Absolutely. Mayor Lopez here. Vice Mayor Barragan. Here. Council member Brica. Here. Council member Gose. Here. And Council member Romero. You have a quorum, Mayor. Thank you. You're welcome. I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. It's good to have a full quorum. We have a pretty big agenda. So before we dive in, James, why don't you go ahead and take the opportunity to let us know about the translation services we have? Absolutely. If you would like to listen to the Spanish portions of this meeting, usually around public comment, please use the interpretation feature located at the bottom of your screen by clicking on the globe icon and selecting English as your preferred language. Si usas le gustaría escuchar esta junta en español, habrá interpreta disponibles. Por favor, use el modo de interpretación localizado de abajo de su pantalla, presionando el icono del globito y seleccionando español como su lenguaje preferido. Thank you. Gracias. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you James. Those of you joining in. Welcome. We're having our regular session of the city council. And I just realized we have not we want to know number two approve the agenda. So happy to. Energy in motion to approve the agenda. There are any objections unless you're an objection so moved. Second move the second. All those in favor. Sorry about that. We. Move the second. All those in favor. Sorry about that. That's fine. We'll get the next one. All those in favor, please vote with a sign of I. I. Yes. Thank you. Item three, approve of the consent calendar. Council members, this might be the biggest consent calendar during my tenure, though of course, I'm sure my colleagues can one up me and say there was a bigger one. But are there any items on consent that y'all would like to pull off for discussion? Again for those in attendance, that's items 3.1 to 3.22. 22 items do we have and some of them were spilled over because we were unable to have a quorum last meeting so hence the bigger packet. Give my colleagues a moment. Are there any items that we'd like to pull out for discussion? While we're at it, James, you want to see if there's anybody who likes to make public comment on any of these on these consent cal and it looks like we have a speaker on zoom Adrian Bryant. Okay, I'll I'll tee up Miss Brian in a second. Why don't we go to Miss Bryant?. Bryan, do you have a question on one of the consent calendar items? I eat. This would be a conflict of interest, all right? Thank you for acknowledging my hand. Give me a second while I meet my other meeting I'm in. I'm just asking that you repoll the commendation from Ms. Rosemary Still. I believe it's consent calendar item 3.20. I'm not sure if any of her family members are there to receive the commendation, but I just asked that you read full that agenda item so that we can give her her flowers post humorously. Absolutely. And if staff would like to remind me of the page number, that would be great. But happy to flag that for you, Ms. Bryant. Other council members going once. The big packet going twice. Then if not, why don't I'm maybe perhaps a matter of being in motion for all consent counter items with the exception of items 3.19. Some moved. Second. All right, as I move the second in, all's in favor, please vote with a exception of items 3.19. Some moved. Second. All right. Has it moved in second? All's in favor, please vote with a sign of I. I. I. Thank you very much. 415. Sorry. This is a big packet. Each. 2.19. Yeah. Better go to the next slide. Each you. People one nine. Yeah. I got a friend. Four nineteen. Thank you. All right. Okay. Yeah. Sure. All right. So folks, we have a lot of business to attend. We also want to make sure, as we affirm, believe to give people their roses, particularly if they can still smell them, but we want to make sure we honor the life and legacy Ms. Rosemary's steel. I'm happy to, why don't I go ahead and read the motion? And then colleagues can also chime in if they'd like to also add some remarks. So, and also open it up for public comment. It reads whereas Ms. Rosemary Patrick was born on September 4th, 44, mobile Alabama, is one of four siblings. She excelled academically, graduating third in her class from Williamson High School before earning a bachelor's in human services from Fordham and New York City. She moved to East Paul Alto in 1970 with her four daughters, affectionately known as the Bracey Girls. It became a proud homeowner in the city living here for 50 years, exemplifying resilience and determination as a single mother creating loving and supportive home and her family. She's dedicated 35 years of her career to opportunities industrialization on center west OICW in Menlo Park, which I believe is now for two as our Nova. If I'm not mistaken, job change. That's what I meant. That's what I meant. Oh, Larry Moody's not mad at me. That's what I meant. Job change. I don't know what that Nova. Yes, where she rose from clerical student to director of corporate relations, known as the job lady, Rosemary profoundly impacted over 800 lives, 800 lives through efforts in job placement and workforce development. She also contributed to the community through a work with the Ravenswood Union High School District, Ravenswood School District and Sun Microsystems where she developed programs to support the residents of East Pawl also, Anne Bell Haven. She was a trusted leader in advocate. She worked in the development project. She listened to the issues of the community. Her commitment to service extended to roles and leadership including the National Council of Negro Women. East Paul, a chapter where she was recognized as humanitarian of the year. The Lions Club, EHP, deeply rooted in faith. A devoted member of the Manol of Church in Menlo Park. And a president of the mother's board, she remembered as a beloved mother, grandmother, great grandmother, and a pillar of her mother's board she'll remember it as a beloved mother grandmother great grandmother and a pillar of her family and community with her love wisdom and storytelling and rich in the lives of all her newer a passionate cook she leaves behind a lasting legacy of love and service and is of course honored by her family William and Mary Patrick her siblings will be Frazier Richard Richard Pastric, her daughter, and her longtime partner, Wester West Bradford Senior, and she is survived by her children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, extended family, and countless friends. Before we do the, whereas the be it resolved, Council members, are there other things that we'd like to take this moment to honor Miss Rosemary Steele. Yeah, I can get started. Rosemary Steele, we call, I referred to her as Mama Rosemary. I've known her and her family for as long as we've lived her group with her daughters. She was really a pillar in the community, ensuring that individuals had an opportunity for jobs. And even later on, I remember working with her at St. Francis to provide hot meals to the community. So she was always really engaged in giving back and making sure that East Palo Alto residents early on had an opportunity for jobs. And she encouraged many. I attended her Memorial Service at the Manol of AOH Church and there were so many people standing up just talking about the great work that she has done. She will clearly be missed and one thing that I mentioned when I gave the proclamation at the church the day of her memorial service, let's try to give these proclamations and accommodations and resolutions while people are yet alive and can hear them for themselves because once they passed on They can't hear it themselves, but we want to make sure that we're giving individuals their flowers while they're yet alive So let's figure out a program where we can acknowledge those individuals in the community that have done the hard work that are still here So that they can appreciate the words while they're alive. Thank you. So next on point, Council Member, thank you very much. Other colleagues, would you like to chime in? Yeah, I want to say I wasn't able to attend the service, but I do remember meeting Rose Mary way back when I first moved here, late 70s, early 80s, and you know, through her final days, she was always involved in something. And definitely I served some years on job training when it was still called OICW. And she was very a key person in the earlier days when a lot of programs were being sent in motion. And yeah, I always enjoyed talking with her. She was a very calm person, very, you know, you see going in a way, but definitely hard worker. And so I think definitely my condolences to the family and another good example of, you know, people just doing whatever they can in the community. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Dica. I think at this moment, I would like to open it up while the Council members are thinking about their thoughts to public comments. So James, are there any members of the public who also love would like to send their share their words regarding the legacy of Ms. Rosemary steel. I'd seen none at this time there. All right well certainly on my end it's always a humbling experience to read and about someone such a pillar of the community, a story of legacy she'll live behind and when we stand on her shoulders and I'm sure I'll speak for many in the room. So thank you for your service and we will dearly miss her. With that I'm happy to entertain a motion to make sure we officially approve of this proclamation honoring her life. So moved. Second. I'm gonna have a vice mayor Baragon second. And okay, let's go ahead and take all those in favor. Let's go ahead and vote with signify. Aye. Very much. All right. Moving on to if I'm not mistaken, a close session. Yes, this is for public employee performance evaluation for a city attorney and city manager. So we'll be upstairs for a few. Can we check James? Is there anyone in the public who'd like to comment before we break for our closed session? Looks like Miss Adrian Bryant would like to comment. Hi, did you want to? I do. All I wanted to say is just give me a little bit information information from my experiences with the city manager and the city of turning. Sure. I can give you kudos for both of them who are always available to answer my questions. And you know, I have a lot of questions. So I'm hoping that, you know, whatever you're doing will be beneficial to them so we can keep them employed. Thank you, that's all I have to say. Thank you Ms. Bryant, James and other comments. All right, y'all, we'll try to be as brief as we can. We're gonna be upstairs having a discussion on performance evaluation. So maybe 20 minutes, 25, we'll see, but we'll be back for the rest of the meeting. All right, so thanks for being patient and we'll be back. you you you you you you you you you I'm going to go to the next page. I'm going to go to the next page. I'm going to go to the next page. I'm going to go to the next page. I'm going to go to the next page. I'm going to go to the next page. I'm going to go to the next page. I'm going to go to the next page. I'm going to go to the next page. I'm going to go ahead and get us get back to our schedule programming. City Attorney Lay could you give us a report out on the closed session please. I believe this is a sensitive manager. We'll have that word for you. Mayor, there was no reportable action out of the closed session. The direction was given to staff. Thank you kindly moving on to item six information reports. There are none item seven special presentations there are none but we do have a nice amount of PNA this evening policy in action 8.1 improving the EPA police policy sorry mayor believe we still need to do public comment guys i'm off my game Let's go ahead and we're winding that for a second. We're going to go ahead and open up to public comment as a reminder, folks in the room, this is for items not on the agenda. So if you see your item, you'll have to wait accordingly. But if there are any other comments that you or anyone else would like to make, speak now if ever hold your piece or send us an email or something either way. So go ahead and James, can you let us know if there are any public commenters for this evening? Again, for items not on the agenda. Absolutely, so we did receive one public comment, slip from Bart Pantorra. Thank you, now it's on, appreciate that. My name is Bart Pantorra, I represent the Building Construction Trades Council. We're approximately 10,000 men and women who work in construction in San Mateo County and many of them, those members also reside in East Palo Alto. I just wanted to take a moment to acknowledge tonight some of those members, specifically from I have the construction trays members please stand up from sheet metal 104 and from insulators number 16, Heaton Frost. These gentlemen just want to have an opportunity to know who they are. They start early in the morning in case of them need to get home and take care of family. Thank you I Look forward to the rest of this meeting that was all. Thank you Thank you next speaker Micro friends wall followed by Gil Wilkerson Mr. Francois please press the mic please like friends wall 2204 guy anyway five things. I just want to be a little bit uncomfortable. Mr. Francois, can you press the mic please? Like Francois 224, I didn't away. Five things I just want to comment on. First of all, I give all we said. We need term limits up there. They need to be implemented by either outgoing staff or in staff. Because a person in the state is 30, 40 years and one. Not acceptable. Even the president don't stay that long. Our governors don't stay that long. Second of all, the roads around here. At night, when it's reached the dark, in some cases, you need reflectors on the road. I've been telling you guys this. This is a safety issue. You need reflectors. It's cheaper to put reflectors down than trying to battle an attorney in court when it rains real hard in this dark. And somebody slides because he hits the wet paint, which should be four feet from the crosswalk. That gives the car at a time the slide on the paint if they hit the paint because it's slippery. And if he hits the asphalt, he'll stop. But now if he slides off and slides into the crosswalk and hits somebody, you guys would say, well, we put up the signs, well, you've been warned. There's a safety issue. You need to make them four feet apart from the crosswalk. And senior center needs a little financial help. Other senior centers around all our neighboring cities, the other 25 cities take care of their senior city. They're not begging for money. She needs help over there. Part time people, students, just little something to help them out during school, maybe $10 an hour, come over to help her do dishes, clean the floors, help set up for parties, give them some volunteer work and some cases. And we need more time up here, three, two minutes ridiculous. It's the only city in San Mateo County that goes to finish. Everybody else is three minutes and they break it down. It depends on how many people they have speaking. And last, I spoke to Mr. Romero about this. Next time you go to Washington, they'll go sticking your hands out. But money, when you're doing things, I think it'll ridiculous. You're covering streets, repairing the streets, but you got old pipes underneath. Repair, ask for enough money to do the streets in a pipe because if you come back, and if I was sitting there and you come back with your hands out again, I would say, Hey, five years ago, thank you, Mr. Francois, you understand. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate it. Next speaker, Gil Wilkerson. I'm doing Mikey on you. I have number of things here. Grievances. We started off with businesses. We see cultures blown up like Tulsa, Oklahoma, and they were insinuated that we would have a place to come back to. I spent 25 years. Okay. And what's the next one? Finding a place to, I had my office where Amazon is, right off the freeway, 101. I was there. And I got this place from there. I can't find a place in office suitable to work from. And I intend to do a Bring Back Dixon's Tax Service January. In fact, I'm doing them right now. OK? I would like to find a place and we're discriminated against. I go someplace and that really hurts me. I've lived in this city all my life. Well, start five years old. And they will not rent to me. They're discriminating. And I like for the city to take care of that. Look into it. If I was up there with you, I would. I know how to do it. And also, you have a traffic and parking problem, but mainly because you have three to 10 families living in houses. I think I said that the first time I start talking to you guys, get those folks out of there. There's laws. I feel sorry for them, but there you could feel so sorry for them. Find them a place. I mean, you got the money. And I'm wouldn't mic with the three minutes. Also, you go to other cities and you could talk a little bit longer before you can get your thoughts together. It's time to go sit out. And the high rents, San Francisco has adopted of the algorithm. This guy, I knew about this back way back in 2016, when they showed me how they determined the rents. They're taking away swimming pools. You guys don't know that. You're supposed to do some about that. They're taking away awnings. They're taking away, taking away, but then they jack, jack, jack up the rent. And that's not right. Thank you. Thank you, those are last comment. Thank you, James. And thank you for the reminder of public comment. We'll happen again. All right, this is gonna be item 8.1, approving the EPA Police Policy City Manager Gaines, who will be presenting this resolution. Good evening mayor. This presentation will be led by police chief Jeff Flute. Chief. Good evening. Good evening council and community members. Back on September 17th, city council approved the use of automated license plate readers to improve safety in our community. And during that meeting, council requested that we come back with a refined policy to present the council and get approved. So I'm here. All right, so objectives tonight. I'm going to discuss the changes we made to policy, Lexible Policy 428 and hopefully receive a resolution from City Council approving East Palo-Dope Police Department's version of policy 428. All right, so data retention was an area of discussion. The original draft policy from Lexipoll recommended one year, and if you recall during that meeting, I had not made any changes to that policy. I just brought you the complete draft from Lexipoll. So we went ahead and we changed that from the language that said up to one year, and we changed it to for a maximum of 30 days to coincide with staff recommendations and city council wishes. Data security was another issue that we discussed. The language we added in 428.4, we added, quote, all data and images gathered by an AOPR for the official use of these Pell out to police department and because no data contains confidential information or such data contains confidential information. It's now open to the public. This language restricts the data so that we can't be requested through public records act. If it's available through PRA, we would get daily PRAs requesting the data, and then that would go to private companies and be available for tracking people, and we won't prevent that. Additionally, all the images of metadata based on the technology that we're incorporating are encrypted from the moment it's recorded on the device to when it's uploaded into the Amazon Web Services government cloud. And they have that block flock, which is our vendor has experienced no data breaches. And that database is only accessible by government and law enforcement. Privacy and surveillance, as I already stated, for 28 makes the data only available on law enforcement agencies. Law enforcement access is strictly regulated, and I'll go into how we regulated that. Now we added language to the regulated and make sure that we're following procedures and they're very strict and we're going to be conducting monthly audits to ensure compliance with those policies that we input in place. So in the highlights I know that's a little hard to read hopefully you guys can read it. The department added the highlighted language so I went in the highlighted what we changed and what we added to the policy. And it clearly dictates very clear direction. And it also documents the consequences for not following the policy. We built in retraining and then progressive discipline, a corner of our discipline, our personal conduct policy, which is quite severe. The language you see in here, a lot of policies, a user word should, we use shall. Should is recommendation shall mandates. So we're mandating our personal to follow these procedures to the letter. And then accountability, we add additional language for compliance and auditing in section 428.5D. We replace the word should with will, which is a little bit stronger and has no ambiguity. And regular basis, we replace with monthly basis so that there is checks and balances and make sure that we're following the policy. And with that, those are the changes to the policy. And I believe in your packets is the finalized policy that we're looking to push out. Thank you, Chief. We appreciate a short and sweet presentation. Council members, you recall we passed our resolution and I appreciate that the chief came back out of abundance and caution really putting some type parameters about how we're implementing this pilot for our city. Do you have any questions or comments regarding this presentation? What's reflected in the picture? I have one while folks wait in terms of the disciplinary action. Can you walk us through? I mean, obviously we have an excellent department, but you know, in terms of the violation, you know, it's very specific that they have to put a reason on why they're looking at that that particular, you know, data. What are the levels of, or officer anyone looking at this and they did not give it a proper reason? Can you walk us there a little bit about what would be that discipline or what would be kind of the steps? Yeah, so if somebody like the first time offense, they put an invalid reason or put the wrong incident number or an invalid incident number. We'll look at it as if, okay, they made a mistake. Their access is immediately restricted and they're going to go through a V training program. So we know for sure they know exactly what to do. That's your warning. After that, if you do it again, then you got progressive discipline and we're starting to look at it like you intentionally did that. and if you intentionally bypass a system by putting false information You know that's that's honesty and we're looking at it from that lens. So we're taking this very seriously And then my other follow up and this will be my last one, on page 438 on the packet, it talks about sort of the policy changes we're making. And it makes a point about changing the policy from up to one year, or at maximum of 30 days. So in the Lexipool, I just wanna understand that correctly, in the Lexipool sort of policy or best practice, it has a year, but our city's only doing 30 days. Is that correct? Correct. Right. So we're making sure that we're doing only as much as we need to but really curtailing that and then you know That's the day they're racing. Right. Right. We we customize it to what our needs are and what our wishes are and what our values are But that year is what the Lexipool kind of suggests or that's that's been a practice across the state or Bay Area It's one understand that year. Yeah, Lex's oppose based on federal state law, case law. And so they take that, they analyze it, and they push out, and that's their service they provide. They push out recommended policies, but we're always able to customize that. Usually the state and federal stuff, we don't touch, unless there's a really good reason to do it. And I remember the ACI, you said at the end of the meeting that the ACI really recommended 30 seconds. Was that right? It was a very, very short period. I really thought it made it completely ineffective. So I think part of the issue too, and this is my comment that we have like 30 seconds on one hand for like ACI, but then you have a year. So there's such an enormous gap, right? And so I appreciate like the fact that we're optimizing a 30 day policy and I look forward to seeing how it's being implemented throughout the year. So, all right, those are my comments and thoughts. Council members, questions? If, oh, sorry, Councilor. Councilor Cacidic. If not, why don't we go ahead to public comment? Oh, Councilor Marbrica. Yes. Yeah, thank you for strengthening the policies. And even, like you said, the word shall be very definitive versus should, because then people have a lot of more discretion to say, well, I had to or whatever. So I think that's a small, very significant one. I'm also glad to see under 428.3H where you specifically prohibits using the system for sort of the usual mild practices like harassment and intimidation. but I'm glad that you included an included immigration enforcement. And one reason is that as you know, the city has a policy has had a policy since 2006 that prohibits staff of the city and definitely police from asking any questions on immigration status when people are stopped. So I think just given the time, so also this is a concern for a lot of the immigrant community. So, you know, I'm glad to see that that the officers will know this is also not a tool for other uses which, and you know and by the way, the reason I say that is because we know for a fact, and it happened even here back in time, some police officers individually, and they have the right to believe whatever they believe. But there are some officers who believe that they are holding the Constitution of the United States and that therefore any law broken, including immigration laws, that they are holding the Constitution of the United States and that therefore any law broken, including immigration laws, that they are supposed to enforce them and even arrest people. And so, you know, this is no version of police, but there are police officers who that is what they believe. And I remember our police chief, one of your predecessors, Ron Davis, who ended up working for Obama in front of me with a group of police. He basically said to that to one person who was making that statement that, sir, you have the right to believe whatever you believe, like everybody else, but the policy of the city, as long as you're an employee of the city, you don't do that. And so that's very clear. It's a, you're an employee and employees wherever they work, they have to follow the policy of the employer. So anyway, I just want to make that comment. I appreciate that it's in there too. