions that were asked earlier about, you know, getting getting the statistics in terms of testing results, whether you're here or Riverside or where else, whoever, does it really matter to me, what matters is we need to get through our testing, our testing capacity. That's the only way we're going to be able to determine whether we're operating to a stage one, two or three or four or three reopening. And that's what it relies on. And until we get a vaccine, that will make it possible for people to go in large settings like. All games and parts. Well, there are conventions and a lot of big events. I think that we're basically looking at a time bomb here without having enough tests around and determining what the extent of the damage is for communities with this virus. So those are the only two things that I have thought that will be covered pretty much. But I do believe that we need to applaud our healthy with the work that they've done. And it's going to be a very tough budget year. And I certainly hope that when we look at the budget for our health department that we institutionalize important parts of that department so that we are assured that they are thriving, that they have the tools and the equipment they need to do their jobs and keep us safe. And now get off that dinosaur. Thank you very much. Speaker 0: Thank you. Councilmember Let me go ahead and go to Councilwoman Zendejas. Speaker 2: Thank you. I was trying to get on. Thank you very much. First of all, I would like to congratulate and thank Tom and city staff for this awesome presentation that you guys put together. I think that, you know, it's very important for us to share this information with all of our residents. I know that you've been wonderful in keeping as the council updated, you know, throughout every process of this of COVID 19. But it really it's really important to also include and share all of this information with our residents. And you've been doing such a great job at this. This presentation was able to answer a lot of questions that my constituents have been asking and stuff. So I'm. And if my constituents have been asking that, that means a lot of other people had the same kind of questions. I also want to give a huge congratulations to our health department. Like Councilmember Oranga said, our our health department has really stepped up for us right now in this crisis that nobody nobody imagined we could be in. But actually, you know, we're here and they have stepped up and, you know, they have done a remarkable job and are continuing to do a remarkable job. And the the only reason that we have a really phenomenal health department that's able to have the resources to actually help us through this is because of the great people that we have working in our health department. So starting with you, Kelly, thank you very much for that, for your leadership in this, for your strength through all of this. And you really, really have are taking this city to a new level in that respects and and making us so very proud of having our own health department here in Long Beach. I was also going to address the issues regarding the nursing homes, but thank you to Councilmember Pearce, who has already addressed those issues and has actually answered most of my questions from there. I also wanted to say a big thank you to Jake for the language access. I think that it's very important in a city like ours where we have so much uniqueness and so much diversity that we actually provide resources so that everyone who lives in our city can have access to what is going on and in the language that they feel most more comfortable in. So thank you. Thank you very much for that. I feel that we also need to continue looking at this issue through our equity lens because it is very important to know that. And I think we all already know this, you know, but I just want to say and again, that, you know, this really, really is going to impact and is having a greater impact on those with less resources at their disposal. And those are the ones that are being affected the most. So we need to continuously look at it and look at everything actually through an equity lens. So thank you for for doing that. And I also want to say that I am in total agreeance with Councilmember Super Na in regards to our fire department. I know that there's been a proposal, you know, consideration of making cuts here and there, and there are some that we are going to have to do, and there are a lot of them that will be hurting us. But I think that that right now we cannot afford to to do cuts to our fire, especially because we need new people. We need more people in this. And this outbreak has just showed us the importance of public safety and fire being fire being very essential, I think is very, very critical. We could look, if we want to make cuts, maybe we should look at other ways within the fire department that we can make cuts. But I think having our academy and having people come in and new people and come in into our fire department is going to be very important. I also want to give a huge congratulations to John and Sergio from our Economic Development Department for just being so open to the community and being so eager to restart Long Beach. But we. In Long Beach the right way. I myself am also very eager to get Long Beach reopened again. But I really, really want to make sure that we open it in the correct way so we can remain open and not have a relapse and not have to come to this again and have to repeat this because once in a lifetime, it's way too many times to do this. So thank you. Thank you, John, in the Economic Economics Department for helping us through this. I know we've been working really close on trying to see how we can help our small businesses, our businesses and everything reopen here in Long Beach. And it's it works so much better when we all work as a team. So, you know, I think I think that this is really good. So with that, I know that we've all been talking a lot. So I just want to make sure that, you know, I say thank you. And I've never been prouder to be a resident of Long Beach than I am today. And having all this all of us work together on that. So thank you very much for this. Speaker 0: Thank you. Vice Mayor. The Andrews. Speaker 3: Yes. Yes. Thank you very much. You know, first of all, I want to thank Tom in the health department and most of the staff, because the things that we're reviewing tonight, I think each of us realize the situation that we're in. And I heard the mayor and I felt the same way about this as well. After this is over, you guys, we're going to reduce the influx of homelessness. We really don't get this right. And that's one thing I don't think we need to really go through a repeat of. We've got the fact that the crisis is bad enough, but our homeless is in that same situation. So I really hope that we really take a serious look at that. And I truly want to thank Eimear for that update every day because everyone is busy to listen on their reading. And I think that's a great job. Now what you're doing with that update every day with reports, right, without consequence, an uproar. I don't think we can afford to realistically talk about messing with the academy, especially on first responders, because these are the individuals, like I say, whether we have this crisis or not, they're going to be there and we tend not to talk about that in the last that we did the. But this cannot be one. We're going to need this more than anything. Not about individual talk and interview services. We need that academy more than anything now. I really hope in the current situation we really kind of take a hard look at overlooked situation and move on to something that I think we will be willing to tighten our belts, but not, you know, academy. And that's all I can say. Thank you very much. Speaker 0: Thank you, Vice Mayor. I have a couple of people that have queued up that have already gone. But I do have an Austin queued up that has not gone. So I'm going to take them and then go up to the folks that have already talked. Councilman Austin. Councilman Austin. Councilman Austin Rokita. Are you on