Music the meeting is now called to order. This is the City Council regular meeting of March 25th, 2025. The time is 4'16 pm. And we will now have the roll called by the City Clerk, Mr. Carl Peterson. Thank you, Mayor. Council Member Carroll. Here. Council Member Goll. Here. Council Member Liu. Here. Council Member Trish Eater. Here. Vice Mayor Mai. Here. And Mayor Eagren. Here. Our first item of business is a closed session. I'm going to invite our city attorney here to let us know what is in closed session tonight. I'm also going to call for those who wish to publicly comment to, if you're wishing to do so electronically to make sure you enter the queue by raising your hand. Let me turn to the city attorney at this time. And why don't you introduce yourself to the vast viewing communities, I'll know who you are, all right? Absolutely, hello, my name is Jennifer Farrell. I am the Assistant City Attorney for the City of Irvine. I regularly cover the Planning Commission meetings. So I am here tonight in Jeff's absence, and I am very glad to be here with you guys tonight. We're glad to have you, welcome. Absolutely. And with that, I'll turn to the closed session agenda. We have two items on tonight's closed session agenda. One is conference with real property negotiators. Under. Welcome. Absolutely. And with that I'll turn to the closed session agenda. We have two items on tonight's closed session agenda. One is conference with real property negotiators under government code section 549-56.8. That is property located at 8000 Great Park Boulevard with agency negotiators all of her cheap, Pete Carmichael and the Negotiating Party's City of Irvine, Almquest, Dan Almquest, and under negotiation we have price in terms of payment. The second item tonight is conference with legal counsel, existing litigation under government code section 54956.9D1. That is a workers compensation case number A, D, J, 1, 7, 7, 7, 0, 2, 4, 4. Thank you., and at this time I'll turn to our city clerk and ask if there are any members of the public who wish to comment at this time. There are no requests to speak, Mayor. There being no request to speak at this time will recess to closed session, convening in closed session, and then we expect to reconvene here at 5 o'clock promptly. Thank you. the meeting. The meeting come to order. Once again, we are reconvening the City Council meeting. The time is 518. At this time I would like to turn to our city attorney to report any action taken in closed session. We have nothing to report out of closed session. No reportable action that allows us then to move along to the pledge of allegiance. At this time I'd like to turn to our council colleague Mike Carroll. Those who are able please stand for the pledge and remain standing after the pledge. All right. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Please place your hand over your heart. Ready begin. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America to the Republic for which to stand, one mission under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Please remain standing if you would. Tonight's invocation will come to us in the form of a rendition of the National Anthem. We have kind of broadened the definition of invocation to include musical presentations and other uplifting presentations as part of the invocation. At this time, I'd like to have everybody welcome Sidney Noel, a 19-year-old vocal soloist from Concordia University right here in Irvine, where she is studying commercial music and graphic design. Sidney has been performing since she was three years old. That's a pretty good start. Her resume includes performances at the Walt Disney Concert Hall and the House of Blues. Again, as part of tonight's invocation, she'll be performing the National Anthem. Please, everyone, welcome, Sydney. Applause. Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light, what so proudly we hailed at the twilight's light, Early light, what so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming? Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight? Or the ramp we've watched were so gallantly streaming. And the rocket's red glare, the bombs bursting in air, Gave proof through the night that our flag was still there. Oh, say does that star-spangled banner yet wave For the land of the free and the home of the brave. Thank you so much. Please be seated. Thank you again for that wonderful rendition of the National Anthem. We really appreciate it. At this time we move along to presentations. This evening we have under item 2.1, Proclamation, Proclaiming April 13th through 19th, 2025, as National Public Safety Telecommunications Week. Anybody wishing to comment on this matter electronically? You have to raise your hand in order to be admitted to the queue. Do we have any requests for people to be heard under item 2.1? No requests to speak, Mr. Mayor. There being none, I think what we should be doing now is taking a vote on the proclamation. I'll move its adoption. I'll second that, Mayor. It moved by me, seconded by Council Member Carol, to proclaim April 13th to 19th, 2025, as National Public Safety Telecommunications Week. With that, would the clerk please call the roll. Council member Carroll. Yes. Council member Goh. Yes. Council member Lou. Yes. Council member Traceeater. Yes. Vice Mayor Mai. Yes. Mayor Aigren. Yes. Terry 6-0. Having concluded that piece of work, now it's my pleasure to step down to the podium where we can conduct a little bit of a ceremony here and take some photos and give this proclamation the proper recognition. All right. So at this time, I believe I'm supposed to be inviting forward the members of our Irvine Police Department and the Orange County Fire Authority who are present here, the Orange County Fire Authority Public Safety Communications Bureau. Can you come forward? We appreciate all this uniform personnel being here this evening. Thank you all for being here. Chief, you can join them. There we are. The Irvine Police Department and Orange County Fire Authorities Dispatchers are the community's first point of contact when police, fire and medical emergencies occur. How many of us have had occasion to call a dispatcher and be in need of a really competent, friendly