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member. If there are no other further questions, comments, I'm going to turn to our city clerk to see if there's any folks in the audience or in Zoom would like to comment on this item. I ask any questions. James, anyone? So we did receive two speaker slips from Gil Wilkerson and Michael Francois. All right. from Gil Wilkerson and Michael Francois. Miss Gil Wilkerson. This is 8.1 about the automatic license reader. Yes. I'm all for it. I had a relative that was murdered in June and in Oregon. And they caught the person aside from the everybody had a camera on their house in the church. License plates reader. And they caught the guy, but they still can't arrest him. And I'm all for that. And if people how are foul about invasion of their privacy, you live in a society. I want to be safe from you. So I'm all for it. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, Michael Francois. Mike Francois, uh, what your chief has been doing with his license plate reading is fine. I've heard they've rented. They've caught a few things and they've dealt with it. I think it's fair. Doesn't hurt anybody because they're not pulling them over with the lights or anything or if they see the lights and play. It works out. It's peaceful and to agree with Mr. Councilman Breaka. I used to work in a jail in Ripet City. And we had an officer that decided that she was going to put immigration hole on a person. The immigration officer came in and read her to riot act and let the guy go. She has officers have no right to put immigration holes on people. Okay, they have no right to do that. You don't even have to make it a rule. But for my friends who's seeing this on a television or listening to this. That know me. If you have any paperwork this questionable, please start working on it now before January 1st. Thank you. Thank you. Those are last speaker. All right. Councilmember is what is our pleasure. We have a resolution here ready for approval. Are there any questions or further questions? Yeah, I have a question, Jeff. I still don't understand why 30 days is an optimal time. You know, are we assuming that if we keep the data for 30 days, there's some crime we're solving. I mean, it just sounds like an extended period of time that, you know, the the data whether encrypted or not is in control by flock, granted it's encrypted. I don't understand why 30 days is a necessary period given what you're using it for. So tell me why 30 days matters to you. So let me give you an example. Like if we're conducting a homicide investigation um we have to you know with our personnel we have to go out there we've got to conduct interviews of witnesses we've got to find witnesses we've got to track people down we have to find surveillance video it takes time to do this investigation and sometimes we just don't get a suspect vehicle until you know weeks after the event occurred. If we shorten it, we're going to miss that window. We're not going to get rid of the vehicle and get that license plate because that that will be gone. So if we do like a week, we may not have the suspect vehicle and then by the time we put it in the flock, we don't have the debt anymore. So 30 days allows us a decent amount of time to do that. I mean, as an investigator, I've spent many years in criminal investigations and spent a lot of time on cases. And frankly personally, I would like to make it two months. But one month gives us some amount of time so that we can quickly get to that information if it's available But sometimes it takes a long time to get that information that we need and know what card to look for Yeah, I'm just I'm just not convinced that 30 days is the right amount of time I think less is better its personal data Or it's certainly personal data when it gets whatever related to the owner of the vehicle and what have you. And it's, as I said, it's intrusive. I mean, we're also entering, by the way, that last time we had this discussion, was before we understood that certainly in Washington, there is going to be a change in the way, potentially certain civil liberties are viewed. that certainly in Washington there is going to be a change in the way, you know, potentially certain civil liberties are viewed, right? And I think Council Member, I already got kind of mentioned that, right? I would hate to see flocks somehow used, right? Because, you know, you can match that and it's, you know, some federal order you can match that with, let's say, you know, some vehicle registration and then the vehicle registration somehow gets matched to the owner and then there's, oh, you know, this owner is undocumented or something. I just, I've had some real concerns about kind of this, this invasion, this intrusion. And, you know, I, like I said, 30 days just seems like it's way too long. And, you know, by the way, the ACLU said 72 hours is a, I guess they called it a better practice. Their best practice is three minutes. So yeah, three minutes. I think it's three minutes, not 30 seconds. So, you know, I'm just, I'm a little reluctant to do the 30 days. I think what I would like to see, and maybe it's inappropriate to put it in this automated, automated license plate reader regulation, but I would like to see kind of a mandatory written somewhere that chief, you come back to us, whether it's at six month intervals or a year interval, and say, you know, this is how we've used this. And you know, these are potentially the criminal cases that we may have, and you don't have to say the cases, right? But you know, we did x, y or z with this, and this is how that information was used. I don't think we've codified that anywhere. Actually I believe, well I don't know if it's codified, but during the September 17th meeting, that was the direction that I come back every three months once we started using it and report back to council. Additionally, we're going to build a transparency portal on our website that's updated on a regular basis. And of course, we're going to post our success stories on there too. When flock is used to successfully solve a crime, we're going to post it on there and put it up there for public view any time, day or night. Well, so to the city attorney is not that it, does it belong in here, but certainly something to that effect saying that as the chiefs just said, every three months, when were if it was three or six, whatever the time was, you'll come back and explain to us how it's been used. I mean, I like it in some document. This is going to be a document that will be lasting. So is it possible to put that wording in here? Otherwise, how do future chiefs can be a long time? Never know. You're going to move to Washington like Ron. Oh, thanks. I think perhaps not in this administration. Perhaps what you do is make it a part of the retention schedule. Was that what you had in mind? The retention schedule here that's discussed in the area saying. If I can add, this is also one year of pilot too. So next year I'll be coming back and saying, hey, if it works out for us, I'll be, hey, I want to extend it. Because I already committed to coming back every three months for the next year. saying, hey, if it works out for us, I'll be, hey, I want to extend it. Because I already committed to coming back every three months for the next year. As far as I know, I'm not going anywhere the next year. Well, if I'm being interjecting, you know, you're looking at the right person. Looking at the right person. You know, I appreciate you having the expertise chief, because, you know, we're saying one month, you say two months, but reality, we don't know who's haven't done it yet. So one of the things, you know, I'm not going to be on the council. But, you know, when you report out to the council, it's like, what has been the average time? Like, what has been two weeks? How many times have you used it? What's the median of that? And that I think will give us some good, wrought data about what kind of parameter makes sense. Because I do agree with my colleagues from a left and right, we have a vulnerable community and we want to make sure we do it in a thoughtful way. But we don't want to prevent you from doing your job either. And so I think that coming back to the councils, the future council, and tell us like what has been that estimate time, has it been a week, has it been two weeks, are there big differentiations between cases? I think, because for me, from where I'm sitting, I'm not in your shoe, so I don't know what that average should look like for East Palo Alto. That's something that I think I'd like to add to the next council. Yeah. Through the chair, I also wanted to just mention, we know that there was a young man who was hit and killed in East Palo Alto, and we were never able to solve that because we didn't have these cameras. Had we had the cameras in place, potentially we could have solved that crime. Not only that, there was a senior who went missing driving her car, And because of cameras, we were able to locate her in Milpitas. So these cameras do work and we have a commitment from this community to protect our most vulnerable residents. But I think what we're trying to put in place is just trying to make the community even that much safer. Let's make sure that we continue to protect the vulnerable residents, but this is a Some the cameras are something that we deeply need right at this point Yeah, and I just wanted to echo that I I agree I believe that we should move forward and try it out for a year and I feel that you have been very thoughtful our council has been very thoughtful And we've given sound advice to put those safeguards for our community. And like, council member Gosei was saying there's so many cases that haven't been resolved. So, and I recently visited a country last week. And I was amazed to see this level of security that they have and people are on board and they're happy because they feel like they've actually gotten back their country that they have it back in control. So I just wanted to say that it you know does take a community to make sure that we put in sound policies into place so I just wanted to have to go to the office and I'm going to go to the office and I'm going to go to the office and I'm going to go to the office and I'm going to go to the office and I'm going to go to the office and I'm going to go to the office and I'm going to go to the office and I'm going to go to the office and I'm going to go to the office and with the city manager. So Are there any? Oh, yeah, so you know, I just want to say good. I think the city attorney's correct that we could actually put the three month review piece every three month for under section 428.4 data collection and retention, where it's actually in the policy. Okay. And I think, you know, the one thing I'll say about surveillance is that there are very few countries of any that have a bill of rights as strong as ours, that guarantees privacy, that guarantees freedom of association that really gives our citizens the right to be anonymous if they want to be anonymous. And so that is one of the reasons that I think we should tread very cautiously on surveillance, whether other countries want to do that, that's fine, but enshrined in the Bill of Rights, which was there because the Constitution was not strong enough to protect its citizens, right? These rights are guaranteed, and I want to make sure that we do not trample over them accidentally. Through the chair. Sorry, I just council member Romero just wants to let you know that. So we we did memorialize in this staff report, which I understand is not a policy that we will be providing quarterly reports. And I've also put it on our tentative agenda list, also known as our agenda matrix for March 4th, June 3rd, September 21st, in December 2nd for us to come back and provide these updates. So if that's not sufficient, we can add that policy, but I've also added it to our Agenda for next year since this is a pilot. I just think it wouldn't hurt to have an ad document that your successor or that you know future councils are actually going to be able to pull up as opposed to the staff report which I I Appreciate but I think if we could enshrine it in here if council members feel that's appropriate. I would You know debt I have no issue with that looking at a city of attorneys That's something that we could on the fly kind of say we want that added and then how would that work? Absolutely. I think you would just give direction to staff precisely what that would be and as long as it's clear to the chiefs and we're good to go. Councilmember Raman, would you like to make the motion with that? That would make sure we keep it as you prefer. Yes, so moves with the addition of that, move the approval of this policy with the addition of that wording we just talked about. Is there a second? Second from Councilman Goshear, been in motion by Councilman Romano. All those in favor, please vote with a sign of aye. Aye. Yes. Okay, I'm just gonna, James, did you get all our eyes? Okay, great. Chief, appreciate your work. I look forward to seeing this rolled out. And I think the fact that you came back and made sure people really understood how about for you being about this speaks. Bottom is much your department. So thank you very much. Thank you so much. All right, moving on to item 8.2. Yes, the long anticipated economic development strategic planning agreement. Have had many folks in the community ask us when we're going to do it. So I'm glad it's at our desk. Melvin, when you got a second, would you mind telling us who will be presenting 8.2? Good. Yes, This presentation will be led by Denise Garcia or assistant to the city manager, along with Brian Moira, I can so from MRG, sorry, RGS. And Ms. Garcia has been a recent addition to your staff as well, is that correct? Absolutely. Denise joined our team in October and has hit the ground running. And for it to providing this presentation. Folks in the public know we're continuing to beef up our staff to make sure we're providing the best service. So Ms. Garcia, thank you. Welcome and we appreciate I look forward to your presentation. Thank you. If you just don't mind, I'm looking for something. Okay. All right. Thank you Melvin for the introduction. Good evening Mayor and City Council members. As Melvin mentioned, my name is, oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. presenting on economic development strategic plan award contract item. Before I begin I want to briefly introduce other key speakers who are available for questions following this presentation. We have Brian Moira from RGS who drafted the RFP and has lots of expertise in economic development. We also have Judith Taylor who's the partner in charge from HRNA advisors and Joey Goldman who's the outreach lead from Kerns and West. And of course we have our city manager, assistant city manager, and community economic development director who have all been involved in this process. Next slide please. Before I begin, I want to put in the forefront what staff's recommendation is. I know it's very worthy, so I'm going gonna just do a high overview of this. We're asking council to consider adopting a resolution that will do three things. The first is it will authorize the city manager to award and execute an agreement with HR and advisors for the preparation of an economic development strategic plan. The second thing you'll do is authorize the incoming mayor to appoint a replacement for current mayor Lopez on this Council subcommittee that will help oversee this project. The continuing member of this subcommittee is Councilmember Abriqa. The third thing that this resolution will do is it states it's not a project within the scope of sequel. All right, so next slide please. I also wanna share a timeline of where we've been and where we're at currently. On April 18th, 2023, the City Council added a new goal under promote housing, economic, and workforce development priority, which was to develop an economic development strategy for council consideration and adoption as part of the fiscal year 23 to 24 council priorities. Staff worked with regional government services, RGS, to help facilitate this work. Brian Moira, a lead economic development consultant with RGS, was onboarded to draft a request for proposals or an RFP. On July 2nd of this year, Mr. Moore presented that draft to the City Council and after review approved the RFP. On October 1st of this year, City staff issued that RFP and used a variety of methods to cast a wide net of different types of potential proposals. Staff closed this submission period on October 30th of this year after receiving a proposals that all met the minimum qualifications. Staff formed a review committee consisting of the city manager, assistant city manager, assistant to city manager, community and economic development director and Mr. Morra to review all the proposals and score them appropriately using a scoring rubric. November 7th of this year was the deadline for the review committee to score each of the proposals and determine which firms to interview. After a thorough debrief of the proposals and their positions on our scoring board, staff invited firms from the top four proposals for 30 minute interviews. Once all the interviews concluded, the review committee selected HR and A advisors, and their subcontractors, Kerns and West on November 15th of this year. Today, Council may potentially award the contract to the firm staff as recommending based on a thorough review and analysis. Next slide. Now I'm going to share the scoring rubik use to score each of the proposals that we that helped us narrow down our top choices. The total score a proposal could possibly receive was 100 points and they were based on these six elements that you see on the slide. The first 30 points we wanted to see their project management approach and a well-planed timeline. For 20 points, we were looking for firms that had experience preparing economic development strategic plans, prioritizing firms with experience within cities in the Bay Area, but more specifically the Silicon Valley. For another 20 points, we were looking for firms that would ensure senior level staff, with years of experience to oversee the project and be involved in every step of the way. For 10 points, we were looking for the proposals that just demonstrated an understanding of the city's objectives, timelines and expectations. For another 10 points, we were looking for the high quality proposals and responses to our questions listed in the RFP. And lastly, for the remaining 10 points, we wanted to ensure the fees associated with this project were reasonable. Next slide, please. Thank you. After deliberating, staff invited four proposal firms, four 30 minute interviews to further evaluate each of them. The interview questions were categories into these four areas to help staff identify which firm would be the best fit. Particularly, we were interested in learning about the action ability of past plans and their success in implementing plans. We also wanted to learn about each of the firm's experiences and their approaches to engaging with diverse communities such as multilingual communities. It was also important for us to see the proposals include senior-level staff involved in each step of the process. And lastly, we wanted to learn more about potential budget adjustments to the scope of work to meet the project and community needs within the financial constraints of our city. Here's a list of the top firms in no particular order that were selected for 30-minute interviews with our review committee. Next slide. HR&A and Kerns and West stood out as a top contender for this project because of five key elements. For one, they demonstrated success in creating impactful equity-focused economic development plans. They also provided examples of work experience with nearby cities such as San Jose, South San Francisco, and Richmond, giving them a nuanced understanding of the region's challenges. These firms also have a track record of incorporating diverse and successful methods of community engagement, which is imperative for this city. They are experiencing co-creating plans with community members to work to meet people where they are at to foster meaningful participation. Each firms have respectable reputation, each bringing over 40 years of experience in equitable urban development and collaborative engagement strategies. Lastly, staff believe that these firms' approaches to building thriving, equitable, and inclusive economies for current and future residents and businesses align well with the city's vision for economic development. Now I'll pass it along to Judith Taylor and Joy Goldman to share more about their firms and approach to the work. Thank you, Denise. Hopefully everyone can hear me okay? Excellent. Thank you. Good evening mayor and council members and East Pal to residents. We're excited to share about our proposal for East Pal out to economic strategy. So my name is Judith Taylor and I will be a partner in charge on this project. I've been working in community economic development for over 20 years and my practice is focused on equitable economic development. I'm working on projects that aspire to build and strengthen economies while also improving the quality of life in communities for existing residents and businesses. And I'm very excited that