mute? Hello. Okay. I'm going to move on and we'll come back to. I will come back to Councilman Austin, Councilwoman Mongo. Speaker 4: Hi. Thank you for the opportunity to reach you to two things that were brought up by Council colleagues that I know that the data isn't out yet, but we're working on seeing and understanding more. I spoke with someone pretty high up in L.A. County testing the chain of command today, and they're spending over $1,000,000 a day on testing related to individuals who don't have symptoms. And as you might imagine. A majority of those tests are projected to come back that they don't have it. However, they could, in fact, have it a day or two later. And so. Speaker 3: That's one of those. Speaker 4: Challenges with the discussion. I'm very interested in our city pursuing the antibody testing. I know that there's different levels of antibody testing in terms of what medical directors feel is reliable, but I think that's really the direction that we need to go so that people can know that they've had it and therefore in the past, then they can kind of reengage. The other thing I do want to echo is we need to somehow project what our requirements are going to be, because if we get into a position where we don't run these academies and we don't have any people, I mean, we're going to be in a tough situation should another medical. Speaker 3: Emergency come. Speaker 4: Or a second wave. And so I want. Speaker 3: To. Speaker 4: Kind of repeat and give emphasis to the comments of my colleague, Councilmember Super. And I am comfortable that those academies are critical. I've looked at some of our fire agencies throughout the region that didn't do hiring for years and years, and they are now really hurting. And my concern is right now, after a pandemic where people are better understanding. Speaker 3: The importance. Speaker 4: Of and the ability and being one of these first responders, we might have individuals who lost their job but may consider a career change. And it might be a perfect time for them to enter the market. And if we don't seize the opportunity and running the academy at this time, we may miss that. They might go back to a different career line and then get back into it and not consider transitioning over 911 with a time where my husband with a college degree said, Now's the time I need to serve, and went to the Army recruiter's office and signed up. There are going to be individuals like that. That would be amazing. First responders, firefighters, police officers, nurses and for our city. And we need to be able to take those on. So we do need to look at ways to say, I'm the first to say let's not spend money we don't have. But I also am one who says. If you have a small hole in the roof, if you don't hatch it and spend that money to invest, you're going to be in a lot more of a world of hurt when that flood or that that rain comes in the water again. And now you have mold and all these other issues. So let's make sure that when we get these recommendations from the city manager, that we begin with the end in mind of what the residents need, not just today and tomorrow, but two years, four years, five years from now. And I know it's unusual that anyone wants to announce when they're going to be retiring, but perhaps there could be some kind of partnership with our unions to get some real good at retirement data from our first responders that we could use to do some better projections. And I would also say that I've worked with our finance office on some potential bring back retiree re hires for our reserve programs. And there's even some pension savings that could be had had we done it. How we do it. Right. Those numbers worked well when I worked on with John GROSS. But to make it a possibility, we really need to talk about a state legislative opportunity in the CalPERS system. And so I know I've been trying to connect with Kevin Jackson now for probably a week or two on what that looks like and if it's possible . But then we also need to connect with our state senators and our Assemblymember Patrick. Speaker 3: O'Donnell and our. Speaker 4: Other state senators and Assembly members to see if they can rally behind something that could really be a savior to our budget and to the number of first responders that we are able to retain on a go forward basis. Speaker 3: Thank you. Speaker 0: Thank you. I have Councilman Richardson cued up, but I had gone to Councilman Austin. Are you able to you there, Councilman? I don't know. It's looking like maybe he. Is he muted by the clerk on this call? Should it be? Not an option. Can you? We're not getting Councilman Austin. City clerk. Can you check in with the council member to see what's going on there? I'll go to Councilman Richardson. Councilman Richardson. You're on mute. Right. Okay. Speaker 3: All right. Okay. All right. Well, I just wanted to conclude, I thought I heard some common themes tonight from a number of the council members. One in particular was, you know, we certainly want to want to keep, you know, be mindful of the health data. But as soon as we want to sort of prioritize the recreational use, then I heard a number of council members mention that. And I want to make sure that, you know, I left that up. And, you know, when they hear that the city manager understand that received that some of that either is reflected within the motion or if need be, the motion, or I just want to say that very clearly, you know, some direction for the council would be to make sure that that recreational you heard of a number of people that recreational opportunities are sort of prioritized when the time comes. I think that's something we control. I think it's easy for us to track and it's a good test of sort of other things that we don't have direct control over. I heard a lot of concern about about public safety with a number of different definitions on that. And I think we're just going to have to be we're going to have to communicate with our employee groups and, you know, about about, you know, all of these different decisions. And I know that we know that we typically do that, but it's incredibly important. And no one wants to see, you know, our first responders, our firefighters and our police officers taking cuts in this moment, particularly when, you know, it's a health emergency. And our firefighters, for example, you know, a lot of them were infected right out the gate because they're our first responders. So to those who think that that lifted up that, I want to make sure we we sort of refocus on that. We have a good game plan as it relates to public safety and that we prioritize recreation first. Thanks. What? Speaker 0: Okay. And then I'm going to go to counseling, right? Speaker 3: Yes. Hello. Speaker 0: Okay. We can hear you again. Speaker 3: So, yeah, I think everything has been pretty much dead that I wanted to say. But I did want to just outline the fact that that did a great job with this presentation. And and the the city, I think, is handling this this this crisis in the best way we possibly can. Great leadership from our mayor, our city manager, our city coming together and responding in crisis in innovative ways. And so I congratulate everybody involved, including the council. Everybody is stepping up and doing what they need to do for our communities. Obviously, this is a health crisis. But listening to the the financial outlook for our city, this is also an economic calamity facing our city. And we are going to have to make some very tough, careful decisions moving forward. When it comes to our budget, a budget is going to be very difficult. There's going to be some impossible choices in front of us. I already hear my colleagues kind of drawing lines, and that's fine because we all have priorities that are important to us and we all have a vision for what a great city is supposed to be run like. The in my my estimation, based on what I've heard here today, I mean, it's very clear that there's this COVID 19 pandemic, and the effects of that has really set our budget and our local economy back probably ten years or more. Right. And so that's very, very important. I mean, I think we