voice on the other side at a moment of real trouble. These individuals are dedicated, highly trained professionals committed to being the vital link between the community and emergency services. The Irvine City Council commends public safety dispatchers for their tireless efforts on behalf of the Irvine community. But before I actually read and present the proclamation which we just adopted, I'd like to share a brief video highlighting our public safety dispatchers. Are we ready with the video? I'm not sure if I can get it. I'm not sure if I can get it. I'm not sure if I can get it. I'm not sure if I can get it. I'm not sure if I can get it. I'm not sure if I can get it. I'm not sure if I can get it. I'm not sure if I can get it. I'm not sure if I can get it. I'm not sure if the just take a minute to see what it is. Thanks, guys. Thank you. I'm happy. Bye. All right, you're going to have to leave it to your imagination. Need. All right. Needless to say, we're very, very proud of the wonderful police and fire personnel who, As I say, are the competent voices on the other end of the phone at a time when you need the most. It's very, very important part of our community. Mindful of that, I think what we want to do is read the proclamation. And then we're going to invite our colleagues down. We'll take a big photograph. And we'll all be famous at that point. OK? This is a proclamation of honoring National Public Safety Telecommunications Week, April 13th to 19th, 2025. whereas in 1994 President Clinton and United States Congress established the second week of April to be National Public Safety Tell the Communications Week and whereas the public safety dispatchers of the the Irvine Police Department and Orange County Fire Authorities Communication Bureau's, are the first point of contact for the public when police, fire, and medical emergencies occur. And public safety dispatchers play a crucial role within the departments to protect our diverse and dynamic community with professionalism, integrity, and respect. And whereas these frontline first responder dispatchers are dedicated, highly trained professionals committed to being the vital link between the community and emergency services. And whereas Irvine police and Orange County Fire Authority Public Safety Dispatchers through ongoing training, leveraging technological advances and ongoing partnership with the community will support field personnel with timely and accurate information in order to uphold the law and protect the value of life and property. And whereas the Irvine City Council commends public safety dispatchers for their tireless efforts on behalf of the Irvine community. Now therefore, the City Council of the City of Irvine does hereby proclaim April 13th through 19th, 2025 as National Public Safety Telecommunications Week and joins in honoring the women and men whose diligence and professionalism contribute to the safety of police and fire personnel and the community they serve. Words of well chosen and well deserved. So let's give you a big round of applause. Applause. Now, I'm going to invite my colleagues down to join us for a photograph. And to whom do I present this? Right here? Would you like to say something? It's frightening, isn't it? They have to speak public. Anyway, we so appreciate all the time to do. Thank you. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. I think we're going to have to do something else. We will. What do you want? What do we do? I think we're going to have to do something else. I think we're going to have to do something else. I think we're going to have to do something else. I think we're going to have to do something else. I think we're going to have to do something else. I think we're going to have to the next room. That's you. We've got a box on under here. Yep. I'm going to go to the next room. Next room. Next room. Next room. Next room. Next room. Next room. Next room. Next room. Next room. Next room. Next room. Next room. Next room. Next room. Next room. Next room. One more. One two three. In your next step, three, two, one. One, two, three. Three, two, one. One, two, three. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank 2.1. We turn now to item 2.2. I think I just want to announce this one. This is great. The title of this item is a presentation on goat grazing for fire prevention. Goat grazing for fire prevention. This was put on the agenda at the request of Council Member Carol. and I'm going to turn it over to you now, Council Member Carol. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor Aigren. Good evening, everyone. I just wanted to really bring this forth. This amazing, oh, looks like we have one. This one won't be moving as much as the ones outside our live specimens that we'll, I'm sure'll be talking about. You know the recent catastrophic fires in Los Angeles were a clear warning and a reminder of our need for a proactive wildfire prevention strategies in Irvine. And in order to protect the many residents life and property located near our large open spaces we must limit the growth of brush and weeds that can fuel fires. I had the opportunity just last week to be in our southern open space in Bomber Canyon with one of the groups, one of the most fantastic organizations and Irvine, Irvine Ranch Conservancy, who's working really hard on those efforts and working on a seedling project with the help from the state, which puts together an opportunity to create banks of native species that absorb water and that are less prone to fire and to create almost like kindling or other non-native species that really go up into flames very easily and create embers which launch with winds onto to roofs and then that's how we have the catastrophes unfortunately that happen with our neighbors to the north. To support our efforts in vegetation management, I have invited the Sage Environmental Group and Alyssa and Carson Hilton with the presentation on effectiveness of a brush grazing gracing method which is really cool. It is state of the art and absolutely primitive at the same time. It's just one of those things that you can't possibly look at and just feel like, oh, that's OK or just feel sort of like, you know, middle of the ground or negative