we have assembled an amazing interdisciplinary team. And Joey is actually here as well. He's just swaving. And Joey Goldman of Kerns and West, H&A is partnered with Kerns and West in two other recent equity-focused projects in the Bay Area. And so we're excited to bring both of our teams together again to support East Palo Alto. I want to note that in addition to the staff that you've seen here, we've outlined a number of staff in our proposal, but we also just want to share that we have, you know, significant resources to bring to the table for this project as well. And so moving to the next slide, just wanted to share how our team really brings strong expertise across a number of disciplines. We bring analytic river, local knowledge in Kerns and West, but also national best practices to bear for this particular project. Our team has really developed a number of economic development strategies, focusing on creating opportunities for small businesses and local workers across California in the country. And as Denise mentioned, we also have been working specifically in the Bay area as well, Working in communities such as San Jose, Richmond, California, South San Francisco, I'm currently doing a project in Sacramento as well. And so we bring our expertise in these economic development strategies in a range of communities. And I do wanna note that while we have worked throughout in many different communities, you know, one of the key things that is important to us is the unique context in each community. So we're really focused on what are the needs specifically in East Palo, to understanding what economic approaches and policies and tools could be best used here. So you know, I've mentioned also that we are focused on economic development strategy, but we are also very focused on small businesses. We understand that that's an interest, particularly here. HRNA and Kerns West have collaborated on our project in South San Francisco. We're looking at challenges around displacement for commercial businesses. And we really understand that by small businesses often face specific challenges and need additional supports. So we're thinking about this as we are doing our economic development strategies. We do a lot of work in real estate development just across, again, California. And as real estate and economic development experts, we're often helping clients leverage strategic sites and generate jobs and community benefits and tax increment districts. And my understanding is that there are eight core districts that you're focused on in East Palo Alto, so we'll be able to bring that expertise as we are thinking about economic development strategy. We are very focused on equity and inclusion. HRNA and Kerns West also believe that residents really understand your community best and that we want to ensure that all voices are being heard. And Joey, I don't know if you want to kind of hop in there and kind of share a little bit about engagement. I can just note that you know this is what we do. This is the focus of our work is making sure that that communities have a place at the table and more than that, that they have an opportunity to develop and participate and implement so that they can see their visions come true. We've done a lot of work partnering with community-based organizations up and down the peninsula. We have worked with several community-based organizations. He's Pello Alto in the past on projects that we've done for high-speed rail, for the 21, excuse me, and Judith, for example, mentioned, we just hosted the Community Advisory Committee in South San Francisco last night for their anti-displacement strategy. So we look forward to collaborating with the community to develop some strategies so that they can really see their vision be a part of this strategic plan. Thanks, Joey. And as Denise mentioned, we've done a lot of work with on projects co-creating our process with the community. And we're excited about connecting with folks here in terms of economic development and economic development they'd like to see in East Palo Alto. We are very focused on ensuring that we're creating an impactful, implementable and equity-focused economic development plan know we really want to drive economic growth in East Palo Alto and understand that you're also looking to support local entrepreneurship, micro businesses, catalyzing employment opportunities for folks and that again you want to leverage those eight commercial districts that exist and potentially support increased tax revenues for the city. And so we're thinking about all of those goals as we would get started with this economic development plan. So on the next slide, we include a schedule of our scope and proposed timeline. So our first phase of work is the existing conditions work and that's planned between January and April. And that really is drawing upon data analysis and business engagement with small businesses and real estate owners to understand market trends to better understand the rest of our project. Our second phase is synthesis and we've laid that out between March and June and so in that process we're capturing information that we looked at from the existing conditions report and we're really kind of exploring the opportunities and challenges with respect to economic growth. So identifying opportunities for well-paying jobs, looking at the specific industries that can help to diversify the economy, building a SWAT, a strengths weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and really focusing on business opportunities. We've laid out a third phase which is community outreach and Joey shared a bit about what we're looking to do there. We are focused on building an engagement plan specifically with the city so that it can be customized and again we're focused on ensuring residents and employees, community leaders and business owners really have an opportunity to share their perspectives. And I do want to mention that we are very focused on ensuring that as many people can participate as possible. And so a part of that is also ensuring that Spanish and English speakers at the very least can participate in looking at language capability. So that's a really important part of our work and we're currently looking at stakeholder interviews, pop-up events, community briefings, and our local canvassing as a part of that engagement plan. And then as part of our existing conditions work, we also were including several focus groups with small businesses. So we're going to be bringing all those pieces together to really get that better understanding of what's needed in East Palo Alto. And then in our final phase, we're pulling all of these pieces together and developing our final recommendations for economic development for the city of East Palo Alto. In whole, this process is going to take nine months and also just mentioning that we are connecting with the city throughout this whole process. And so that's our current land timeline. And again, we're really excited to come out and support your community. Please let us know if you have any questions. Thanks, someone's Judith. Joey, appreciate y'all's presentation. Sorry, go ahead and scratch the mic. Am I jumping the gun here? No, we're already at the end of the presentation. I just wanted to conclude by restating what our recommendation is. So as you can see on the slide slide the final recommendation is to adopt a resolution that will do the following three things authorize the city manager to award an execute an agreement with HR and advisors. $330,000 with their term through December 31st to 2025 to develop the economic development strategic plan. The second thing you'll do is also authorize the incoming mayor to appoint a replacement for current mayor. And the third thing that this will do is that the resolution does not constitute a project within SQL. Thank you. And again, we have a large team that's very eager to share with you or answer any of your questions that you may have. So yeah, I welcome comments or questions. Thank you. Thank you so much, Ms. Garcia. Council members, any thoughts, questions, comments about this item? Your call has been something very much anticipated. The market business, the vendors, we know we have to support our small businesses and so this is going to give us a great framework to achieve that. Folks, anything comes to mind. Council Member, go ahead, Gisner. Yes, thank you for the report and slides. I had a question on the, you know, in on this, the scope of services and the different tasks. I'm sure it will be in there somewhere, but I was reflecting a little bit on some overlap that we have with our HH initiative that is doing some workforce. You might say, training, trying to get people better prepared for certain jobs that maybe are not as easily accessible. Well, that kind of fit in some ways the profile of our community, the education of profile. So, you know, HH is trying to help people get into the building trades, also into high tech or different forms of tech. So you know, I had a question on whether you would be able to include or do some work, some research on the all the different types of training opportunities that are going on around here. Because one of the things I noticed, especially with populations of people who, they may be entrepreneur, if nothing else, are hardworking, they don't have a lot of formal education. And so then their opportunities sometimes that they may miss because they're not able to get into some kind of training program. So I feel like part of the economic development or in the old days we call it community economic development. It was developed the resources of the people themselves to be better equipped. So yeah, I was just wondering whether maybe it'll come out under existing conditions, but I, you know, because there was no specific category on it, but I think it's important to get a sense of what, yeah, you know, how do job training opportunities help economic development, help people be better prepared for opportunities? And what's going on? So we know that job training, you know, they do a great job, but we have so many people who could benefit from those opportunities and sometimes they're not easily available or we don't know about them and so I think that to the degree that the council could can be more informed, fully informed on all of those things that are around the area here that become a tool for economic development too. So I just wonder if you could address that a little bit. Yeah, thank you so much for bringing that up Councilmember Abydica. And just to let you know that when we had our interview with HRNA advisors and Kernzen West, one thing that really stood out to us was that they talked about attracting employment and reducing inequality at the same time and so although they didn't specify what you're looking for exactly I'll I'll check in with our city manager and I'll defer to him to respond to see if we can analyze those types of job opportunities with our console with the most consultant. Thank you. Thank you, Denise. Yes, so Councilmember Abrica, part of HRNA and Kerns and West's proposal is to do a look at local employment strategies as well as kind of existing conditions. Part of that will be assessing our both, you know, the local opportunities and training programs like job training, as well as what the city of East Powell also does putting money towards STEM and building trades through measure HH. So that would be definitely part of the analysis under that local employment strategies. I just want to make sure, I mean I think even if it's not explicitly stated but I do want to just make sure that you you know, we know the community colleges now are expanding their resources to do this much more. I know that like adult education programs have been sort of decimated, but it seemed to be bouncing back. So again, you know, beyond the, I guess it's beyond the boundaries of East Palo Alto only that we look at some of those opportunities around because I think people can access them if they know more about them and what they can offer. So, I just want to make sure that something is done in that area because I guess, you know, I'm not an economist, but to me, developing human resources is a way to enhance the economic situation of not only the person, but the family, the household and the community. And so to the degree that we can connect those, you know, would be, I think it'd be important to have something done. Got it. And luckily you're on a steering committee or the, so we'll continue to have these conversations. Continue that discussion, but yeah. So I just, you know, and also because there are, it seems to me and, you know, definitely the state has put more inefficies on that, even with the high school, having more explicit sort of trades, career tracks, and not only college, which is great, but up to now has been either you go to college or then you figure out what to do, right? And a lot of young people come out and they don't know what to do. And so anyway, and adult people too, but just thinking of the coming generations that the more we can help them, said something up ahead of time, the better. Yeah. And one other coming I was going to make was, and I noticed this subcommittee, so it's helpful to have, you know, couple of council people to bounce off ideas, but I think that perhaps at the end of the existing conditions report or that part that, I think it'd be good to bring that to the entire council to bring some report and have an opportunity for the entire council to, some report and have an opportunity for the entire council to You know give some feedback or also opens it up to the public. I know there's gonna be engagement in different ways, but You know if that's possible to do I think it's important. So it isn't just a subcommittee doing that So is that I guess I'm making that as a request if it if if the council is doing that. I guess I'm making that a request if the council is willing to go long or we can bring this back at another point at time. Excuse me. Ms. Taylor correct me if I'm wrong. Would that be face for the final plan and then task 12 for the City Council reviews? So currently in our current scope, it is laid out that the full council receives the final draft. We do have an interim existing conditions deliverable. And so, you know, the subcommittee may see it. That can be socialized as well. And so I think it's just a discussion if we want to make another meeting. Through the mayor, I actually agree with councilmember Abidi because Ladder saw it and it was probably my main comment on the tasks as laid out and the feedback loops. I do think that there have to be, you use the term socialized perhaps that is your term of art. I do think that the report backs the council need to be a little more frequent. I agree it's good that we have a subcommittee, but on something of this nature I don't think it makes sense to just wait till you have a draft plan. So I think what I would like to see here is integrated into these tasks. Perhaps one, maybe even two interim reports back to council how this is going prior to the final one. Because I think it gives very little time for council to actually intervene and add, you know, our concerns Prior to the full elaboration of this draft Want to make sure staff got no sorry Miss Taylor go ahead. Oh, I was just gonna say we can make that change But I would rely on Denise if you know your thoughts there. All right. Yeah. And I mean, we can expand the scope. And as you all know, expanding the scope. I think Miss Taylor is being a light and I'm saying I'm expanding the scope might expand the cost. So that's something that we'd have to consider. Thanks for being explicit. You know, that's helpful. You know, we should know that if we want more meetings, going to know. No, you know, I do want to just, I think, reaffirmed the importance of this, given our past history in terms of, you know, we're trying to do the right thing. This is a very important study at this point in time, particularly after the pandemic and all this stuff we know, you're changing administration, all of these things. And so the benefit of bringing it to the council at some point before the final draft is that it does draw the attention of the community. It does put it in the public and the people who are most interested or who are more engaged is good to hear from them. And of course the engaging other groups in the community who may not be as involved it's also important. I also get concerned about that too sometimes you know that. That we always hear from people who come to the city council, which is very important, but then everybody else we need to hear from them too, what they think, and et cetera. So it's really kind of a combination of both things. And yeah. Thank you, seems like it's a yes for the council. All right. I'm gonna go to councilwoman, go share and then vice mayor, Barbara. I just wanna say thank you for the report. This is something that we do on my day job, looking at workforce development, thinking about how we're gonna close the gap. Many of the jobs that are required even in the county have a degree requirement. If we can remove the paper ceiling in some of these opportunities so that more people can get jobs. Not all the jobs that are requiring degrees should necessarily require a degree. And if we're really gonna make an impact and make a difference in our community, we need to be able to do that, remove the paper ceiling and look at those opportunities where there, there's some areas where there are truly gaps or there are trying to hire in certain industries and they can't find enough people to do so. So how do we make sure that we make those opportunities available and ensure that we're training our residents for those opportunities? IBM, for an example, will provide free certification training that you can go online and take that will help you with careers. Where are those opportunities that we can share with the community? That's going to make it possible for our community members to be eligible for those careers that are making providing those wages that will give them allow them to stay within the community and thrive. Thank you. Vice President, would I go on the joint act something? No, I was just going to comment what Mr. Abrica had said about having maybe two times a check-in. So going back at the table that we have here, it's like a nine-month period process. So before the final, you know, just thinking kind of what I do also in my day job that we have to report, maybe having it at the first, like a report of what's happened the first three months and then like after the next six months, or you know, like in three increments of three month periods and then like the final one, I think that would be like a good amount of space to kind of see how the process is going. If we need to tweak it, if we need to make any changes. So thank you. City manager, do you want to respond to that? Or you just... I'm open to all suggestions. My preference would probably be for the project team and council subcommittee to get together and look at kind of the entire project and then plug in some appropriate check-in points when we kind of talk about and digest a little bit more of what this will actually look like. So today we might need, and I can't do the math right now, scrolling vigorously to figure out what a, maybe we need an additional amount added to the contracts. Or we can come back to council at that date to ask for an additional or a contract amendment. Yeah. That was good. Other colleagues, questions, comments? If not, James, would you mind if we go to public comments, see if anybody, again, this is for the economic development strategic plan agreement. So we did receive two speaker slips from Webster Lincoln followed by Joe Wilkerson. I just want to say I like that we're aligning the real estate development with the economic development and that's kind of all I have to say. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, Gil Wilkerson? Yeah, I feel like I'm having a day to go. Are these people supposed to be like urban designer? I couldn't get that. It sounded like it, but it wasn't really there. I like to know if they have been successful somewhere else and they say it's gonna take nine months. It seems like, like I said, day to day, we've been through this with other people, not on the Pacific thing, the agenda, but we look up what, nine months, two years later, and really they haven't done anything. So where have they been successful? And they say they can do what organizes the city to have economic development and I hate being you know critical But at this point we've been incorporated since 1983 and somebody got to put their foot down It's not that hard 2.5 square miles We got laws and ordinances on the book that can bring in revenue We don't have to hire everybody just walk by East Palo Alto, and they end up not doing really anything. I like to see some proof in the pudding. Do we pay them afterwards? At the end of nine months, are the getting paid $200,000 all the way down? And then they come up short. most of the citizens all they see is Amazon building over there. That's all they see and other buildings going up. The citizens have to see things that they can believe in and things that they can fill that's going to make them feel comfortable and Talking about work and all like do we've done that else before? Just go and put a bowl in alley and they restaurants Just clean it up and that's what people in in the East Palo Alto want to see Not the talking points Thank you Thank you. Thank you. Those are our last speaker for this item. All right. Thank you very much. Councilor Moodle-Motto, do you have an additional comment or question? I'd have a just a couple. One, the next item we're great thing to do with the strategic priorities. It's the strategic priorities and work plan agreement that will be helping council put together I guess a new set of priorities and goals beneath that. And I just want to understand how this study might interlace with that because I do see that indeed there could be actions and activities that come out of this process that I mean given the timelines differ either don't get in or you know depending on how rigid we structure the priorities document, we may not be able to get in. So are there any thoughts on that since this is somewhat of a policy guiding document? And then I have another question after that or another comment after that. So anybody want to answer that? Sure. The economic development strategy, which we're discussing now is focused on, broadly focused on economic development and your strategic priorities entails whatever those priorities may be. Staff has discussed the potential for our community to become exhausted with engagement as we have a strategic priorities process that will include by design extensive community engagement. This economic development strategy by design will include extensive community engagement and some other things we're doing like the safety element update and the environmental justice element update will also include significant community engagement. It's a great time to share your input community members with the city of East Palo Alto and to shape the policies that our council is making. I'm excited about it, but we definitely will be looking for ways if you approve this agreement and as well as the next one on as the next item to see if we can align the engagement efforts to maximize them. But the actual plan in this case that will be developed will come after the timeline for the strategic priorities, as we want the strategic priorities to be adopted along with the fiscal year 2025-26 budget. So that's an earlier timeline. So your priorities won't have the final input from this economic development plan. However, there might be things that we learn from community input that we're able to involve in strategic priorities work plan. Right. But I was just going to say that very asynchronous nature is what concerns me. Is you're going to spend $200,000 on a plan that I think it's merited, but the integration into the