need to understand what that means. And yes, there will be cuts in the future in front of us. And I think we all need to absorb those those cuts as city council members as well into our own budget. The I think we have engaged residents to work with over the last week in terms of getting input from residents is something that I'm very proud of, proud to see the responses that came back. So, so much so that it seems that we did a good job of communicating that. And I think that should be almost standard operating procedures for when we have big issues in front of the city today. Our residents are more captive than they normally are more expensive and what's happening with local government. And so it's an opportunity for to to educate. And I think the decisions before us need to be data driven decisions when we talk about reopening. And there's a lot of good information in front of us that can help guide that. And I expect that. And we've heard that that those will be markers that will help make those decisions. But also what are lovely and and looking at creative options for continuing the service provide the service the level of services that we currently do in the city. I'll just tell you, my priority and the way I've always approached governing is that health and safety of our of our residents should be the priority. And that will be how I proceed forward with my decision making and keeping the safety as a priority for for for the residents of the city and everything that supports health and safety of our residents moving forward. You know, much has been said about the the value of having the health department. And I do recognize that value. And I do believe that we should be very proud of the fact that we have our standalone health department. But at the same time, with that, that comes great responsibility within our health department, an opportunity to I mean, because we think Councilmember Moore mentioned that we we can make decisions independent of L.A. County. We can make decisions independent of Los Angeles County. Orange County certainly is is taking another approach. And they are very close and will be concerned, you know, I guess regional partners in some respects. So I think we need to look at our data and make decisions based off of the data. Not not. And look, Ludlum have said and I don't know, Councilmember Longoria also mentioned recreation and youth sports. But let's keep in mind that, you know, we are now approaching the summer months. I mean, today the requirement is I think it was over 90 degrees. People are at home becoming more and more restless. I think it's very important that we at least establish some guidelines for for youth sports, and we don't have anybody on that. The task force representing most of those those organizations, I think it would be really good to do that as well because that is a major part of our way of life here in the city of Long Beach as well, just like arts and culture is, I would say youth sports is a very, very much important part of what keeps families going, but also keeps our kids motivated. And so we talk about recreational activities. Again, understanding the data, being as courses and careful as we possibly can, we need to make sure that our our young people are physically healthy and and inspired as well. And so and then lastly, I'll just make a point to say that when we put our stay at home orders into effect, I saw a remarkable response from our residents throughout the city when we when we said stay at home. I would say most people complied. I don't know. I would I would be I would say the. Vast majority of people comply when we ask people to practice dietary practices and use facial coverings when in public. When we go out, I would say most people in Long Beach are adhering to that. And so as we reopen in our our city, our local economy, in a phased in approach, I would say that we should trust our small businesses to do the right thing. We should trust the people in our city to do the right thing as well, because they've already showed that they understand the impacts and the importance of this. And so I think social distancing will obviously be a practice that will be with us for for some time, possibly facial coverings. And I think people are going to be a lot more cognizant of how they think they govern themselves with the right type of guidance and education from the city. So those are my comments. I appreciate every one else's comments. Obviously, we're in this together and we are going to this council is going to have to make some some tough decisions moving forward. But we have made tough decisions, you know, over the last eight years since I've been on the council and I can. Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilmember. I think Councilman Sun has, I think, your cue to back up. Speaker 2: Thank you, ma'am. First of all, I just wanted to agree with Councilmember Austin about our residents that they have been doing an enormous job of respecting the stay at home order. And I think that's why our numbers are the way we our numbers are. So thank you to all the residents of Long Beach who have been doing a great job in helping, preventing the spread. Another thing that I wanted to touch on that I forgot to mention earlier was. Site. Our response to two. Are our people experiencing homelessness? I'd like to hear more on that. I know that. I want to hear more about what we're doing right now and what we plan to do in the future. I understand that we are working with the state to help shelter people in in vacant hotels and and motel rooms. I'm happy that we have the Project Roomkey program extended to offer to our people experiencing homelessness. We still keep getting, though, a lot of calls into our office about people experiencing homelessness, and the constituents that are calling in to the office are more concerned for for them not be not knowing that there is options for them. Right. So that's one of the things that I know why I wanted to bring this up. From what I understand, the project Project Roomkey is for those individuals over 65 with underlying health conditions. I'd like to know if we have any plans to scale up this project to meet the needs of all our neighbors experiencing homelessness and other resources that may be available and other funding that may be available as well, including from FEMA. The thought of everyone in our city without a place to shelter in really concerns me. I'm. You know, it just makes me nervous to think that there's people out there that are not able to to get shelter, whether they are , you know, under 65 or, you know, in any circumstances. Because, as you know, there's also a lot of younger youth that are homeless in our city and that may not qualify for that. But that could also. Contribute to spreading COVID 19. So I'd like to see if maybe there might be a ways that the city could work with hotels to kind of bring together incentives that would help those hotel owners to help get some of these some of our neighbors experiencing homelessness off of the streets and into shelter where they can be protected. Speaker 6: Councilmember. So there are a number of different steps that are being taken right now for all ages. People are experiencing homelessness. So excuse me. So Project Roomkey is very specific. So yeah, so Project Roomkey is very specific in that it is either for people who are COVID positive or quarantining for COVID. Or for people who do you know who have not been exposed or, you know, have not tested positive, but that those who are older adults and have underlying health health conditions. So those are the two spaces where FEMA has agreed to do the 75% match and we are utilizing our state dollars to draw down those resources. Now, in addition to that, we also have the the Silverado site. The Silverado site is a congregate site. And we are making sure that before people go in, we screen every day before they're placed at the site as well as every day. We do have nurses onsite and others, and so there is space at Silverado that if someone is ill, whether you know that they may not have, that may just be, you know, sick, but not COVID