strategic priorities process will be missed. I believe the timeline is June and the timeline here is November, is September October. So there's, you just aren't even trains passing in the night. This is a train behind the other. If I may, I did want to comment on these two documents that are going on at the same time, and then also to comment on some comments made by the public. Is this the right time? It's always the right time. Go ahead. You know, I do understand the concerns about particularly around engagement fatigue. However, I actually think it's very good timing that you're working on these two things hand in hand. If you were working on just the strategic priorities, I can guarantee lots of questions around economic development and economic needs in your city are very likely to come up and this is the time to actually ensure that these align they're not perfectly aligned and actually it sounds like the strategic priorities is coming first. Is that correct? And that's what it sounds like. Yes, that's correct. Perfect, which is actually ideal because we are taking those strategic priorities, and that does get placed into our economic development strategies as well. Typically, it's actually really hard to align something that's coming at the exact same time. You probably do want one coming before the other. You want your city level priorities coming first, and then we're taking those and integrating those into how you want to perceive your economic development strategies as well. So that, you know, that can actually be helpful that it's coming first and then that's coming next. And then I also, you know, wanted to kind of speak to, you know, this is a nine month process, and I think someone brought up questions around, you know, what's gonna be completed within nine months. And, you know, I will kind of speak to, we recently did a project in Richmond, California, and we actually did a short-term business recovery action plan, as well as a long-term business, investment, and attraction strategy. A lot of times when we're doing economic development strategies, we want to make sure that we have recommendations that short-term, immediate recommendations that are also mid-term and long-term. You can't, most cities cannot achieve everything in one shot. Like you do need to think and plan, and this is a strategic plan. So there are some things that hopefully the city can immediately move on and make changes. But this is a long term plan that is going to extend five to 10 to 15 years out. That this is helping you to align how you're thinking about your strategies and the actions and the catalytic moves that you're making that is going to improve an evolving economy across time. And I think that's an exciting place to be at this moment. I was mentioning enrichment California, we did that work and several of our strategies that we actually had suggested during that process got put in place. We recommended the creation of economic development working group because there was a large ecosystem of folks out there doing economic work, but who had not been actually talking to each other. And so, you know, there were opportunities coming up and people were missing them. They had a chance to coordinate and then that was moving forward. There were recommendations for centralizing guidance and the city actually put in Onbuds person in place who could actually support businesses through the process and they put up a lot of checklists that we had recommended that people and businesses needed. And a lot of that stuff, those short-term pieces actually got put in place. You know, again, medium and long-term does take longer, and that's the expectation there. I also just did want to mention some of the work, and I know there were questions around workforce, which, you know, typically is a part of like that ecosystem and economic development work that we're doing at a high level. I had done a specific study with the Los Angeles Clean Tech Incubator several years ago, so in like 2021 and it was a strategy looking at green jobs and how they might build out. We made recommendations that the region needed to come together to talk about workforce needs and actually Lacey ended up Los Angeles Clinton Tech incubator ended up creating a partnership that we started guiding this past year where we're building out a roadmap and we've been starting to connect employers and training organizations there. So they are seeing the movement in that work that we recommended four years ago. And these things are being put in place. So some things get done immediately and other things just made a long term as well. Thank you. I just have one last comment or observation. And I don't, I think you may have done some work previously in other cities with a slightly different lands. And I would hope, and perhaps the consultant wants to speak to this, that certainly for East Palo Alto, anti-displacement, community stability policies and programs are vitally important for us. We can develop economically and lose all our existing residents and it's not just. And I think it's been a focus of this council and of the city for its last 42 years. And to the extent that those lenses can be focused or at least be used to view the development of this, you know, economic development policy, I think it's essential. I do note that you have some examples of where you indeed have used a anti-explacements community stability overlay and I would hope that you would be able to interlace that into this analysis and your final kind of, you know, output. If I may also just echo, I agree with Council Member Met on this one. You know, you look at, I think part of the crux of the issue is that historically in this city, economic development becomes opposed to committee preservation. What we're trying to figure out is how to hold the two together. You think about whiskey, gold, you think about Ravenswood High School, you think about subrado folks in this community have routinely seen buildings that have been once there as demolition. So how do we like envision to consumables from the most point an economic plan which puts those two together. So to the extent that we can create a framework that really has a robust anti displacement policy, I certainly would be supportive of that. Not sure what my colleagues will find, but I think that's critical to put that in the DNA of our document. It was going to help us find a blueprint that's really going to work in the coming months and years. Since it sounds like from a Miss Taylor said this is something that could be 15 years in terms of a time horizon, right? Yes, and absolutely, like by the way, I absolutely appreciate the direction. We were already focused on creating an equity-centered economic development strategy and it's great to hear this direction coming from you as well. That's definitely, we'll just make sure to keep that central in everything we're doing here. And this is how we spend a lot of our time thinking about economic development and why and how we do it differently than other organizations. Well, we have a full agenda with us unless there's any final comments and remarks otherwise I'm happy to entertain a motion proving this item. Make a motion or I'll second revenge. All right all those in favor please vote with a sign of aye. Aye. Yes excellent. Thank you very much Miss Taylor. Thank you Joey. Thank you everyone. Ms Garcia. Excellent job. Appreciate you on much Miss Taylor. Thank you Joey. Thank you everyone. Ms. Garcia excellent job Appreciate you on the team Moving on to item 8.3 strategic priorities and work plan agreement It's really a two-for-one special for this item, but Melvin you want to tell us is gonna present this Yes, this will be led by assistant to the city manager Orally Amy, who also recently joined our team. And not Phil Braswell? No, she joined, it's like week three. She's all free new. Welcome right to work. That's right, on the move. Good evening, honorable Mayor, Vice Mayor, members of the City Council. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Orle Amy and I am the Assistant to the City Manager. That is a sign to support the Council's Strategic Priorities and Work Plan and like the City Manager said, I'm new to the city I'm looking forward to working with you all and learning from you all. I'm providing this update presentation that will focus on the proposed strategic priorities and work plan for the city and together the priorities and plan will serve as the framework for guiding the city's actions and decisions over the next two years. So today I will cover the request for proposals process that led to the selection of rainy and associates as the recommended consultant for this effort and why staff believes that they are uniquely positioned to lead this initiative. And by the end of this presentation, you should have a full understanding of the proposal so that you should planning process the goals of this initiative, the recommended firms approach, and the next steps as we move forward. And please know that today we also have Matt Raimi, who is the lead of Raimi Associates. Raimi and Associates, excuse me, in the audience here to answer any questions. So please stop me if you have any, but we'll have him go right after my presentation. So he will walk us through their proposed strategy and walk us through the timeline, highlighting key milestones such as the community workshops, staff engagement sessions, and the council goals setting workshops, as well as the deliverables. Next slide, please. So we are recommending that the council adopt a resolution to authorize the city manager to execute an agreement with Raney and associates for this project with a not-too-exceed budget of $130,000. And to confirm that this project is SQL compliant since it's not an environmental project. So Rami and Associates who will introduce, like I said, following my presentation and many of you may already be familiar with him due to prior work with the city, brings extensive experience and strategic planning and has a demonstrated understanding of the city's unique challenges, making them what we believe the right fit for this work. Next slide please. So for some background context, the city of East Palo Alto has a well-established practice of holding annual priority setting sessions. These sessions are critical for ensuring that the city City Council staff and the community are aligned on the top priorities. And so as you know, this process was designed to be completed in Dovetail right into the budget. The strategic priorities that the Council defines then shape the two year work plans, which then direct staff efforts and guide how the city is going to allocate financial resources and staff through the budget process. So for the current fiscal year 2324 and fiscal year 2425, sorry, I got that little mixed up, but for fiscal years 2324 and 2425, the priorities, the council adopted seven key focus area priorities and these are around the areas of housing, economic and workforce development, transportation and mobility, health and public safety, financial health, water infrastructure and community services and parks. So this process has served us well and what we're doing now is proposing an enhancement to make the priority setting process even more robust and more inclusive of resident feedback. So the consultant that we're recommending will gather and synthesize data from the diverse and wide range of community members and provide this data to the council for you all to consider in your strategic priorities workshop. And so that's the key difference between the proposed priority setting process versus how it's been done in the past. More robust community engagement. Next slide please. So for some more recent context, at the October 1st City Council meeting, the Council authorized the City Manager to issue a request for proposals to develop a new strategic plan and work plan for the city. So the direction from the Council at that meeting was very clear, create a four-year strategic framework, but focus on the detailed two-year work plans. And so this will allow for a regular evaluation of outcomes and allow for us to make adjustments at the two-year mark, making sure that we're able to remain flexible and responsive. Next slide, please. Why now? So the timing of this request for proposals and contract award is very intentional and aligns with the city's budget cycle as I mentioned before. So essentially staff needs to ensure that the strategic priorities that this council decides have funding behind them. So to ensure that the budget reflects and funds the major priorities, we need to get the strategic planning process underway now. awarding the contract will allow the consultant to begin community engagement in early Q1 the budget adoption process. This initiative also fulfills a current year of strategic priority for the city manager's office, conducting a process to develop a five to ten year strategic plan. So this effort lays the foundation for longer and turn planning and ensures that we're positioning the city for success over the next decade. Acting now will allow the city to be able to provide a new project for the city manager's office, conducting a process to develop a five to ten year strategic plan. So this effort lays the foundation for longer and turn planning and ensures that we're positioning the city for success over the next decade. Acting now will allow us to move forward with purpose and urgency and help us create a clear framework for aligning on the priorities and properly allocate resources. The initial planning for this is expected to kick off in December following this meeting. Next slide please. On October 2nd, the city released a request for proposals RFP for this project. And that RFP was made publicly available on the city's website to ensure transparency and to make sure that any and all interested consultants could have the access to apply. So we receive proposals from four firms and they're listed on the screen in no particular order. The four firms are Maroon Society, Baker Tilly, RGS and Ramean Associates. As for the evaluation process, to evaluate these proposals, the city manager, assistant city manager, and two assistants to the city manager used a structured scoring criteria that I will show in the next slide that reflected the priorities that were outlined in RFP. And there were a variety of ways in which the consultants who responded to the RFP could approach the project. We did not want to be too prescriptive and in evaluating the proposals, we were looking to see how the consultants might tailor their approach to our community. Next slide, please. The RFP evaluation process prioritized selecting a consultant that could demonstrate an in-depth understanding of EPA's challenges and provide a clear and actionable approach to solving them that involves robust engagement from residents. The scoring criteria is listed on the screen. The proposals were evaluated across four key criteria. Each criteria was weighted to reflect the most important elements of this project. So for a total of 100 points in the first category area, where 30 points we have experience and qualifications. So for this category, we assess the consultant success leading similar projects in California and the expertise of the team that they assigned to this effort. For the next category, approach and comprehensiveness for 30 points. This category evaluated how well the proposal laid out a clear and well-defined approach that was specifically tailored to EPA's needs. The third criteria for 20 points, understanding of city objectives, this category measured how clearly the consultant articulated their understanding of the city's priorities in this process, and how responsive they were to EPA's unique challenges. The last category for 20 points, fee and cost reasonableness. We wanted to acknowledge that cost alone would not determine the selection for the vendor, but this category considered whether the proposed costs were appropriate and aligned with the funds that we have available for the project. As for the scoring process, each of the four evaluators independently score the proposals based on these four criteria, and following this to evaluation team met to review and discuss the results collectively. We wanted to ensure consistency and fairness in the scoring. And out of this methodical process, it resulted in Ramy and Associates earning the highest overall score and earning our recommendation. I wanted to note that while Ramin Associates does have a longstanding relationship with the city and we do value that relationship, it was not a determining factor in our selection, we thought that their proposal stood out in several key areas, the first being the deep understanding of EPA's challenges. So of course some of their insights are rooted in their on and off 12 years of experience with working in EPA. But in their proposal, Ramey demonstrated a clear and localized understanding of the issues that are facing this community such as housing affordability, infrastructure strain, and fiscal constraints. And this set them apart from the other proposals. The other area in which their proposals sit out was in their proven expertise with data and community engagement. So, Rami has shown an awareness of where gaps and outreach might exist and they have a plan to uncover and engage voices that may have been underrepresented in prior effort. So folks that we might not have heard from in traditional methods of outreach, we want to try to target those folks this time. And Raimi's approach also emphasizes building on the existing community outreach efforts that have been done over the past two years. There's been a lot of those. So Raimi and his team will work to synthesize some of that past data to avoid any duplication and to make sure that that work can be more targeted. Another area in which their proposal stood out was with their actionable and comprehensive approach. So, their proposal outlined a well thought out an actionable plan that had a strong emphasis on inclusive community engagement, which is what we wanted to see. And some of their community engagement methods included surveys, focus groups, pop-up workshops, things like that that reflect EPA's close knit and diverse communities, and we'll be able to meet folks where they are in employing some of those methods. And Raney also proposed ways to incorporate council feedback into their outreach efforts, including collaborating and making sure to align with them throughout the process and ensuring that they are able to comment on some of the inputs that are received from the community to make sure that they're aligned. Lastly, what we liked about their proposal was their demonstrated expertise across critical fields. And so, Rainey's team has expertise in a wide range of areas related to this project. And some of those areas include housing and economic development, public works, environmental planning, and so we believe that this breadth of experience will allow them to approach our city's challenges holistically and will allow them to be well informed in doing this work. So overall, Ramy excelled across all of the evaluation criteria and presented a comprehensive plan that aligns closely with what we're looking for for this project all at a reasonable cost. Next slide, please. What does significant community engagement look like. So for a strategic plan to succeed it needs to reflect the voices and the priorities of their residents and serves and obviously it also needs to highly prioritize the direction of the council and collaboration with the council. So this council has repeatedly emphasized community engagement and I just want to let you all know today that we heard you. So with this process, the City Manager's Office is hoping to create something where community engagement is at the heart of the process. So Ramy and Associates approach includes ensuring diverse multi-lingual representation and this will help us to make sure that all of our community members, regardless of their background or their language, can participate and have the opportunity to contribute if that's what they would like to do. As I mentioned, Ramy would use a mix of methods, such as public meetings, stakeholder sessions, online surveys, social media outreach, pop-up events, things of that sort. And we believe that this multi-pronged approach will help us to meet residents where they are and encourage more broader participation than we might have seen in the past. City staff will also play a key supportive role in ensuring that internal goals and priorities in line with community inputs that are gathered. And it's our goal that the combination of this outreach and the internal alignment one sure that the plan accurately reflects the community's needs and is rooted in achievable actions that tie in directly to the budget. And so I just want to input that budget part again because it's a key aspect of this. So I'd like to emphasize again that this will continue to be a council-led process. The consultant will be meeting with council members as well as staff so you'll have interactions with them throughout this whole process This council has its retreat and spring and rain and associates will be a part of that Matt Rainey will be reaching out from one-on-one meetings with council members before then and There will be several opportunities to gauge alignment So as I mentioned council can assess whether the inputs that range me gathered accurately reflect the community priorities and then Council will be able to guide any adjustments that need to be made. My role as an assistant to the City Manager supporting this project will be to project manage and provide overall support for this initiative. B, LEAZON between the consultant and the council, keep the strategic priorities process on time and on budget, and make sure that the city council gets what it wants out of this process. So I will be helping to remove any row blocks that are by, and I will also be serving as a resource to the consultant and his team if they need any coordination or any help getting access to the council. Next slide please. This score impact. So the estimated cost of this project is $100,000. And the $100,000 fully covers this core scope of work that's outlined in the proposal. Additionally, we've included a contingency amount of $30,000. And this contingency amount will provide the flexibility to explore optional services that the consultant has identified as being potentially beneficial to the success of this project. So these optional services are not included in the initial scope or budget, but they could provide value depending on the needs and priorities as this project progresses. So some of those optional services and how they could advance our work, there are five of them. The first is a pre-retreat community survey that would allow us to gather broader input from the community before the council retreat. The second is a social media analysis. So, Raymean Associates could conduct a review of social media data to identify trends and concerns that are expressed by residents in non-traditional forums, especially those who might not participate in the traditional engagement efforts. This might be a way to catch those opinions. The third optional service is a staff survey, so this would provide an opportunity for a city staff to share their insights on the priorities and help make sure that the internal perspectives are considered. The fourth item for optional services is board and commission meetings. So the idea here is that by engaging directly with boards and commissions, Ramy and his team could help a good gain a unique perspective on the community priorities that are present on these commissions that might not emerge through other engagement activities. And the last optional service is a data dashboard. And so this would be an interactive dashboard that could track the process of the strategic plan and provide a clear and transparent way to measure and communicate success over time. So including this contingency for $30,000 ensures that we are