related, that there is a space for them to stay. And then if someone is tested positive, then we move them to the isolation site. So that allows for places to that allows for people to have a place to sleep that is safe. And we're following all the distancing practices. So normally at the Silverado, we would be able to put it, I believe, our original one. We're just looking at basics like emergency sheltering, the capacity there would be 196 beds because we are doing all the distancing protocols and all the other things that are required to have the right space and safety protocols. We have 70. So we are as we are looking at sort of some of the congregate options, doing everything we can to make sure that we are providing the safest options possible. But so the the project roomkey in terms of the ability to, you know, cost recovery and those sorts of things is very specific in who it covers. And then for all else, we do have capacity. So the Silverado right now is not operating at full capacity. We do have the capacity to bring on another facility when those are full. And then we are also the winter shelter is now a 24 hour shelter. So that is going and then the year round shelter will be opening. It is still scheduled to open in June, which to bring another 125 beds online. So we're doing you know, we have capacity to expand. We have been reaching out to many of our hotels and motels. And we have someone on our team in EOC who has dedicated her time to calling and following up and spending a lot of time engaging with hotels and motels who that, you know, may have interest. So we continue down that pathway to engage and we could look at, you know, other mechanisms for payment. But to date, the Project Roomkey and the FEMA reimbursement is is has been our strongest partner moving forward. But we do have those capacities to be able to congregate settings that that allow for the safe distancing and safe practices. Speaker 2: Okay, great. Thank you, Kelly. Speaker 0: Thank you. That that concludes our our our list. I'm going to just do some close some some closing thoughts and then we'll I will go ahead and take a vote on the motion. I just want to just uplift some of the items that were brought up and just kind of highlight them because they're really some of the key, I think, pieces of information that got listed today. Just as a summary, I want to thank the staff. I mean, the fact that the city of Long Beach has moved 1.5 million people, 31,000 of the N-95 masks. And we've gotten those to nonprofits, we've gotten those to hospitals, we've gotten those to our nursing care facilities is really amazing. I just want to thank our entire team. I saw this team move really early on this issue and there's a lot of foresight and I just want to thank them for doing that. The wrapping up, too, over 1000 tests a day. Again, I don't know if Meredith is on this call somewhere, but I also want to thank Meredith Reynolds, who's part of our team and is doing a lot of this work behind the scenes as well. And I want to thank her and Diana Tang from from my staff as well. Early on when we weren't getting those tests, we had to go out and get those tests ourselves. And I think that Diana and Meredith and a lot of other folks in the city system got aggressive and started calling companies and getting those test kits. And I just want to thank both of them. It was highlighted by a couple of council members that we are tracking below L.A. County, both on the positive cases as well as as deaths. And of course, every single one of those deaths matters. And it's obviously not just a number, it's families. It's a there's loved ones attached. But I do want to just note that the city is trending a little better than the county, and the county is doing as best they can as well. But we were the number to look at also noted that of our 38 fatalities, 30 have been from our long term care facilities. It's where a majority, I want to say 80% of our fatalities are, and which is why there's so much effort there going on right now. Want to uplift the fact that our hospitality I'm sorry, our hospitalization rate has remained generally flat for the last 25 days, 20 to 25 days. And that's a really good indicator. I believe the state's indicator is 14 days to be flattened. So I'm proud of that, that the team has done such a great job in the hospitals. On that rate and a couple of other keynotes we have right now, our hospitals are at 50% capacity. And so when you hear a lot about other US possible reaching capacity, we have created that room within the capacity. We've got 225 ventilators that are available for for use and we've created an additional 500 beds to add that to the capacity of our hospital bed system. And so what all of that tells us, I think, is that within this stage one that the governor laid out, the city is meeting that challenge. And this stage has, has and is being met. And we're doing a great job because of all the teamwork and our employees to meet it. And so that's the information in the data that we need to have as we now transition into stage two. And and I want to note just again, that from what I have heard tonight from Tom in the team and in other conversations, it's really over the course of the next couple of days that we're going to hear a lot more about what our local process is like, of course, driven by our health officer and our medical teams. But we are looking forward to those meaningful adjustments to outdoor recreation. I think you heard that a few times tonight, and we're really looking forward to having those announced and and on our way as we go into this weekend as because people are really ready to to enjoy our community and our outdoors in a way that is. And so I just want to reiterate what we've mentioned multiple times and many council members that there seems to be some consensus and the data really speaks to there being consensus around that being something that we are moving into. And then of course, we know that our safer at home order, a ghost goes up until May 15th and I'm looking forward to hearing from our team on their best recommendations in the days ahead. And so thank you all for that great report. There's a motion and a second. And please, if I can have the clerk do a roll call on the motion district one. Speaker 1: District one. Speaker 2: Yes, a district two. Speaker 4: I. Speaker 1: District three. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District for. Speaker 3: High. Speaker 1: District five. Thai District six. District six. Speaker 3: Hi. Speaker 1: District seven. District seven. Speaker 3: I do. Speaker 1: District eight. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District nine. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: Ocean carries. Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you. That concludes the first item on the agenda. So an and an important one. So thank you all. Let's we're going to take a couple of items now. The next one's going to be item 27.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to receive and file a report on the novel coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, and provide input and policy direction to staff on next-step strategies for the City’s emergency response to COVID-19. (Citywide)