prepared to take advantage of these services if we if the Council determines that they align with their project goals and it provides some flexibility without us having to commit extra funds at this time. Next slide please. So we are at the end of my presentation. So I hope this has provided some helpful context about the proposed project. And in conclusion, staff is recommending that the Council adopt a resolution to authorize the City Manager to execute an agreement with the Ramyn Associates for this project with a not-to-exceed budget of $130,000. And to confirm that this project is SQL compliance, it's not an environmental project. So at this time, I'd like to thank you for your attention and pause for any questions before inviting Matt Rey up to share more about his firm's approach to the project and the schedule for key milestones. Thank you very much. Rick, Council Member, is any questions? Rainey, I think we're pretty familiar with the firm, but if there's any other additional things you'd like to share that we haven't, that I haven't known in four years, that you've been, you know, keeping in the, in the vest that's relevant to this item, feel free. But before you do, customers, any questions before, Raymond gets up and does this thing? Yeah, I'm going to actually say I'm going gonna be very frank. I'm thoroughly confused and it has nothing to do with you Is it are or Lee or I'm sorry that that's your first name Miss Amy. Yes, Miss Amy forgive me It really has to do I think with the discussion we had previously To discuss this item what we have before us is the elaboration of a strategic priorities plan. However, there's a process that we usually use, and this is more directed to the city manager. It's a process that we have usually used to generate on an annual basis, either additions, subtractions, review of our progress on our strategic plan, and we would move forward. Palo Alto does it, Melo Park does it, Selvesson, particular does it. We now have this process and what we were told at the last meeting when we discussed this was that we would have the opportunity to actually mold and meld and look at that process. That is not here. We have a fully baked plan, which I, by the way, very clear Matt. I understand what you're proposing to do, and I'm not opposed to this. But the process itself, right, and how we update on annual basis, how we perhaps on an annual basis select maybe there is a particular item that we want to actually move forward. I don't see that here. And so it seems like we've disrupted a process that we've been using for the last, I don't know, maybe eight years and haven't had a full blown discussion about how that process either lives or dies. Because this is just a document that's going to have a lot of feedback from the community, which we appreciate, that will set out these strategic priorities. But it doesn't address the issues that you had said previously. Well, you'll have the opportunity to talk about those issues once you get this, once we get the request for proposals. So that's why I'm thoroughly confused. I don't have a problem with this proposal, honestly. And before you answer city manager gains, if I may just ask as a clarification, my understanding when we had this meeting ever so long ago was that this was the philosophy behind it is that we have these two-year cadences, but you're looking at sort of a mid you're looking at sort of a sort of middle mid-term You know, short term along to a mid-term window into how we could Think about our priorities, but critically supplement our retreats with community discussion, right? Is that? Then the words that it's not in a position with what Councilor Meta was saying, but your idea is that you're sort of supplementing what the Council's doing with this community feedback piece. Is that kind of the spirit of this resolution to decide? Yes, thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council Member Romero. I hopefully can clarify and remove the confusion. The city council's existing longstanding process and at least in the last year that I've been here and right before I started I participated in includes a one-day workshop and in that workshop community members make public comments they get there two minutes and they say these are the things that we think should be the priorities the council listens the council deliber, the council deliberates, the council decides what they believe their priorities are, staff then go on to take those priorities and look at various different projects and initiatives to help the council accomplish those priorities. We propose what we call a work plan that includes all the projects to approve the priorities to the city council and that is where I believe you're saying so council member Romero, the council decides what they want what they don't and they tell staff these are the project we want you to work on go forward and do it get it done. the only modification to that process that this new strategic priority, what we've released in RFP for, is really to thoroughly enhance the community engagement process. And this is something that I've expressed to this council. I've always been interested in you all know that community engagement and empowering East Palo Alto residents and community members to have a voice is something that I believe is necessary for our team, our city staff to effectively provide services to this community and that's something that I always said was important and you all know that I is important to me and you agreed to look at this process and expand upon it last year in a priority setting. It's what you have before you is in fact one of your strategic priorities to look look at a longer term strategic plan. That the proposal before you is not finalized. If you were to say, I don't like this as proposed, you have the opportunity right now to tell me, change this or get rid of that section. That's what I, that's what my intent last month or whenever on October was to say that you have the opportunity to look at the proposal. Staff has recommended the proposal from Rayman Associates and to say these are the, look at those tasks that they have out loud and say we don't like this or we do like this and modify it. That's what you have the opportunity to do right now. Or you can throw it out completely and we can do what we've done the last few years on work on scheduling a one day retreat where we can follow the last year's process. Through the chair, before we could have had a more full blown full throw to discussion about how to proceed, let's make it really clear that the document I have before me actually has the priorities of this council agreed to pray eight years ago and then we've modified since. Done over, you know, every year, most of these are the same. There have been a couple that have been added. I'm not saying this doesn't have to be updated. As a matter of fact, I'm intrigued with the more one time because really this is not going to happen every year. This is going to be a one time review and then ultimately a reimagination of the Shreja priorities and a work plan. So that still doesn't answer my question of one, I guess, is this just autopilot? We do it, we're done, we don't have, all you do is just report back to us, this is what's getting done. And there's no opportunity for council on an annual basis to intervene and say, let's change, let's add this, maybe there's a special project, we had COVID would have you. And so that to me is problematic with this approach. Not this document that will come out of this, which I think I support, but the process beyond that. And I just don't think we've discussed it as a count. And none of this is changing the opportunity that the council has to on an annual basis look at the work plan. And for everybody's benefit, the work plan is the projects that are accomplishing the overarching goals. Right now the city council has seven overarching goals and we have 900, I'm exaggerating, but we have a lot of projects to accomplish those goals. But the difference here is we're asking for a big community engagement process to really define what those overarching goals are. And for those overarching goals, very similar to what's happening now organically. But we wanted to be intentional, would remain for what you all said last time when we met four years. But the annual work plan would be modified annually. However, the caveat being most projects take two plus years. So every year when we look at that work plan, I'm going to be giving you all updates saying this project is 20% complete. This project is 70% complete. In order to add anything new to it, something has to come off, but you have that opportunity. and I think that's a good thing to do. I think that's a good thing to have a good time. I think that's a good thing to have a good time. I think that's a good thing to have a good time. I think that's a good thing to have a good time. I think that's a good thing to have a good time. I think that's a good thing to have a good time. I think that's a good thing to some of the things that the council has been doing the last eight years. Because you know, always believe that if something is working, don't get rid of it. If you want to add something, then that's a separate question. So I do hear the idea to have much more feedback and gauge man from, you know, the broader to have much more feedback, engagement from, you know, the broader community in different ways. And in fact, I think when we started doing this about eight years ago, it coincided with the council having done a commission, a, you know, I forget what to call it, but it was a representative sample of the entire community. And so we had a document, I still have a copy of somewhere, that basically did inform the council of what the people were thinking out there. Their needs, their satisfaction, their ideas, their concerns, et cetera. And that was a very valuable document because it was representative, right? And so I understand that concept. The more you can never do 100%. But when you do a good sample and I hear that, you know, you try different methodologies, different approaches, so you're not excluding people and even intentionally trying to bring in groups of people or people who maybe tradition are left out for whatever reason. That's always the case in every city that people get either ignored or people are too busy and then we can just say, well we gave them a chance and nobody showed up. Well, no, I understand it's not enough. You should go to them. At least you can go to people where they are and find out they're thinking their idea. So I mean, generally I hear that that's why you're in attendance and I support that concept. Right? Now, on the other side is I think the opportunity for the council itself to do what we have been doing, which I think has been important. And that is something like this. I'll try to quickly summarize it. Let's say in December or January, the council gets an updated kind of the latest report on where things stand. Because you mentioned 90, okay, you're exaggerating, but okay, maybe there's 20 big things going on that the staff is trying to work on, but that we get a report that gives us an idea of, okay, this is where things stand. These things have been completed. You know, some got delayed. Some is gonna take another year. You know, in the course of the year, the council put something else, et cetera. Okay, so we, I get a chance to review that, let's say now or next month. And the public also gets to find out what the status is of things. Okay. Then when the council has its retreat, you know, we're not going to go over every little thing that's going on there. And you're right, you know, generally speaking, there's limited community engagement. I totally, you know, get that. Not enough people show off to give their comments. Not enough people send comments, we invite them. And, you know, I don't know what that is. It's just a certain inertia that happens in every community. It's just the way it is. Not everybody in town is consumed by the politics of the city or the concerns of the council. They have their ideas and their concerns and their needs. But when we set up a retreat, we're going to have, you know, the people who, for whatever reason, are more interested or have the time and they will come and then we can say, well, we have community input but we didn't have a lot. Okay. However, I don't want to undercut the importance of the elected officials who after all were elected by the voters, by the community, that those five people have an opportunity to discuss what is it that collectively, they would like to see, you know, for this year or next year and I understand like putting it in two year to year plans is good in a way because lots of things don't happen overnight you have to you need one year two years but I think it has worked very well for the council collectively to have an opportunity to have discussions and debates and even with management push back to me that's a healthy relationship you know if we say well you know for people on the council would like to get this done this year well you know that's the way our system works if the majority of the council is saying we want this done this year, then the management has to push back if they feel they need to to say, look, if you want that done, then something else has to give. So you tell us what else is going to fall behind. But the point of it is, the point is that the council has had a chance to fall behind. But the point of it is the point is that the council has had a chance to do that because if we don't do that then I don't feel that we're having a very dynamic and fruitful discussion between the elected body granted is only five of us. But we do represent the community. And the management does the job. You guys represent the community too, because you hear from people. But anyway, there have been years when the council has introduced something new for that year. And then we haggle it out and it gets done. If the majority of the council ones. If the majority council feels like, no, everything's okay. We don't need to change where on track, et cetera, then it's fine. But missing that opportunity, I don't think it's healthy for the dynamics of the elected officials and the management, you know, so that that's my opinion that we should not lose that opportunity for the five of us to, and there are going to be two new people to kind of hash things over, and maybe things will just be the same, and this bigger process is good. So I support that too. This bigger process of engaging the community, but not at the expense of the five of us, not having that opportunity to say, you know, for this year, this is really something we've won down. And then we can, you know, go back and forth and negotiate with each other with the management and the city council to see where it lands, you know, anyway. So I think we could do both, I feel. Yeah, through that, just thank you for those comments, Councilmember Abrica. Just one thing, just not sure if you were asking or if you're saying that we do provide quarterly updates on the existing work plan. Every quarter we do either on consent calendar or a presentation, the way it's now, we're trying to do presentations,ally but every quarter there's at least one consent calendar can be pulled. We might be when the last one was. September 3rd. Okay so we probably would get one like in January or or did we do we did one after that sorry. I get that confused all the time. Twice a year. But we just did one. So we we we closed out 23 24 and then we did the first quarter of this year of last month. So I think we did it in November, the beginning of November. All right. But your the this process that is proposed with this with Ramin Associates proposal still provides the opportunity for the council to deliberate and decide which projects and what the you all are the end all be all we're just providing you with additional inputs. Thank you, gentlemen. I'm going to let Vice Mayor Baraghan. Yes. So with all fairness and equity of voices and representation of the people, I would like to also hear Mr. Raimi who's been patiently waiting to have his turn to explain his rationale as to why he chose his approach for us to take into consideration and also for time-stake because we have a lot of new agenda and we need to move it along. So I don't know if it's okay. A lot of us do have families to get to children and a day job. So I don't know is it okay? May her be. Do the chair. Yes, yes, yes. Thank you. I'm dining here. What do you have to go to the council. I'm going to go to the council. May her be. Thank you. I'm dining here. What do you have to say? Thank you. Mr. Mayor, members of the council. I actually don't have very much to say. I mean, ultimately, this is the council's decision and direction. The couple of pieces that I just, you know, hearing this was actually really helpful. And, you know, our approach to this is essentially the process that you have had plus. And so I just wanted to reiterate that point of it, which is its community engagement added onto the process that you have plus a, I think, a document that's sort of more crafted that's for the community as well as for the council. The only other thing I would, two other things I would say is, one is that the team is myself and then we have a strategic planning group in my office, which you all probably didn't know. So that's, it's myself working with our strategic planning group and then again with the engagement, I think there's a lot of coordination all probably didn't know. So that's, it's myself working with our strategic planning group. And then again, with the engagement, I think there's a lot of coordination because there's a lot of activities happening in the next six months. We'd be happy to start the process if starting the process is talking with the council about what the process is. We can do that as well. So with that, I will just leave it to you all and I'm happy to answer any questions, but we'll keep referring. Thank you for the sake of fairness, equity, um, customer will go share. Did you want to add something to the mix? Now I don't. I think this has been an exhaustive conversation and I'm ready to move forward. All right. My, my only two senses, I, yeah, I don't, I don't see this as a zero binary opposition of the councils being undercut. I mean the reality is when we have these meetings five people show up Maybe court Miss Wilkerson. I appreciate you guys Mr. Lincoln. You'll be on the council soon, right? But not a whole lot of residents and we're in the business of yeah We're elected by the people but those people don't show up to our means and that's a systematic thing That's not just EPA that that's government in general. Civic engagement is a huge issue. So how do we supplement what we do? How do we innovate and what we do? We live in an innovation economy. So let's think about how we can continue to improve our city services and outreach. So I don't see it as a, you know, the city manager or staff or just in general that we're somehow undercutting our work. I think this will really enhance what we're already doing as a community. So, barring any further objections to the council or this item, I'm happy to entertain a motion so we can move on to the main event, if you will. Sorry about that, Councillor Abrikan. James, can you check if there's anyone's comment on item 8.3? Let's see, none, Mayor. Thank you. Councillor Ember, do you have additional comments to make? No. I'll second, or did someone second already? No. I'll second. Just, you know, what I said before and I think Remy seems to agree that as long as we don't sacrifice that process of having to counsel plenty of time that day to do that, then, you know, I'm fine. All right. You know, specific to the proposal, there are three items I want to touch on. One, I think it's going to be important for the consultant to distinguish where the information is coming from. So I want to make sure that I know that this is staff's input. And then I want to know this community input. And it's vitally important because this should not be a staff driven document, right? And I don't think that's where we're trying to go. But I wanna make sure that there's a demarcation that we know staff is saying this, this is important, that's great, okay? But maybe PADD is not as important as doing the park or what have you, okay? So if we can get there, I think that would be helpful. I'm not saying that, just have driven. As far as the optional tasks, I don't know if we're gonna do that, but the social media analysis, because a significant portion of our community is not on social media, right? I mean, you can maybe do some texting, but actually is, and Romen, we've done some focus groups with seniors, with Latinos, in which it's a world that they don't pertain to. And I think that you miss a significant sector of folks. If you say yes, okay, this is the social media piece, which is very chattery, right, which kind of, throws out all sorts of stuff. So I would not be in favor of that analysis. And then I had a concern or it's not a concern, but I think there's a discussion about three to five council priorities. We have, I think, seven here. This document has seven. There might be one or two that could actually collapse into some of the other ones, but either to staff or to Matt, because yes, actually, it's a portion of your practice that I wasn't aware of until I actually started looking at some of the stuff you've done It's is there an optimal number of priorities that we should be searching for do you Matt and also to staff because again, I think it is important for us to focus If we are gonna do this to see if indeed we either shrink it or we combine two. So is there any thoughts in terms of like what we might be shooting for in terms of priorities? Yeah, the overarching one. Yeah, overarching priorities. I think that focus provides more direction. I always shoot for five and council's always land on more, but I always go low and you all go higher. When we land where you decide, I think that the idea of having fewer priorities is having the ability to say this is what the council really cares about for this period and hold ourselves accountable to delivering on those focused areas. When you have seven, like with our current priorities, they are our priorities, but it's very broad. So fewer helps us to focus more, but I also understand that this is a community with a lot of needs. When I look at those seven priorities that exist right now, I can't say one of them is unimportant. They're all important, but the the quest, the desires, to say like, well, what's the most important of those important men? And that's a hard thing. So I wouldn't blame you if you ended up with seven, but I'm going to ask you to go five maybe. Yeah. And then just one last piece is, again, as with the economic development strategy piece, you know, is there an opportunity for kind of a mid career, I'm sorry, kind of a mid point, you know, true up with the council. This is kind of where we are, what we're hearing, this is how this is proceeding. So just one of the know if that would be possible. We have actually in the six months, there's actually three check in periods already. The first piece is the sort of the gathering information and then the goal setting session with the council. We then create the draft of the strategic priorities work plan. Let's bring that to the council. The goal setting though is in June, correct? No, that's in March. It's in March it's in March yeah and then two months a month and a half two months later we bring the the draft strategic plan back in a study session and then we bring it back again for the final time so we already have three times so there's that March piece which is the day long goal setting which will include this feedback outreach that you've been doing. Exactly. The engagement will happen at two times. First is before. I'll appear enough for theory. Yes. Okay. As you said, yeah, before and after. Yeah. So before on what are the ideas of the issues so that the