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Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you. That concludes the first item on the agenda. So an and an important one. So thank you all. Let's we're going to take a couple of items now. The next one's going to be item 27. Speaker 1: Report from financial management. Recommendation to execute all documents necessary to evidence a loan by the City of Long Beach to the Aquarium of the Pacific Corporation of up to 2,154,000 from the Tidelands Operating Fund Group District two. Speaker 0: Councilmember Pearce. Speaker 4: This is a staff report item. Speaker 0: Okay. You cued up. So let me let me turn to staff first. Speaker 4: Yeah, I just motioned. Speaker 0: Okay. Go ahead, Mr. Modica. Speaker 5: Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And, yeah, we would like to give a short staff report from our finance director, John GROSS. You know, the aquarium, which is a city asset, is also not been immune to COVID 19. They've had some significant loss of revenue, and they've come up with a creative solution to be able to continue to work on their on their issues. So I will turn that over to John GROSS, who will give the report. Thank you very much. The as the city manager indicated, the aquarium has been impacted by the COVID 19 and it's been closed. And to help ensure that the aquarium successfully weathers the pandemic, staff and the aquarium have and do recommend approval of three transactions that are for your consideration tonight. The first one pre pays the balance of the challenge grant that council had put forth a few years ago for 15 million and has 6.2 million loans yet to be paid to the aquarium that would be paid immediately in fy20. At the same time, the aquarium would prepay their loan that we made to them for 11 million. So we would pay them the balance of the challenge grant for 6.2. They would give us 11.1. The net transaction is that we would have 4.9 million in cash from the aquarium. Now that money will be needed in the future as part of the funding to pay the debt service on the city's 2017 bonds that would otherwise have been paid through the aquarium loan payments. So these transactions excuse me 1/2. I think we've got an open mic on somebody. If everybody can meet their phones, please. Thank you. The net effect of these transactions is to impact the Titan's cash flow and the appropriation needs, but otherwise have little financial impact. The aquarium, on the other hand, wants these two transactions to give them financial flexibility so that they can use the challenge grant for operating purposes if they need to do so. The third and last transaction is for a potential tidelands loan to the aquarium in case they need to need a loan to pay the 2.154 million that is due to us in October as rent. The aquarium hopes that they'll have enough customers to make that payment, but if not, and I suspect they won't, the aquarium will borrow some amount of money between 012.15 4 million that they need from Tidelands, and they will use that to. Speaker 3: Pay the rent. Speaker 5: To the city. It's neither in the aquarium's interest nor the city's interest to have the aquarium default on that rent. So that's why this proposal is being recommended. Either way, a loan for an aquarium default. The Tidelands Fund would be paying the same amount of money. Hopefully there is not a need for a loan and hopefully if there is a loan it will be repaid soon. However, there is no assurance that the aquarium will be financially sound enough to repay that loan. I do want to note that in your packet, the promissory note schedule, debt service schedule should have been noted as Exhibit A. It's out of order and it was marked as Attachment A, but it is the correct schedule. We recommend this transaction because it's relatively neutral to the city and it helps give the aquarium a major financial, a major city asset, the financial flexibility to weather the crisis. And that's the end of our report. And we stand available for any questions. Speaker 0: Thank you very much, Mr. GROSS. Councilman Pierce, you have a motion? Speaker 4: Yes. Thank you, Mayor. I want to say that I support this motion. I know that I talked to Tom about it. This was one of the first things that I did on council. So I have been wondering how the how the aquarium was doing. I believe that, Tom, you said that this would actually give us more cash on hand up front. Is that correct? Speaker 5: Correct with the where we front them the loan they pay back the other loan. It does present us cash on hand upfront, provided everything goes according to the aquarium's plan. Speaker 4: All right. Thank you. And I know none of us are fortune tellers, but I think that this is the right move the aquarium for the city. And I'm glad that we're in a position to make sure that they don't default on that on that grant. So I hope that my colleagues will support this item. Thank you. Speaker 0: I'm sorry. The councilman, Councilmember Pearce. That's a motion. I said councilmembers and De Vos is second at the motion customers and they have to have any additional comments. Speaker 2: I fully support this motion. Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you, Councilmember Price. Speaker 2: Thank you, Mr. Mayer. You know, I support this motion in the sense that it feels like we don't have a whole lot of other options, but we have thus far leverage our pilots operating budget. To support efforts of the Queen Mary and now the aquarium. And I know that perhaps there will be an ask at some point in the future for the convention center, which which are all city assets that we support. And we want to continue to support with the understanding that when we leverage those funds, there's less of those funds available for the districts that rely upon those funds to be able to have operations on a regular basis to be able to continue those operations without disruption. So to the extent that we're trying to support operations happening throughout the city and we're relying upon private funds to help some of those operations continue so that we don't have to tap into the general funds. The Titans operating funds are critical, but I don't really feel that we have much of a choice on this. I'd like to hear from John GROSS. Speaker 4: So do you feel like we have much of a choice in regards to this item? Speaker 5: Councilwoman Price I think there's always a choice and that's why it's before you. But it is my recommendation and I think you expressed it pretty well, that in order to support the aquarium and to minimize any potential damage, I think this is the best choice we have. There could be some pain here. And you are correct that the Tidelands is ultimately supporting this. And but I don't see a better choice at this point and hopefully it will all work out. I think this best positions us to have it work out. It may not. Speaker 2: Well, I appreciate that. I appreciate the honesty and you know that I very much appreciate when staff give us an honest opinion, even without sugarcoating what the realities might be. Because I think that when we think about some of the activities that we have along the coast that are part of the city's fabric, if we don't have Tidelands money to fund those, then we have to start looking at the general fund. So hopefully that doesn't happen. But whether it's District two or District three, there's a lot of relief that comes to the general fund by virtue of us using Tidelands dollars to upgrade bathrooms, run activities, support ongoing operations, including public safety lifeguards and police . And to the extent that we don't have money to support, you know, our critical functions in the tidelands, including police and fire. And lifeguards. I think we'd have to tap into the general fund, so hopefully that doesn't happen. But I know that our police officers and our lifeguards and our firefighters who service the typhoons area look forward to having an operating budget that supports their efforts as well. So thank you very much. Speaker 0: Thank you. Thank you, Councilwoman. Next up is Councilman Ringo. Speaker 3: Just totally, completely in support of this item. Speaker 0: Okay. I don't see anyone else cued up. Why don't we go ahead and do a roll call vote? There's a. And it's a. Speaker 1: Council district. Speaker 0: What can you do? Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District two. I. District three. I district for. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District five. Speaker 4: II. Speaker 1: District six. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District seven. District eight. Speaker 3: Hi. Speaker 1: District nine. Speaker 3: All right. Speaker 1: Motion carries. Speaker 0: Thank you. Motion carries on item 26. Let me go through a couple other of these that are shorter ones. And then I know we have another another item as it relates to cannabis that there's going to be some discussion on. So let me let me get into some of these other items or more quicker. Item 26. Madam Clerk.

Agenda Item

Recommendation to authorize City Manager, or designee, to execute all documents necessary to evidence (i) a loan by the City of Long Beach to the Aquarium of the Pacific Corporation of up to $2,154,000, from the Tidelands Operating Fund Group, (ii) the acceptance of the prepayment of an existing 2017 loan by the City to the Aquarium, and (iii) the prefunding of the Challenge Grant by the City to the Aquarium; and, approving related documents. (District 2)

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Speaker 0: High ranking. Adam. Adam. 29 motion carries. Speaker 1: Communication from City Attorney Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code relating to civil defense and the declaring of the urgency thereof read for the first time and laid over the next regular meeting of the City Council for Final Reading Citywide. Speaker 0: Motioned by Councilwoman Pryce. Can I get a second? Second by country. Speaker 2: Mr. Mayor, I'd like to be heard on this. Speaker 0: Yes, please. Speaker 2: So. So I have a couple of comments on this. First, I want to thank Monika for putting this together. I do have some concerns with with the language not not at all reflect the work of our city attorney on this at all. But I think the intent of this item, as it was suggested to council, reads very differently than what's actually on the item. So kind of to start with, you know, I think if we can try to keep. This item related to Code Red as opposed to a broader category of just general emergencies. I think that would be good. So my recommendation or my motion is going to be that this item be written related to COVID specifically. This in regards to the language that's in the TFF, I think it's very broad, but going into the ordinance specifically. So if we look at the red line version on page one, I have a couple of recommendations. I would request that the 2.69.070 that the term director be defined further to include city manager, as I believe that's the reference in this ordinance. Speaker 4: Is that the director. Speaker 2: Would be equivalent to a city manager. Is the city attorney there? Can they. Is that correct? Speaker 5: Yes, yes, I am here. And yes, that is correct. In the earlier in the ordinance, we were only amending two of the sections of this ordinance. And we the plan was at the conclusion of COVID, or when the emergency was over, we were going to take another crack at rewriting the entire ordinance to clean it up and bring it up to speed. So you are correct that the definition of director is the city manager and we we can make that clear in this red line version. Speaker 2: Okay. Thank you. The other suggestion that I had is still on page two of the red line version, the timing of this. It didn't make sense to me. Is it after the conclusion of the emergency or shouldn't it be upon the declaration of the emergency? I think were feasible. My intent would be that there would be approval from council where feasible before the city manager were to act. And is that if we were to get support from the council on that, is that something that could be worked into the ordinance to make that a little bit clearer? Speaker 5: Again, this is Charlie Parker. And again, the answer is yes, we could work that into the ordinance. The the issue that we were having specifically to cover and your first comment about making this directly related to COVID could also be incorporated if that's the desire of the council. But the health orders were changing so rapidly. We when this first was coming out multiple times, possibly in a week, and there would have been, to the extent practical to bring it back to council, it takes a week or two at the best or the fastest. So we were trying to be, as you point out, COVID specific with this and the it was going to be bringing it back at a later date. So I don't know if that answered your question, but that was the thought is that these are this was a fast evolving issue driven by health data. And the the health orders. Speaker 3: Were. Speaker 5: They slowed down, but they were continually changing there for a while. Speaker 2: And I and I get that. I totally get that. Charlie and I and I really this is has zero my comments have zero reflection on my trust in our current city manager. But if you look at the four corners of the document, at least what was presented in a council package, a packet, it really is very broad and it's not narrowly. It's not narrowly tailored to the current situation, which I believe was everybody's intent. So if you look at how it's written, so my my motion would be that this be narrowly tailored to reflect COVID related orders to the extent possible actions by the city manager regarding those orders should come back to the Council to the extent possible. I would request that throughout the document we have the term his. This is a very minor point, but perhaps coming from a female, I would like the language to reflect his or hers. We say this is language that we're imposing into our municipal code that will relate not just to Tom Modica as our city manager, but any future city managers. In regards to page two, subsection G is the assistant director. Is that the same as the assistant city manager? Speaker 5: And the answer to that is no. The director and I don't have the in the definition section and to to raise your point to gender. Again, we were only amending two sections, so we did not address and that that was brought up. And no, I totally agree with you on the gender issue. We had made changes through the entire ordinance or entire section, entire Chapter 2.9, but we felt that was too much to try and do at this time. So I totally agree with you that we should correct it. But when it goes into the municipal code, if justice want, these two sections are changed, it'll read differently. I don't have a problem with that, but we will certainly do that and we will certainly define in these two sections. Well, the assistant director to. Speaker 2: Yeah, I think that would be very good. I think that would be helpful in terms of the violation section, which is why I thought we were bringing in this document to begin with. I was frankly surprised. It was a lot. It was much broader than what we had discussed. But in terms of the violation section at 2.69.110, I would love in subsection in sections eight sub. Speaker 4: Two. Speaker 2: I would love that if we could somehow spell out law enforcement in there. I don't understand why emergency organization is in there. I think that's a little bit vague. And again, I'm perhaps I don't have the full language of the ordinance. I'm only looking at what's in the council package. But if we could include something about law enforcement or law enforcement officials, I think that would be very helpful in clarifying the document on page two of the whereas clauses. I would like the whereas clause that says to the extent possible approval, to the extent that approval from council is impractical, something to the effect of that there's going to be an effort to receive approval from council or notification to council because I think that's missing in the whereas clause. I also think that the whereas clause is missing the fact that the intent of enforcement is really education and outreach. First enforcement through criminal sanctions is is not the primary legislative intent. So this that's you know, I think we should include in the whereas clause that enforcement that education and outreach are the primary goal for any enforcement efforts. On page four, it sounds like we're trying to say that, you know, under section 2.6, 9.110 and your violations. It looks like we are. Talking about this as a misdemeanor. But then in the on page five, we talk about it's the sole discretion of the city prosecutor to prosecute it either either as a misdemeanor or an infraction. There's no waB let languish under 2.69.110. So I think we need to clarify that it can either be prosecuted as a misdemeanor or an infraction under the municipal code. And then I think that would naturally lead to the prosecutor has the discretion to make that determination. Speaker 5: I that's that's all right. Excuse me. But that's already in the mini code in other sections that this is the discretion of the prosecutor. That's be language was added at the request of the city prosecutor. Speaker 2: Okay. So we don't need to spell out that the offense itself can be punishable as an infraction or a misdemeanor. Speaker 5: No, because that's already in the municipal code. All violations of municipal code that are criminal in nature are at the discretion of the prosecutor. Speaker 2: Okay. All right. I mean, I'm looking at 2.6, 9.11. Now I see that the prosecutor has discretion under Section B, but Section eight only lays out misdemeanor as an option. So if that's if that's how the Miss the Munich code is written, then then that's fine. It's consistent with it. I just I feel like any resident reading this or or some that's this might apply to will think that it can only be prosecuted as