council has kind of a big picture of the direction of the community which we know you already know but it might give some perspective and then after you do your priority setting it then goes back to the community and that helps inform the plan itself and then it goes back to the council. All right thank you. Thank you very much it was no further questions that make a motion to pass 8.3. Is there a second? I second has it moved in second. All is in favor of please vote the sign of I aye. Yes Thank you. Thank you. Ramy. Thank you. See the manager gains. Thank you miss it Yeah, there was no public there was no public comment No I'm not sure if they're going to be able to get the car. No, they were lining up because they thought we were done already with this item. And they were teamed up for the next item. All right, number nine public hearings. This is adoption of the RBD for corners final specific plan. And final S E I R. We are two Amies, but this is Miss Amy Chen. Thank you very much. Thank you Troy. All right, this is the main event. This is like the paper review, like the big fight. I mean, this is like a- Here we are. Thank you. Yeah, look at that. All right. Well, without further ado, Alan should you set item item? Good evening, everyone. Wow, it's been four years in the making. I know this because my son is four years old, and as old as the pandemic, when we started in 2020, by selecting the Remina Associates team. So wanting to start us off, by reminding us that the last time we were here going over the Ravenswood Business District specific plan update was September 24th, where we had a council study session, and we reviewed the near to final version of the environmental documents and address changes to the specific plan update itself. Sorry, I didn't say who I was. I'm Amy Chad and I'm the Director of Community and Economic Development and joined by several folks here on the team. I also wanted to remind folks that although we sought a great deal of feedback from our developers, countless community members that participated in both virtual and in-person outreach events and went through all the variations of development scenarios. We are only looking to approve the specific plan tonight. We're not approving any projects in the specific plan area and we are open to feedback, although this follows a four-year engagement process and I think 12 study sessions with the City Council. So we feel that we've made a lot of progress this year with the documents and have posted the environmental documents for their sufficient public review periods without any issues and really appreciate the public's comments and feedback in that timely manner. So thus we think it's important for the current council to see this work through. We hope we can complete this first reading tonight in order to finalize the update with this same council with this body before the end of this year. Lastly, I wanted to thank the development community, nonprofits, advocates and our partners that provided all their feedback. Also through our robust website, we have postings of all of those community engagement events recorded as well as the council study sessions. So without further ado, I wanted to introduce, first we do have several consultants that are online from David J. Powers, who helped us prepare the environmental documents, as well as Goldfarb and Lippmann, who provided additional legal advice. So with that, I'll turn it over to Matt Raimi and Trey Reinhaltter, who will be leading the main presentation. Thank you, Amy. Good evening, Council members. I'll try to be succinct tonight while still giving a very, you know, accurate and precise summary of the work that we've been up to since the last time we've seen you. So, as you all know, we've been at this for some time. The project officially kicked off almost four years ago. The purpose at that time was a number of development proposals were submitted, which were an excess of the original specific plans EIR. Therefore, the first goal in the key goal was to study both the impacts and the benefits of more office and R&D development. Hand in hand with that was that the plan would be refreshed to have new design standards, which would craft the complete neighborhood and employment district serving the city. And finally, and most importantly, is that the new plan would contain a framework for the delivery of community benefits from developments in the plan area. As Amy mentioned, we've been at this for some time. This will be our 13th and lucky meeting with the council. We've already had three meetings this year alone. The first one was in April when we discussed and reviewed the public draft of the specific plan with this council. We received some excellent feedback from members of this council. In July, we discussed the public draft of the SCIR. Two kind of key decisions were made at that meeting. One was the removal of the loop road from the plan and then secondly a policy to monitor future industrial square footage that's developed in the plan area. Finally, the most recent meeting in September, we received a direction from this council to select the larger scenario two, which permits up to 3.3 million square feet of office in R&D. We also received some direction and some comments related to changes to community benefits and implementation policies. So tonight we're looking for at the first reading of this plan. We're looking for an adoption of a resolution that certifies the subsequent EIR, adopts the mitigation monitoring reporting plan, adopts a statement of overriding considerations, files a notice of determination, and approves a general plan amendment which is to carry through the land specific plan elements. Secondly, we're looking for action to adopt an ordinance, which waves the first reading and approves the updated Ravenswood Business District four-corner specific plan along with a, in addition to the copy of the plan that was provided as an attachment to the staff report a change here to a specific policy that we've listed here. And finally, the wave of the first reading and amend the city's development code or zoning code, again, to be consistent with the specific plan. So now I'll turn it over to Amber Sharp of David J. Powers who will discuss the findings of the SCIR and key changes that were made between the public draft release and this final document. Amber. Thank you. Good evening. Mayor, Vice Mayor, Council Members, I'm Amber Sharp with David J. Powers, as Choi mentioned, we assisted the city with the preparation of the subsequent environmental impact report referred to as the SEIR for the Ravenswood Business District specific plan update. Aconi Danielson also with David J. Powers and I are on the panel this evening to address questions that come up regarding the SEIR and see what process. Next slide please. of the two scenarios that were studied throughout the SEIR process, scenario one and scenario two are contrasted with the amount of growth allowed under the 2013 specific plan, which allowed up to 1.4 million square feet of office and R&D space and 835 residential units. The impacts from the increase in office and R&D, light industrial, retail, community, and civic space, as well as housing were evaluated in the SEIR. As noted earlier in the presentation, and we'll be discussed later in the presentation, the city has identified scenario two as the preferred scenario. Next slide please. This slide summarizes the impacts disclosed in the S E I R as shown in the leftIR. As shown in the left-hand column, most impacts would be less than significant since there are policies or other requirements included in the plan that would serve to avoid impacts or reduce impacts to acceptable levels. The specific plan would result in no impacts related to agricultural and forestry resources, mineral resources, and wildfire hazards. The middle column shows several topic areas that could have significant impacts. However, the SEIR identifies mitigation measures that would feasibly reduce the impacts to less than significant levels. The third column lists two impacts which are related to operational criteria, air pollutant emissions and greenhouse gas emissions that would remain significant and unavoidable despite the policies and standards included in the plan. The following slides provide more details about how the key environmental resource areas would be impacted by the specific plan update. Next site, please. As mentioned in the previous slide for most topics, the SEIR finds that the specific plan would result in no impacts or less than significant impacts. For five topics, implementation of key mitigation measures and or specific policies and standards will be required by future developments to reduce impacts to less than significant. These topics include cultural and tribal cultural resources, biological resources, geology and soils, and hazardous materials. For cultural resources, the plan area includes archaeological and historic resources, and the plan includes policies to ensure impacts to cultural resources are appropriately mitigated. For tribal cultural resources. No known resources are present within the plan area. However, resources could be discovered during construction. Therefore, the plan includes policies to ensure impacts to tribal cultural resources are mitigated. The significant and unavoidable operational air quality and greenhouse gas impacts that would result from the specific plan are typical of large-scale development projects in the Bay Area and require a statement of overriding consideration, explaining how the benefits of the plan outweigh the impacts. Next slide. Some other key topics that were covered in the SEAR include biological resources, hazardous materials, and utilities and service systems. The plan area is next to biologically sensitive Baylands or salt marsh and other important habitats are present and support a number of rare, threatened, and endangered plant and animal species. A broad range of mitigation measures developed by qualified biologists are included in the plan to ensure future development does not result in significant impacts to biological resources. For hazardous materials, prior uses on many of the sites within the plan area could have led to the release of pollutants into the soil or groundwater, and there are a number of sites that are currently included on several agency databases to foreclaim up action. The specific plan includes policies and standards to ensure that sites undergoing redevelopment are evaluated for potential to have soil and groundwater contamination and that appropriate measures are taken to protect construction workers, existing residents and workers near construction sites, and future occupants of new development. For utilities, the plan would require substantial improvements to serve the new demand. With these improvements, the water, sanitary sewer, and storm drainage systems would operate at or above current functionality. The Pallow Alto Regional Water Quality Control Plant has adequate physical capacity to serve the specific plant growth, along with cumulative East Po Alto growth. However, the existing contractual rights for treatment of wastewater would be insufficient to serve cumulative growth with a specific plan built out. As a result, the city will ensure contractual rights for adequate treatment complicity exists at the time projects receive entitlements. Next slide, please. capacity exists at the time projects receive entitlements. Next slide, please. So the draft SEIR for the plan circulated for public review from July 26, 2024 through September 10, 2024. 23 public comment letters were received from state, regional regional and local agencies, as well as organizations and individuals. A final SEIR, which includes responses to public comments and drafts SER text revisions was prepared. The draft SEIR text revisions include minor updates and clarification to the draft SER texts and mitigation measures, which do not change the SER I.R.s impact conclusions. The one instance in which the SER's conclusions was changed pertains to the roadway noise impacts that would result from future traffic generated by plan build out. The draft SER concluded there was a significant impact at Bay Road at the University Avenue to Clark Avenue and Clark Avenue to Pulgar's Avenue segments due to the traffic noise increase from the build out of the plan compared to existing traffic noise levels in the plan area. The traffic noise mitigation included installation of quieter pavement and the implementation of traffic calming measures to reduce traffic noise impacts from specific plan build out. The draft SER concluded that installation of quieter pavement could reduce noise levels by 2 to 3 decibels. However, at the time the draft SER was prepared, the feasibility of installing quieter pavement along the impacted segments was unknown. At staff's direction, the city's noise consultant completed a noise survey and pavement analysis of the affected Bay Road segments in August 2024 to determine if quieter pavement would reduce the traffic noise impact to a less less than significant level. Based on the Roatway noise survey and pavement analysis, it was concluded that installation of choir pavement along the affected segments would reduce noise levels by at least five decibels and therefore would reduce the traffic noise impact at these segments to a less than significant level. As a result, the traffic noise mitigation measure was updated in the final SEIR and the conclusion regarding the specific plan build out roadway noise impact was changed to less than significant with mitigation incorporated. The final SEIR also clarifies that the Council identified scenario 2 as the preferred scenario, although the SEIR, SER continues to disclose the impacts of both scenarios. Since the preparation of the final SER, eroded to the SER were prepared on November 21 and November 26 to include clarifications to the noise impact conclusions and minor corrections to type a graphical errors in the alternative section to ensure internal consistency with text revisions provided specific plan policy, LU 7.3, clarifying that protections for tribal cultural resources discovered during construction include additional options for mitigation consistent with plan policy LU 7.9 regarding archeological resources. The text revision in the RADA reconciles plan policy LU 7.13 with policy LU 7.9. The revisions in the final SEIR and RADA would not result in a new significant environmental impacts or substantial increase in the impacts. Since the specific plan update build out would result in significant impacts, the city prepared findings accompanied by a brief explanation of the rationale for each identified significant impact. The findings were posted in the city's website on the city's website on November 26, 2024. If the city were to move forward with approving the specific plan update, SQL requires the city to adopt a statement of writing considerations for significant and unavoidable impacts, which identifies the specific benefits of the specific plan update the out way, the significant and unavoidable impacts. The city will make the decision to adopt the findings statement of overriding considerations along with the specific plan update mitigation, mitigation monitoring and reporting program once the specific plan SEIR is certified. This includes my portion of the presentation and I will pass it back on to Troy. Thank you. Amber, I'll now briefly summarize the key changes that were made to the public draft of the specific plan as a result of the many comments received from this council, members of staff, members of this community, key local stakeholders and property owners in the plan area. So the first few chapters of the plan were unchanged those simply summary chapters and existing conditions summary of community output and other background materials will begin with chapter 5, 6 and 7, chapter 5, the land use policy. There were additional policies that were added to reflect updates that were made to the environmental document, such as Amber mentioned related to quiet paving, tribal cultural resources, requirement for health risk assessments, soils, and other topics. On Chapter 6, the land use and development standards chapter, there were visions made to the land use table that support additional flexibility and land use by right provisions while still minimizing the impacts to neighbors and biological resources. There were reductions in certain requirements for base-tier projects, acknowledging that those projects have less ability to support and subsidize certain types of activities. And finally, in Chapter 7, the Parks and Open Space Chakter, we clarified that the locations shown and depicted in the plan for plazas are conceptual and will be finalized during project approval and then there were some other minor revisions to the location and shape of future parks shown in these diagrams. Changes made to the mobility chapter 8 and the utilities chapter 9 includes changes to the TDM or transportation demand management section. These include the elimination of the district wide cap. Those still, there is a project by project trip cap. Clarified this shuttle is not a mandatory, but an optional element to achieve the required TDM trip reductions. And additional details will be moved to a separate guidelines document that will return to this council next year. Largely, the specific plan deferred to the city's TDM ordinance with a few exceptions, such as the requirement to form a TMA or transportation management authority. On the utilities chapter, there was a revision made to the safer Bay Figure Alignment to clarify the single soul city's preferred alignment and to correct the width of the buffer between the levy and the university village properties. There was expanded requirement for projects to conduct an assessment of the vulnerability and impacts of shallow groundwater beneath their projects and finally clarified that the projects who fund or construct utility improvements beyond the nexus requirements that is their fair share requirements. Anything beyond that represents a community benefit such as addressing existing deficiencies. Changes to the community benefits chapter. In part due to comments from this council include an increased preference for allocations of square footage to those projects that Excel in the affordable housing category clarified that this point system and benefits that are in the adopted plan should be regularly revisited by this council as needed to reflect changing values in the community and also changing in the market and economic conditions. As discussed with this council in July there were minor revisions to the exemplary tier targets and similarly we clarified that for affordable housing projects, requirements that the city has for comparability for unit sizes and unit types may be waived if the tax credit standards are met. So it's not to jeopardize the low-income tax credit financing for affordable housing projects. A number of changes were made to implement the city's adopted six cycle housing element. These include the addition of a policy that permits the city to offer fee waivers or reductions to enhance the feasibility, financial feasibility of affordable housing projects. There was an addition of an item to the priority benefits, which is construction of housing units for vulnerable populations, such as large households or disabled persons. Added a policy to prioritize the construction of infrastructure needed to support and serve affordable housing projects and clearly stated the protections that are in place for any resins that would be directly displaced as a result of new development. Changes made to the implementation chapter, which is in some ways the most important chapter, which will determine how this plan plays out over the coming years. We expanded and added the local jobs narrative to the base tier, previously applied only to the higher tiers, the standard and exemplary tier. Added timelines for the staff and city review of the proposals at those higher tiers and their associated community benefits programs Removed a map identifying specific Dedications or easements so that those can be negotiated during project approval Clarified that the city at the city's discretion may accept a license agreement in lieu of a public access easement for publicly accessible Plases and other park spaces. And as discussed, we added a policy to monitor the total square footage of industrial development that occurs in the plan area. Just highlighting a few comments that were made in result in reaction to the comments we received in September. We added two items to the priority benefits list, adult care and housing for at-risk youth items that we heard from the Planning Commission and Council specifically. We removed the conditional allocation or the whole process in light of the current market and the desire to an extension for base tier projects and the entitlement there is a five year maximum to again kind of remove the ability for a project to hold on the square footage in a too long of a period. In response to concerns about the construction of promised affordable housing, there is a new policy that we're calling the Safety Net in lieu, which is that for a project, a non-resonant project that is promising or donating land to build affordable housing, the certificate of occupancy for that non-residential use is contingent on the demonstration or the evidence of progress towards that affordable housing, such as a building, or financing, or alternatively, the applicant must pay the commercial linkage fee that would have been covered by the construction of this affordable housing. And finally, the initial concept of an immediate allocation window, which would open after adoption, is changed to a more flexible process, similar to a gatekeeper process used by other similar nearby cities. I'll explain this in a little bit more detail, but it's essentially a window for all the exemplary or standard proposals that would be received prior to this window would be reviewed and considered simultaneously by staff and by council. This review of requests would occur somewhat semi-automatically, depending on the interest from the developers and or more frequently at the staff or councils initiation. So as I was describing the specific plan describes the general framework for the allocation, but it is still flexible depending on the interest. How this might play out is that at the beginning of the year there would be a window whereby major property owners would be asked to submit a letter of interest which would describe their intent to submit at and at what tier later in the year base standard or exemplary. If necessary, if there's a number of exemplary proposals then tend to be submitted, there would then be a competitive window. If not, there would not need to be a competitive window. At that time, there would be staff would provide an update to council about the process intended for that year. Staff would review those allocation requests, including their proposed benefits. Council would then consider these requests along with staff's recommendation. Acedure projects would be different. There would, as they're not required, a legislative change, they would be reviewed and allocated on a rolling basis. Staff will implement this process flexibly, again, depending on the interest in the highest tiers of development and the need for a competitive process. So on November 18th, we held a meeting of the Planning Commission where we discussed the final SCIR, the specific plan, the zoning and the general plan amendments. At this meeting, the staff and the project team answered clarifying questions about these documents, the Commission reviewed and considered the final environmental document, and finally the Planning Commission recommended the adoption of these documents and these amendments to the city's zoning and general plan. A number of changes were made after that planning commission meeting. These include a clarification over which development standards apply in residential overlay zones. Additional revisions were made to the land use tables to permit more uses by right in recognition of the current market. Clarified that certain required setbacks do not apply to private streets only to public streets. Clarified the responsibility for projects to restore marshland according to the resource agencies desires. Clarified again, more language about the fair share responsibilities for off-site improvements. We added policies and a priority benefit relating to the use of local building trades apprentices and approved construction training programs, a comment that was received at the Planning Commission. We added a policy requiring notification of a relevant agencies if an existing remediation system would be impacted during excavation, again in response to a public comment at the Planning Commission. And we clarify the land use definitions for commercial recreation outdoor uses to include athletic fields. So to reiterate, the actions we're looking for tonight are plentiful, but they revolve around the certifying of the S E I R adopting of the MMRP, adopting of the statement of overriding considerations, filing the notice of termination, proving the general plan amendment, approving the specific plan with the following text change as described below and amending the city's zoning code to be consistent with the specific plan. As Amber mentioned, the final SIR was circulated between the date of the planning commission and yesterday and the second reading by council is scheduled for the Tuesday, December the 17th and I'll note that any sort of major substantive changes made at this point in the process could potentially necessitate another first reading of the plan. And so thank you all for your time. And I'll just add that it's been my great pleasure to work on this project, close collaboration with this council on behalf of the members of this community. I hope that you find that we've developed a plan that's really set up to serve the best interest of the city, its residents now and into the future. Thank you. All right, pretty good. Thanks everyone. Amy, Troy, Rami, all the folks behind this operation. Council members, this has been a long-awaited I think there's a lot of information. I think there's seven action items that we have to take if we decide to go down that route. But for now, are there any burning questions or thoughts that come to mind? I know it's going to be an ongoing conversation. But when anyone wants to get started, I think there's a lot of information. I think there's seven action items that we have to take if we decide to go down that route. But for now, are there any burning questions or thoughts that come to mind? I know it's going to be an ongoing conversation, but when anyone's like to get started. Otherwise, I guess I'm going to start. I don't know how much of an ongoing conversation because basically we're locking this in today. Right. 