a misdemeanor. There's no it doesn't call out infraction. But if that's the rest, the way that the rest of the code is written, then, then that's fine. I would like to add under section 2.69.110, sub a sub one it says after. Notice willfully violates or refuses to neglect, refuses or neglects to conform to any lawful rules. I think it would be important to put something in there that says after notice and an opportunity to comply. We want to give up people of notice, but we want to have an opportunity to comply before we start talking about criminal sanctions. I think that's the intent of the council. I might be wrong, but I think the intent of the council is to give people the education and give them the opportunity to be made aware of the rules and to comply with the rules before we start talking about criminal sanctions. So so my recommendations would be to approve this with the areas that I've pointed out as needing a little bit more clarification. Speaker 5: We can certainly do that also. Speaker 0: Okay. Speaker 2: So thank you. But but I would, I would ask council to consider limiting this to COVID because as it's written, it's very broad. And, and the timing of when city manager can take action without council approval is very, very broad. Speaker 5: And you point out that this is only this I do point out this is only after the declaration and ratification of an emergency by the city council. So while the language is broad and it is already broad, we are adding this to as a point of clarification and as an additional tool. I totally agree with Council Member Pearce Pryce that the the intent is to gain compliance through education and notice. But this would help clarify as as you know, there has been some difficulties in enforcing the health orders in other jurisdictions. And we are trying to the best we can address that with the changes that you've requested this evening. We can't do that tonight. We will do a rewrite on this and bring it back at a future date. But we could certainly make those changes. Speaker 2: I appreciate that. I mean, I think for me, I was really surprised to read this because it says it talks about you know, it talks about received and filed by the city council no later than at the conclusion of the emergency or shortly thereafter. There is a lot of opportunity for council to weigh in before the conclusion of an emergency. So I will again, let me reiterate, I don't perceive this as a problem at all for Mr. Modica. But the way the language is written gives a lot of latitude to someone who may. Not be as prudent or maybe as conservative with the powers as I think Mr. Modica would be. So I really want to make sure that we're writing a document that is narrowly tailored for a particular situation and allows for council to weigh in when practical at every stage of the orders. I don't want a situation where our city manager is declaring his or her own orders without consultation with the Council. And so that I'm just trying to narrowly tailor this to to account for that, knowing that this will be in our municipal code perhaps longer than Mr. Modica might be. City Manager. So that's why I want to bring this to your attention. Speaker 5: So, council member this is Tom. So I fully agree with you in terms of we're not looking to to do anything without, you know, kind of council interaction. And I do think you have to think about, you know, future people not, you know, who's here in the seat at the time. What as your city manager, I'm very interested in and is very interested in and so is the prosecutor in this section is really the violations part. So we would ask you to to allow us to somehow make those that wording so that if we do need to do citations, it's very clear and that we have that authority . That really is the important part to us. We could come back and clean up the rest of it later or make other changes or modifications. But that is the request we're getting from PD and city prosecutor is to make the violation section very clear. And it is it is absolutely our intent to do to do education first. We have not had to issue citations, and we're very proud of that because every time and every call we go to, we educate first and it rectifies the problem. So I did want to underscore the importance of this, to be able to have a clear, enforceable section. If we do reach somebody who is purposely and willfully disobeying the health order and PD is trying to get compliance. Speaker 2: That clarification. Mr. Murdoch, I thank you for that. My motion then would be to approve section 2.69.110. Entitled violations with the modification to the whereas clause include the legislative intent, which is that education and outreach are the intent are the are the priority in terms of enforcement. And that imposition of criminal sanctions is not the priority of this action, but is an option that's available to law enforcement if necessary. So that should be included in the whereas and when I would further request that on page four of the document under 2.69.110 sub a sub one that the language and an opportunity to comply be inserted after the words after notice. With that, that's my motion. Speaker 0: It's okay that there's emotion. I think councilors in the house seconded the motion originally councilwoman. The names. Speaker 2: Yes. With that. Seconding that again. Speaker 0: Okay. Okay, great. So there's the motion in a second. Uh, let's see. Comes to me. Ranga, you wanted to second the motion? It's already seconded, Councilman Mongo. Speaker 4: Yes. I also had the opportunity to speak with the city attorney earlier this afternoon about this item. I, too, have concerns. I think that perhaps with the comment from our city attorney that the goal would be to bring this all back and get it revised. What I would ask is let's have this sunset in 90 to 120 days. Let's go at 90, at which time the city attorney has plenty of time to work on and bring back a more complete picture of what is necessary. I also have concerns. I don't want to be using enforcement on the front lines. There are things that we are not enforcing that are far worse than some of the things that I see on the media and I don't want to of our city get to that point. We're very fortunate to have Mr. Modica and an excellent chief of police, but that does not mean that that will always be the case. So, Councilwoman Pryce, would you be open to a sunset clause in 90 days? Speaker 2: Of course, yes. Speaker 4: Wonderful that I can be. Speaker 5: Mayor and council member Mungo. If I could just request that a 90 day sunset clause may not be enough time for the covered in as the motion has been revised, it's only adopting the violation section. We can certainly bring something back to you before 90 days. I don't think you need to put the sunset in the violation section. We could come back to you with a revised either this whole section or just the changes that Council Member Price had requested to the rest of the ordinance before 90 days, if that makes it better for you. But I'm not sure that from a practical speaking, we'll be out of COVID and not need the violation section in 90 days. If that makes. Speaker 4: How about 80 days? I'd put us in a November. Speaker 5: We'll go with whatever days you want to put on. Yeah. Speaker 4: I just I'm really cautious that this council continues to give away our power. I mean, it's great that we have committees that advise us and all these other things, but at the end of the day, the buck stops with us. The people elected us. The people didn't elect the city. We didn't elect the chief of police. All those things. It is our responsibility to listen to the constituents and and our responsibility. And so if 190 seems too small, let's see. 120 would put us in June. Speaker 2: July, August, September. Speaker 4: I'm open 180. That's November. That would potentially mean that a second wave was coming. That's far enough time for it to be a priority to other offices. Councilman Pryce, are you open to revising to 180 days? Speaker 2: I am. You know, the sunset clause isn't that called to me? But if it's critical to one of my colleagues in the spirit of compromise, I'm willing to accept whatever recommendation you have. Speaker 4: Thank you. I appreciate it. I feel passionately that we really need to look at sunsetting more things more often and looking at them. I know we trust staff a lot, but I mean. 100 days ago, we wouldn't have thought that half of the projects in the city were on hold. And so this really provides for ensuring that future councils are protected and the wording has come back and is in place. And if not, then a future council can handle revising the language again. It obviously isn't too difficult if we can bring it forward at this time and we don't currently have any health challenges or health order challenges that are coming down on a weekly or daily basis. So we have that time to make those changes. So I appreciate your acceptance of my family. Speaker 0: Thank you. Next up is Councilman Pierce. Speaker 4: Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Councilmember Price, for redlining. This on top of the red line. I I want to go on record as saying i agree. I think it's important that the council maintain the power that that we do have. But I also want to make sure that we are in a place during a crisis or a disaster that our city manager has the powers that he has now and that he's able to be effective in in executing those. I know that we haven't been like Orange County, where we've had a lot of people out across the city. But we have had an issue in my area and we have had to have more P.D. presence out there on the block in the parks. And I don't want to be in a position where there's a gap in what we can do. And my concern today is that we are going through the state making changes. L.A. City, L.A. County might. And so I want to make sure I'm not a fan of ticketing. You guys all all know that. But I want to make sure that there's not a gap in what the people on the front lines are saying, that they need to make sure that their safety in place. So I know that lots of people probably have opinions on this. I think the motion that Councilmember Price has is a good motion. And so we can get this done and then come back, you know, at a later date and fine tune it. And I do think that there's a lot of energy that the staff is spending right now on items like this in the middle of an emergency . So as much as we can put it into place that now for future emergencies, I think makes sense. I'm not completely for or against sunsetting on this item, but I do think that we have to be mindful about making sure that when there is a crisis, that there are already rules in place that allow us to protect our residents first and foremost. So I support the motion as is and look forward to voting. Speaker 0: Thank you, Councilmember Richardson. Speaker 3: Thanks, Mr. Mayor. Thanks, Mr. Mayor. So I tend to agree with a lot of what I heard on the council, you know, in the meeting from my colleagues. My thought is. I'm a little on call. It is kind of hard to follow. You know, I have the agenda item up and it's kind of hard to follow all of the changes here. I think it might just be cleaner if we simply give staff a week. You know, if we amend that motion, just give staff a week to come back and have some of this worked out. I mean, I tend to agree with their editing language about, you know, he versus she that she or they and a little bit more time briefing the council members on the implications of this. We had a conversation a little bit earlier about how we want to be appropriate, developmentally appropriate, with engaging young people who may break rules and things like that, skate parks and stuff like that. You know, I think we need to have some conversations on that. I get we want to have some of this in place in case people say no to the social distancing. But I just think we need to take our time and make sure the council feels good. I actually would. I would. Councilman. Councilwoman Pryce, are you open to a given staff direction? You work on some of this and come back next week so we can take a complete vote. I mean, respectful of all of the things that I've heard so far. Speaker 2: But absolutely. I mean, I'm not. Curry I understand that the city manager and the police chief, of course, want some tools. And I get that. I mean, I'm dealing with this like tenfold in my day job with the beach cities. But I have I have no objection with coming back to it in a week. Speaker 3: I think that makes a lot more sense. Thanks for being open to that, if you would make that your motion. Speaker 2: So I'm happy with that. Speaker 0: Okay. So I think just for clarification, I think the motion is just to bring it back in a week with clarification that what I think that's what I heard Councilman Price in the right. Right? Speaker 2: Yeah, that's right. Speaker 0: Okay, great. I wasn't interested in anything else. Speaker 3: I'm good with that. Speaker 0: Okay. Comes from your anger. Speaker 3: Oh, well, that was going to be what I was asking for a point of order, because it seems that any changes that the reprisal is a substantial change. The ordinance is worded. So I was going to ask you if the changes were set up to go back and then make those corrections or adjustments as proposed. But see that there's a motion on the floor already to do that for a week. I'm good with that. Speaker 5: Council Member Your Honor. You're absolutely correct. Based on the additional motions of the sunset clause, this would have even the modified motion by Council member price would have needed to come back for a new first reading. Speaker 3: Thank you for that clarification. Also with you, certainly we can talk about in the future, I don't know if it's something worthy of discussion here or at a city council meeting, but the way I heard the discussion going was that there was a push towards adopting a growing portion of organs and in making changes that would come back later with those to the council. And that I think problems with that and I'm not sure that I would want to see a problem with this ordinance that it was other future one where we adopt the Parliament. We'll have a review for other parts of it to come back later. Any opinion on that possibility? Speaker 5: Councilman of Urunga, thank you for the question. Yes, I think that we were trying to be very narrow and it doesn't look like we succeeded very well. But we were trying to be narrow in the change to this particular section when, as I mentioned earlier, when we looked at the entire civil defense section, we believe that it's quite outdated and based upon what we have learned in dealing with this recent COVID crisis. We believe that a complete rewrite of the section is in order. But that's a that's a large undertaking. And it we felt the need for the violation section would be necessary to help us address what's currently going on, and we could wait on the others. We certainly don't recommend that as a general practice. You're very right. I think if we're going to address a section of the municipal code, we should take on the entire section and bring it up to speed and and do the best we can with that. But given where we are today and the resources that we have, we are just trying to narrowly bring back a narrow, minor change to the section, which some people obviously may not think is minor, but a change to the section that. And then at a later date, when we had more time, bring back the entire ordinance to be debated and considered by the city council. Thank you. Speaker 3: Thank you for the fabrication, that's all. Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you, Councilmember. Councilman Austin. Speaker 3: Yes. I got the clarification I needed when I queued up. So thank you so much. I'm fine with moving this item a week, but I do think it would probably behoove us to have the city prosecutor and or police to move on to some. Some credibility as to why we're moving this item. Well, thanks. Speaker 0: Okay. Thank you. There is a motion to second to table this. And why don't we go out and do a roll call vote? Speaker 1: District one. Speaker 2: All right. Speaker 1: District two. I'm District three. Speaker 4: I. Speaker 1: District four. Oh. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District five. Speaker 4: I. Speaker 1: District six. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District seven. District eight. District nine. Speaker 3: Hi. All right. Speaker 1: Ocean carries. Speaker 0: Thank you. You please do. I am 25. I'm sorry. AM 30.

Emergency Ordinance

Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach Municipal Code by adding Chapter 8.120, temporary enforcement of Long Beach Health Orders related to COVID-19; declaring the urgency thereof; and declaring that this ordinance shall take effect immediately, read and adopted as read. (Citywide)

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LongBeachCC_05052020_20-0391

Speaker 0: Thank you. You please do. I am 25. I'm sorry. AM 30. Speaker 1: Communication from City Attorney Recommendation to declare ordinance amending Long Beach Municipal Code governing the sale of unclaimed property. Read the first time and lead over to the next regular meeting of the City Council for Final Reading Citywide. Speaker 0: I have asked first and second place. A motion by Councilwoman Van de Haas, second by Councilmember Pearce. Members. Please do a roll call vote. Madam Third. Speaker 1: District one. Speaker 2: I. Speaker 1: District two i. District three. District three. District four. Speaker 3: I are. Speaker 1: District five. Speaker 4: By. Speaker 1: District six. Speaker 3: I. Speaker 1: District seven. District eight. Speaker 3: II. Speaker 1: District nine. My motion carries.

Ordinance

Recommendation to declare ordinance amending the Long Beach municipal Code by amending Chapter 2.78 relating to the sale of unclaimed property, read and adopted as read. (Citywide)

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