13 meetings is what I'm saying. Yeah. Okay. That's what you mean by ongoing. But it's not ongoing after today, you're saying. Okay. So yeah, just a couple of questions on the land use development standards and you're adding a couple of a few new categories to any of you. There's this mini storage permitted with the CUP and industrial transition in the REC area. I'm just curious how that got in there. And I look, we have mini storage in this city. And it is really a very unproductive use. And I'm concerned that, you know, economy's bad. You want to get something out of your land. You put up a mini storage, and they don't go away for a long time. So is there any reason why we actually want to have many stories? Is that possible option? I think that's a fair comment. It was added as a conditionally permitted use to provide more discretion for the council to potentially consider whether or not that is an appropriate use. The intent was sort of just to provide additional flexibility in light of current feasibility of projects, but again, it would be a CUP process that requires this. It was just more discretionary than correct. Yeah, I remember a planning commissioner 10 years ago saying that you know the entire RBD should be nothing but storage And it was like oh my god We that was when we were about to do the specific plan or in middle specific plan. Okay I you know if I had my brothers I'd pull it out It is a CUP, it's discretionary. The other item, a couple of these things I did discuss with Troy or some of these things. This corporate housing category, which is Bay Road in four corners, the question really comes down to, for me, is this covered by TOT or is is it covered by the gross receipts tax measure? It's 30 days. I don't know. I actually think my preference would be that it would be covered by TOT, honestly. Some various tax considerations around that. But yeah, have we thought about this? And then the other question was, I can't believe this would actually count as rena housing. I mean, we can't even get student housing to count as rena housing. So I'm hoping this would not count as rena housing, actually, because I don't want that to see it like, oh, it's a public benefit. So, and then last thing, last week, would the inclusionary housing ordinance apply to this? A couple of questions, so I know the answer, so I don't know whether it would be counted towards arena. My reading of the TOT section of the municode is that if the occupiers of the space are there longer than 30 days, it would not be covered, but that it would be covered by inclusionary. So inclusionary requirements would apply to this housing. And then subsequently the gross receipts tax would also apply. That would correct. That would follow. Because it's considered rental housing. That would follow. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Um, you know, just to make it clear, TOT money, the city manager would prefer TOT money. It is far more, it is the most flexible tax money we can get into a city just by far. So, I mean, I don't know if this eventually means that we should change the TOT ordinance so that these longer stay, these longer stay, I don't know, hotels, whatever we're calling them, actually a caption on the TOT. But for now it sounds like, and I don't know, the city attorney, it sounds like this is probably a gross receipts tax, a business license gross receipts tax collection as a rental property. That sounds right. And I am a little bit uncertain as to whether or not we could apply sort of TOT to it sounds like what you're saying is extended stay as opposed to something that's just simply 30 transients. Yeah, it's still transient right? It's the definition of transient. Yeah, and I've just never seen it framed that way, but we can look into that. Okay, but for now, any building of this nature you're saying would comply with the inclusionary. So you have to have 20% that would somehow be, you know, affordable at our levels. And in addition to that, the GR, the gross receipts tax business license tax. Yeah, that would be my understanding. Yeah. Okay, and again, this is just for that four corners area, right? Special. Yeah, the proposal is that the corporate housing use would be permitted in the four corners in Bay Road area only. Okay. You answered those other questions for me. Yeah, there was a question. I had this question about the revision to the parking maximums. I understand why it went from 2.5 to 3. My preferences 2.5. Developers are saying we can't get financing. We need to have this 3.0. If we don't, banks aren't going to think that our projects are feasible. Granted, okay, let's give that to think that our projects are feasible. Granted. Okay, let's give that to them. They want a flexibility, all right. Means they have to build more parking, which is going to cost them more. But when we add this issue of removal of the midpoint, and addition of, excuse me, vehicle parking reductions as a potential qualifying benefit, I would say no, it's not a qualifying benefit because it's actually in their interest to reduce the amount of parking because they're shaving off $50,000 to $60,000 a parking space from their development costs. So I don't think we should give them a double benefit for doing that. So that would be my suggestion that for this, that one proposed change to the community benefits piece. Noted. And I, you know, I'm going to the city manager, the city attorney to say, I mean, these sounds like, sound like they're minor revisions, so they wouldn't require rereading. That's correct, yeah, that's our position. Let's see. We already got that. You answer that question. Yeah, could you explain the commercial linkage fee safety net in lieu policy because I'm a little Well, I mean would this be a policy that we would apply to a an exemplary Project that did not get its act together to build the housing that's precisely it is the idea that if an exemplary project say promised housing and it did not get built that project would not receive its occupancy certificate for the office portion unless it either demonstrated evidence that it was actually moving towards that housing or it basically paid the fee that it was trying to get out of by building that housing. So the city is sort of recovering its cost there. Which would be the inclusionary plus if they were going forward to get the exemplary with because your formula is 30,000 square feet per one unit for 30,000 square feet. Yeah, I guess it would be the value of the housing that they had proposed at the current commercial linkage fee rate. It's an aggregate of both. It's that floor that we set with the commercial linkage fee plus whatever they had promised to develop through that they're based on the commercial project of their bill. Yeah, I think that's it. Yeah, unless they had already paid their commercial linkage fee for their non-residential portion, but yes, if not, then they would be essentially on the hook for that entire amount. If they had not delivered that housing or could not provide some evidence that they were on a successful path. And that, yeah, I just wanted to make sure that this wasn't a loophole for somebody to say, oh, I'm just going to pay the inclusionary link and fee and not reimburse you for the full value that they are. Right. Yeah, no, no, and that is not the way this read. No, that's the you're describing correctly. Okay. Troy, I think you answered the other three questions I had on the phone. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Very good. Other council members, if not, maybe it's a good opportunity before it becomes tomorrow to open it up for public comment. How have we get? Night is young. Oh, it depends. Dep depends when you wake up. It's not half a day job. It is young. But if you do, it's I'm not young anymore because of this man. All right, James. How many hands we got? So we did receive several speaker slips. It looks like we received eight plus that's it. And there are three hands raised on the table. Okay. Well, we'll give two minutes. Sounds good. So first speaker, Jonathan Ticus. See. I know some folks left. So for the first speaker, Jonathan Ticcus. He, I know some folks left. So. Jonathan Ticcus had to leave. My name's Anthony with the Shimano workers union. And those 11 apprentices that we're here tonight we're here to just support. You know, he did wanna say a few things. They as an apprentice, but I just wanted a couple things he mentioned what I wanted to say was, you know, vote for this just because, you know, there's language in it now that's gonna help apprentices and kids coming out of high school, kids going to different trade schools to coming out of high school, kids going to different trade schools to have work when they get out of there. And yeah, just, they were here to support and they all get up tomorrow morning, five o'clock in the morning to, you know, so. So the night's not young for them. Yeah, it's not young for them. Yeah, it's not young for them. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So the next speaker, Bart Pantoha, followed by Mr. Willie Clifton. All right. Evening. Bart Pantoha, because it has building trades council, it has been a long evening, mayor, vice mayor, council members and staffs. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. Thank you for the two minutes. The building trades council is in support of this specific plan. I want to thank the council and thank staff and for those involved in meeting with the building trades to address our concerns. And then also we came to we had a great discussion. They proposed some very reasonable amendments that as Tony or Beena mentioned, a apprenticeship as a key piece. It's the career pathway I took to get into the trades to, you know, have a successful career in the trades. I've actually been able to provide for my family, have health care for my family, and all I had to do was just go to work every day. And hopefully have some retirement when I retire someday, if ever, with some dignity. The inclusion of these work community workforce standards is key to developing pathways to viable careers and construction. And we appreciate the shared value of East Palo Alto, that working people matter, all working people, whether you're wearing slacks or car hard pants, work boots or dress shoes. It's important what you do for yourself, for your family is important. And the best way I heard a lot of talk about all the topics that we're brought up today, the best way to, I guess avoid or get away from displacement is being able to have a life-sustaining career. It's tough. You can't make people stay, but hopefully we can get them going that they'll want to do is to make a decision to make a decision to make a decision to make a decision to make a decision to make a decision to make a decision to make a decision to make a decision to make a decision to make a decision to make a decision to make a decision to make a decision to make a decision to make a decision to make a decision to make a decision to make a decision to make a decision to make a decision to make a decision and our training programs to do that. So thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, Mr. Willie Clifton, followed by Anthony Viscoso. Good evening, Council. And good evening, members that are still here. I just like to say I'm representing local 16, heat and frost out of Benisha to piggyback off. Like one of my colleagues said, I've been able to change my life since I've joined the trade. I've been able to provide for my family. I've also just had an amazing time in the trade. And what I wanted to say was to include our our locals in the labor laws, just to even if it's not immediate, to have an impact for our children later on to have an opportunity at something that might be around here is great. I just spent six weeks in Reno traveling out for work because it's slow here in the Bay area, but with that to say, it will give opportunity for guys like myself and out here in the Bay Area, but with that to say, it will give opportunity for guys like myself and out here in San Mateo County for other guys that's even interested to have projects to work on here. Save a little gas for the community. I mean, for the environment and things like that, you know what I mean, but I just wanted to say, if we can be included, we would much appreciate it. And thank you. Sorry, local 16, local 16 heat and frost So you mean like HVAC stuff is after you bite each but but but so it is actually called heat and frost Eat and frost and allied workers. Oh interesting insulators. Okay. Oh got it. Okay. Thanks Thank you next speaker Anthony visco, followed by Webster Lincoln and Gail Wilkerson. Good evening, Mayor and Council. Thank you for allowing us to speak. Again, my name is Anthony Viscuso. I am a business agent for local 16 Frost insulators. One thing that Mr. Wily forgot to mention is he isn't, he is a resident. He lives right down the street from here. So, but you know, even even on the business agent for for union workers and I'd actually want to speak for the non union workers as well because we don't just represent we don't just represent our members we represent every person that puts on a pair of work boots and goes to work and the opportunities, you know, we're always talking about how good union opportunities are. And right now, if you were to go to our hiring list, you'd find 400 people waiting to get into our union for that opportunity. And the labor standards that you guys have included in here are gonna allow more opportunities for that to happen. There are members right now that are working non-union that are your residents that would love the opportunity to be organized and actually start working in a career that'll last in the rest of their lives. And so I thank you guys for putting that into that and we, putting those standards into this, and we do support it and we do ask for an approval. So thank you very much. Thank you. Next speaker, Webster Lincoln, followed by Gail Wolkerson. the workers. Okay. As a recently elected council member, I felt compelled to express my concerns regarding this process. It really surprised the approval and the update of this update. Based on what I've seen, this appears to be less about making a thoughtful timely decision and more about rushing a process that ties the hands of the incoming council members. Before we've had an opportunity really to weigh in on this process, several planning commissioners express concerns about this process and they express concerns that they felt that it was rushed and that's what wasn't communicated. So nevertheless I just encourage you guys to defer this decision until the new council takes their seat. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, Gil Wilkerson. Good evening. Or is it midnight yet? Anyway, uh, the morning who said that, you're wrong. I'm leaving after this. But I came because I thought as maybe talk about the four corners there. And I remember the last thing Carlos was ripping it up and I saw he wanted it reduced and I've been thinking about it I have all this see I have about 18 things the last one's child care on here this is what I was running on this is what I found out people wanted and they want something they're constructive and pleasing to the eyes. Right now you have that statue there. It's growing on people. It's unusual. It's like an alien landed in East Palo Alto. But I was thinking, is it too late to tear all that up, because I'm thinking 2.5 square miles, our land is equal and valuable more so than Dubai. And I think it should be something monumental there, other than just some buildings. Some kind of nice skyscrapers. I don't care about rich people having pen houses. It would change and this is East Palo Alto. We can do that. So that's what my concern was. A lot of this stuff on here, people wanted waterfront and beautification, a fishing clean station out there. They want to build out into the bay. Who cares about that stupid little mouse out there? That's all I've been hearing about. I remember I had some cats and the rats killed the cats down by a chameleon. So that's all I have to say. We got 2.5 square miles and we should take advantage of it. Skies the limit. I'm in real estate, okay? I'll charge each one of you. Thank you, Miss Fulcresson. I'll give you a real estate class. I help 30 people get their real estate license. Call me. Thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you, Lucas. Those are our last speaker. Thank you, yes. All right. Thank you, James. Oh, apologies. There are some speakers. I was going to say, yeah, that seems kind of short. So for speaker Naomi Goodman, followed by Eileen McLaughlin and Kim Diamond. All right, thank you very much. I am an environmental scientist and a volunteer with the Sierra Club Bay Alive campaign. I want to take the opportunity to thank Remy Associate Staff for listening to and responding to concerns we brought up in the Planning Commission meeting regarding hazardous materials in soil and groundwater. As I understand their response, the city will implement a publicly accessible electronic repository of properties within the district that have environmental assessment assessment work plans and reports for proposed projects. Some of those properties have cleanup requirements that are established years ago that are no longer considered health protective. This electronic resource will help the East Palo Alto community and organizations such as ours to recommend actions protective of human health in the environment. Again, thank you and we look forward to working with the city as plans move forward. Thank you. Next speaker, Eileen McLaughlin, followed by Kim Diamond and Jeff Page? Yes, good evening. Mayor Lockez and members of council. I'm Iley McLaughlin here for the Citizens Committee to complete the refuge. I want to start first by fully supporting Naomi's comments just now and the concerns that the She-In-the-Bale Live program raised about toxic contamination. Looking back on my calendar, I saw that it was 2019 when we first learned of the initial proposal at the 2020 Bay Road site. It caught our attention, and I suspect that's when the wheels began turning in City Hall about this specific plan update. Tonight, I want to say how grateful we are for the manner in which this process functioned, persistently inviting and respecting community comments throughout. As an environmental advocacy group, this process stands out in our experience, in other jurisdictions. For Citizens Committee, this is a time in which we learn just how much you and city residents valued and enjoyed having the marshes as a neighbor. In turn, the specific plan update documents include a robust list of very specific protections for the Bay, the wetlands, and wildlife we all love. We're also happy to see improved requirements addressing sea level rise and rise and groundwater. For me, the Citizens Committee, the wetlands, and for the refuge we cherish, it's kind of special to know that the city documents will now correctly label the marshes long called the Baylands preserved or the Favour allowister tract. That label is the Don Edwards San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge. Please enjoy knowing that a lush part of the largest urban refuge in the country is on your Bay's edge. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, Kim Diamond. Thank you, City Council members for the opportunity to speak tonight. I'm sorry I couldn't be there. My name is Kim Diamond from Harvest Properties and we really do truly appreciate all of your time and hard work to get to this important milestone. Thank you to City staff and the City's consultant team, Ramy and associates, and David J. Powers for working cooperatively with us throughout this process. This probably goes without saying, but these are unprecedented times in the real estate world, particularly in the commercial real estate market. And we're certainly at a very different point than we were when the RBD specific plan process began four years ago. And truthfully, the same will likely be true four years from now and beyond that. And as of now, very little development is feasible. And it's hard to say when it will be financially feasible again, especially with the requirements of the city and in the specific plan. What I hope this has taught all of us is the requirements of the city and in the specific plan. What I hope this has taught all of us is the importance of flexibility. We've heard many of you express that you have grown up in EPA with sites that have been vacant and undeveloped for most of your lives living here. And what is most critical is that the current and future city councils work in partnership with your private sector partners so that these sites don't stay vacant for another 20 years Given the unknowns both sides will have to be flexible to see these sites developed and while the specific plan provides a framework It may not fit for all projects We look forward to continuing to work with the city and you all and the EPA community to develop our sites. Thanks again for your time tonight Thank you. Next speaker, Jeff Page, followed by Mike Kramer. Hi, Jeff Page with the Ravenswood Shores Business District. I'd like to reiterate the thanks to staff and the consultant team for all the hard work that got put into this. I remember back in 2013, and I'm sure that a couple of council members remember as well the development of the initial specific plan. And then here we go six or seven years later and we're needing to update it. I think that the process that we've gone through while it's been good fate has not been a process anyone would look at and say was what you would like to have happened four years when I think the expectation was when we first got into this, this was going to be 12 to 18 months. So at the end of the day, where I think the Ravens, which yours business district is, is reluctantly supportive of moving forward because we don't really want to continue this process going on and trying to relitigate or re-institute and re-evaluate each individual point. But the point going forward is that where we were in 2013 and where we were then in 2020 and where we are now is going to be changing and we do continue to need the flexibility to modify what is required and hopefully that flexibility can be undertaken by the City Council going forward and staff as well. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker'm Mike Kramer from Sandal Properties. We purchased the long vacant four-corner site at the University of Bay in 2019 and held several community meetings to get hundreds of points of input about what to do at this property that had been vacant for over 30 years. In 2020, we submitted a plan for a vibrant mixed-use downtown, including a new public town square with ground floor retail, restaurants, and community uses, including a new library. Despite general plan direction to prioritize development of four corners, our efforts to move forward have been very difficult. Over our objections, the city began a specific plan update, and we were told it would be a data refresh with limited scope taking less than one year. Our application was held back and required to remain behind the specific plan, eventually delaying us several years. Four years later, the draft plan includes significant changes in development standards, complex community benefits tiers, and it downsones most development sites including four corners. After all this time, the final draft review and adoption is being rushed through. This draft should not be advanced without also discussing how it affects the feasibility of future projects. The city's own feasibility analysis confirms that all development, except for sale town homes and warehouses, is infeasible under the new draft specific plan. We've submitted over a dozen comment letters to propose suggestions about how to create new housing and economic development with feasible community benefits. These suggestions have mostly been ignored despite our hopes for a high quality feasible project at the forecorner site. Therefore, we recently asked staff to suspend our current project application for forecorners. Please take more time to consider the implications of development and feasibility or remove the forecorner site from the draft-specific plan. Otherwise, we'll have to consider simpler alternatives that can be achieved in a feasible and timely manner. There's no need to rush this important decision. Thank you. Thank you. Those are our last speaker. Thank you, James. Thank you, thank you for folks commenting online and in person. I appreciate the trades being here, our developer, stakeholders, and just everyone who is a part of this important moment. Council members, we've had some time to chew on some questions. We have any questions to ask, uh, staff or our consultants here. You know, I don't have any questions. I just, you know, want to make a few points here. Um, this is not a rushed plan. Right. We took four years to develop this. Uh, 13 public hearings, focus groups. This is not a rushed plan, right? We took four years to develop this. 13 public hearings, focus groups, no one in this audience, whether they're smiling or not can say that this was not a plan that was deliberated and reviewed and re-reviewed. Number two, some folks have talked about flexibility. What we have here is a plan that actually has flexibility in it. It has three tiers. It tells developers how they can reach those tiers and it links moving to those different tiers to community benefits that we heard over the last four years that the community wanted. It is representative of this community and reflects the values therein. In addition to some of the comments, we are moving our development envelope from 1.2 million. Looks like the preferred alternative is the 3.35 million. It's almost a tripling of the development envelope. And yet I still hear people complain. It's true, some of you wanted 5 million square feet, which I do not believe was sustainable in our friends from both the Sierra Club and the community to say the refuge, Nuestra Casa and other folks, we heard from them saying that is way too much. The 3.5X, 3.35 is actually a compromise, which I'm not sure. I didn't vote, at least I didn't give a straw vote on it last time. I'll see where I fall. But again, this is a compromise. And lastly, certainly to Mr. Kramer, what we said and what the report says is that under the present economic conditions, your projects are not feasible. It has nothing to do with what we've imposed because even if we pulled away from the economic analysis, if we pulled away if we just let drop all the impact fees All of the city related charges your projects are still not feasible because the economy is in a place where you cannot build them. Do you want us to subsidize your projects? Do you want us to give you city money so you can build them? Well, that's preposterous. So for those who say that it is our specific plan that has impeded their development, what I say to them and some of the developers have been honest enough to admit this, that perhaps the time we spent on deliberating on this specific plan actually saved developers bacon, because they actually gone bricks to ground, they probably have projects that would right now be in default. So I think it's time to decide whether they're going to approve this. I think I know where I'm going. And so I would love to hear from other council members, but I think that four years and all of the work that's gone into this from both consultants, our city managers, Amy and the developers because I have to admit, you know, harvest has been a very good, Jeff has contributed a lot of good comments to this Jeff page. So to everyone, I think we have a project, we have a specific plan that reflects community, developer, council interests, time for us to move forward. Thank you, Mr. Romero. I did have a couple of just questions, kind of in the lines of my colleague that just mentioned, I just wanna be crystal clear. So I'm looking at Rami, and perhaps even Troy, the fees that the city are imposing or leving on the the developers are they cross prohibitive in other words if we were to get rid of all the fees now right with with for example say a um uh since we have we have to creamer example the um you know say no properties would they be able to build if we were to take away all the fees at this moment will or the next study but just to be crystal clear on that, because I want to understand, you know, this sort of conversation on our fees, some of being cost prohibitive. Can you just clarify that with the public? Yeah, I mean, Matt Rayme here. Thanks for the question. You know, I think that what we're seeing is the entire building industry slowing down to a halt really in the Bay Area, except for very limited number of projects. So, you know, there are, the plan does impose community benefits. They're there for a reason, but there's really nothing very little being built right now across the Bay Area for a variety of reasons that are macroeconomic reasons that are not specific to East Palo Alto. So it's sort of darn if we do darn if we don't in other words that this mechanism in place is sort of to set the tone for future where the market could be conducive to build but at this moment it's limiting in terms of what's feasible independent of what we're I guess again asking for in terms of impact fees, correct? Yeah, there's very, even, I mean, every jurisdiction has impact fees. Every jurisdiction has requirements, but nothing is being really being built, things that are being approved now or not. Actually, people are waiting for the next cycle. Yeah. And then my other question, unless others have any questions, was about the community benefit flexibility. We've heard a little bit about, and the slides mentioned them, the interests and desires of the community naturally will evolve over time, as needs change, as assessments change, what priorities are. So I guess, can you speak a little bit about, can we negotiate community benefits standards and exceptions, depending on, let's say, if the projects wanna offer, for example, just putting my cards in table, infrastructure I think is critical. And that's something that we have an enormous deficit that we have to fill. So can you speak a little bit about just how we can negotiate the flexibility of the benefits and exceptions and sort of swapping different benefits that a developer may offer that, can you just speak a little bit about that? Yes, sure. So, for the first point is that as I kind of reiterated the idea is that this council should revisit both the list of priority benefits and the potential targets that are associated with those on a regular basis, particularly as the economy changes. There's also a potential that the city should revisit. It's commercial linkage fee calculation, again, as the economy improves. The way that the framework is set up is that there's a base tier which does not require additional benefits. It simply requires the standard impact fees that the city charges from all developments. To move to higher development tiers or higher FARs, taller buildings, more intense development, the standard tier or at the highest tier, the exemplary tier. A project must propose a benefits package which earns a series of points for points for standard eight points for exemplary. Those points can be earned through a variety of categories. The categories that they've set out in this plan are utilities, affordable housing, community and job space, parks and open space and transportation. So an applicant is asked to basically pick from a menu of targets that are key to each of those categories. Therefore giving the applicant the flexibility to choose the benefits that it sees as most feasible and most cost-efficient in terms of providing those as far as its pro forma and its site and its particular constraints. So the framework is set up to incentivize an applicant to put forward the benefits that serve both the community priorities that were established in this framework and also its own ability to subsidize, maximally subsidize those framework that those benefits. And just last question, how do we make ensure that, for example, there's no double-dipping, like let's say we have two developers who are really interested in green spaces, but there's a deficit in terms of infrastructure or housing, right? Is there a way that we can sort of, maybe not first come first serve, but on our end, be able to distribute those benefits so we're not silent into just one when we're missing other pieces. That makes sense. Like is there a sort of methodology or framework that we're thinking about as we're approving these projects hopefully in the future? Yeah, so there's some guidance in the plan for the types of, again, there's frameworks from mobility improvements, utility improvements, parks improvements that are called out as being particularly well-suited, certain locations for parks, trails, plazas, bicycle facilities. So there is expectations established by the plan about the best locations for some of those improvements. And then as a project puts together, it's benefits. It's not possible to kind of get to the highest years without spreading yourself across a number of the categories and therefore, you know, delivering a diversity of benefits. And then ultimately, the benefits that are proposed will be reviewed by staff and staff's recommendation will reflect whether or not those benefits are well distributed and well, you know, suited for the site and for that project. Gotcha. Okay. Those are my questions for now. Council members, I think at this point we ought to deliberate about what is our pleasure disposition on this project. Is anyone like to start? I do have a question. Can you talk about, I don't know if I'm looking at Melvin, the pausing of the application. What does that mean for this project or is there an implication? You know, San Hill said that they've paused. They've requested that we pause the application. What does that mean? Yeah, they have a existing, they're 2019 submittal. I believe they've paused, but Amy can elaborate. Yes, thank you for that question, Councilmember. So among our RBD specific plan area, we did have four applications that were in progress while we were working on the specific plan update. And the projects did put a pause on what we call our developer reimbursement agreement process. So what we have set up with each applicant is a series of consultants and staff that are working on analyzing their project. During the four years that we were working on the specific plan, those applicants decided to put a pause on their processing their project. So it was the developer's decision, maybe due to the changes in the economy or the unpredictability of the pandemic outcomes. But we still engage the developers during that process. We actually met with them monthly to go over the progress of the specific plan and sought their input. So they were involved knowing that when our specific plan was finally adopted, that if they chose to move their projects forward and basically turn their projects back on and their reimbursement agreements back on, they could do so. And so in the example of Sandhill, they had put a prize on their primary project, but actually subsequently in the recent weeks have submitted a new project to us focused on residential. So there is hope at the end of this process that these projects will come back around whether they decide to redesign their projects or scope to a better community benefits package that works with the framework that we've established, but that was essentially our goal to kind of bring it back around at a time that was really necessary. Even though development isn't happening, we wanted the city to be prepared with a specific plan that was ready. No, thank you. Thank you so much for that. And then when I think about the timing, we've been working on this for a very long time. And I would like to see this accomplished before I leave the council to see that the work that I put into it for almost 12 years, I want to see it come to, to at least get it approved before I leave the council. So thank you for the work. I know it's been a long journey and to the future council. You'll be working on this because you'll have to approve projects. So I'm looking forward to moving forward with this tonight. May I just ask, sorry, very one small question. Just as I understand it, prior to us tentatively proving this tonight, would it be therefore impossible? Like the one million square feet that we had, in other words, that was the maximum allocation development the city was able to do. Is that, am I understanding that correctly? That prior to that prior to this moment, if there was an exceeding amount of development, we would de facto cancel that because of that cap we already put in in 2013. Yeah that was the impetus for this plan was to go beyond that original amount because of the interest at the time in the 2019-2020 cycle so at this at this moment before the adoption of the new plan the city is currently limited to that 1.4 million square feet and the old development standards and various other policies which are not reflective of today's market today's communities values et cetera and the community benefits framework is also Essentially more or less non-existent in the existing plan Gotcha, okay. Thank you. Council member to go. Thank you for your patient. Yes. I was gonna say I think You know the 2013 plan was a compromise and perhaps these plans are always a compromise. But I feel that definitely when the projects were being proposed back in 2019, there was no way that the city could accommodate them, period whatsoever. There was just no way. And if the city had just arbitrarily said, okay, well, we'll change it to, you know, we'll make an amendment and we'll make it this. That would have been, in my opinion, very irresponsible, a reckless action, and the community would have been up in arms right this all. So those of us who've been here 30, 40, 50 years have to that when every development happens, the best situation is to have time for the community to express their needs, their concerns, to study things, and those things do take time. So I think right now, we are at a point where I feel that the developer community is being supportive of the plan, maybe a little reluctantly, as I heard, but the labor community, which is important also for us to build things. The labor is the working people are the ones who build them after all. Then we've had community engagement. I feel has been very extensive. And of course, there's the city, the city structure, including the council, our staff and by extension, the consultants that do work for us. And also the commissions and all the community groups. I think have had plenty of opportunity to express their thoughts and their concerns. And I do agree with Lisa. I do feel that this council and the previous council, because there's been like two or three combinations since we started this, have been very diligent. And it's time to make a decision. I think that the new composition of the council will still have an opportunity actually. Actually, it will be the new council, you know, that, or subsequent councils that will really get into the nuts and bolts of the projects. Because right now there are no projects that are being processed. And that's a little misunderstanding. I read the article and the daily post. And part of it was already sounding like we were approving a project or something. You know, I mean the story, and it's hard to cover things in the story. But I think what we're doing is simply now having a plan being prepared and being very detailed so that when the economy picks up and it will pick up, that's just the nature of the market, right? So as not anything we're doing or not doing, the market will pick up. And we know historically we are strategically located. And so I anticipate that developers will find a way to pose to the city what they would like to do. And then all the details can be worked out. But I think it is time to end this cycle. And I think as Amy mentioned, one thing I've learned over the years is that, you know, both for developers or other people who want to do things, they check you out to see if do you have a plan. Now, they may not totally like the plan, but if you have a plan, then they know what they got to work with. If you have no plan, then people stay away until, because it becomes very arbitrary in some ways. So anyway, I feel like, you know, the incoming councils will have an opportunity or all the commissioners that will join in the next few years will have an opportunity and they'll have their turn to really deal with the details of this back and forth that will take place. So, and I think that, you know, it's a, that what I say. I think it is laying the groundwork for, you know, the next generations that hopefully they will benefit more, from having more revenues, more community benefits, better infrastructure, we have a lot of needs, but this is just one step in the process. So I'm in support of it this way. Thank you. Okay. All right. Well, let me just say this, you know, as a generation of grew up in this community when there was a lot of a Our residents able to come to this community and enjoy things in their city. I was looking at the old clips and I saw Shriifu Wilson, we was talking about Ravenswood Shopping Center that 65% of the dollars were spent outside East Paul. So we're continuing to try to figure out how do we build the just city. I don't think this is a rush process, frankly, but I'm pleased that we're at a juncture that we can deliver something and continue to tweak it and adapt and have the flexibility for the incoming council. So are there any last questions or comments if not, I'm happy to. So looking at council, our attorney, we have two resolution, I suppose. I guess the way with the cleanest way to be do it, we do the one to five and then six to seven. Is that what will your recommendation be in terms of how we pass this resolution? Yeah, I think you can do it all at once, but you're correct. That's how I would kind of divide it as well, analytically, because one deals with the resolution. All those items went through six, and then you've got the ordinances. Be something like 9.1, but then one number is one through, I make a motion, for example, to approve items one through five under 9.1. What you could do is you could probably base it off of staff's recommendation in the slide. Because there is one revision, I think, that staff had highlighted. Is it this slide right here that we're looking at? Yes. Maybe adopt the resolution as amended by staff or as recommended by suggested by staff? The... I don't know if the other resolution item actually involves this change. I think it's only the ordinance resolution item actually involves this change. I think it's only the ordinance is it. So it would only be for six and seven. If you want to just simply reference the slide, I think that might be a good way to do it. That way you're not reading everything. Yeah, I just wanted to make that comment to make sure that that was a part of the motion with this amended language. I'm well, I've been in a chain of motion if anyone wants to take a stab at it. I'll make a motion with the amended, yes, the amended language for it. Is that good enough, John? Yeah, that's fine. And I think Councillor Rarrique is actually referencing the, his motion is actually summarized in the presentation given by staff and slides 25 and 26, I think, with the amended language. Seconded by Councillorman Goshear. All right. Should we do roll call? I just want to ask a clarifying question. This is that what we were approving here in terms of the specific plan itself is the preferred option is the 3.35. Is that correct? So if we vote on this, we're option is the 3.35. Is that correct? So if we vote on this, we're voting on the 3.35 number. Correct. Okay, thank you. All right. Let's go ahead and just say all those in favor, all right? So all those in favor of passing the motion that Council member Abedika made vote with a sign of I. I, yes. And John, is there a second one? Or was that included in this one? I think it was included because I referenced slides 25 to 26. Yeah. OK. Great. Then in that case, thank you. Yeah, it feels kind of cathartic. Thank you, everyone for. Yeah. Thank you, Troy. Thank you,artic. Thank you everyone for yeah Thank you Troy. Thank you, Ramy. Thank you city manager. Thank you to the ticket to the trades the residents Everyone who was involved my colleagues who started this this before Martha and I came along really it's You know, it's the start of something great. I hope so Okay, council reports colleagues., do you have any reports? Any vaccines, any dances, any events that we should know about? No. I can report that the, I think there were 26 vaccinations that were given at the Ravenswood, the Ravenswood, Chavez Ravenswood Middle School. Very nice to go. Excellent. All right, then in that case, the time is 1057. Have a good night meeting adjourned. Oh, and I would like to adjourn this meeting in Memoram of Miss Rosemary. Miss Steel. So, meeting adjourned. you I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. Thank you.