about it. It's really one of the coolest things. And outside in our city hall, Piazza, they were two pygmy baby goats, they were live. And they were here. We'll see a little stuffed version due to, I guess, building codes. We can't have the real guys in here. But when they were out there, please stop by and say, hi, if you get a chance, when you leave, be out there. At this point, I really just would like to turn it over to them. And first, our former mayor and environmental champion herself. This is someone that was largely, if not completely responsible for removing harmful pesticides in our entire green environment. We're Irvine, we're Tree City USA, we have many, many, many acres of greenery and parks and open spaces that we protect and use substances with and Mayor Shay was absolutely instrumental in removing the toxic versions of those treatment treatments and removing those pesticides. And that's probably just one of the things. And when I say a true environmental champion on her tenure on this Irvine City Council, I had the honor to sit with her for a few years and she really was just that. Another one of those projects was this project and we're talking about goats. And at this time, I would like to turn it over to our former mayor, Christina Shea, to introduce our presentation. Mayor, welcome. Thank you so much. What a privilege it is for me to be here tonight. Mayor, so nice to see you and council members. And thank you, Mike Carroll, a city council member, for bringing this forward again as a presentation. And right over here next to me, this is sugar. And I was given sugar maybe four or five years ago and she lives in my house now. She doesn't say a whole lot but she's cute, right? But I just wanna say, in 2017, I brought forward, as you mentioned, Councilmember Carol, the whole idea of the non-toxic pesticide program. And it was wonderful because we started moving out all round up, all the toxic sprays, and we started spraying our parks, our open space and our green bells with organic sprays. And then we ended up implementing a goat program, which was wonderful because so many of the students in the schools would come up on Embamera Canyon and other areas in our open space because we're surrounded by so much open space to make sure that we were able to, you know, have the ghosts, they eat down the, I think they start in spring if that's correct. And then they eat down the weeds and all the, you know, the brush and it really protects our community in a safe and environmental way from fires that could be breaking out. So we haven't had too many, which we've had a few, but not too many in our direct open space. So with that, I would like to introduce Alisa and Sugar and she'll give you the presentation tonight. And thank you so much for considering this program hopefully in the days ahead. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for all you've done. I just have to say I am an admirer of Mayor Shea and her many, many years of dedicated, tireless dedication to open space preservation and forward-looking approaches. The IPM program that she put together was really novel and expertly done. So thank you. So one of our aspects is we do goat grazing and how we started it is we've been an environmental company for about 30 years and I too got tired of spraying a lot of herbicide in Wildlands again and again and again Actually have an all-terrain vehicle that has a spray rig on it for 50 gallons of spraying with a boom sprayer And I can do that and I began to think well, maybe there is a Another way an additional way to to address the noxious weeds in these large open space areas. And it happens to be these little goats which are hungry all the time, fortunately. So this is a, how do I advance the, there we go. Okay. So what goats do is they browse on plants and they reduce the amount of volume of plants. From the black mustard can get 10 feet tall, we call it goat crack. They absolutely love to eat it. It's their favorite food and they run after it and they reduce it down to about four inches. They don't create any erosion and they're very light on the land. So over time, instead of being fields of that beautiful yellow mustard, which is highly flammable when it dries out in the fall, it's these tall dead stalks that create air pockets in between. So it's a very hot, fast fire. They reduce it down to about four inches, which is a much slower moving and less hot temperature fire. So not only does it reduce the biomass, it also reduces the fire risk for, let's say there is a fire, of it actually getting out of control and the embers going for miles, because there isn't really that much biomass involved. Next slide, please. So who we work for is municipality, cities, counties, fire departments. We also work for HOAs. This is Anaheim fire, maybe go back one. So this is the vegetation management for Anaheim fire. And you can see how the officer down in the lower right corner is looking at the tree. What the goats do is they also create a vertical separation, which separates the fuel on the ground from the fuel on the trees. So instead of a fire running like up the canyon, grasses burning a tree and it's windy and the embers fly, they create a four to six foot separation so that the fire can run through under the trees and perhaps not ignite the tree or ignite it with less intensity because they have that vertical separation. And that's one of the standards that OCFA has requires also. And goats do that naturally. You can see in both of these slides how there is that vertical separation and there's a goat actually getting up there in that vegetation. Next slide please. So this is emphasizing this is a Captain Fantasy, Fire Chief Fantasy from OCFA talking about how it's important to create a space around residences that's a buffer, a fuel modification zone. So we set a low impediment electric fence and that's where the goats great. So we can tell the goats where to go and it's a very controlled situation so we can go around homes on the periphery of valleys and hills and really put them where the fire department wants them and we actively coordinate with the city or the fire department to really target the areas that meet it badly. Next slide, please. So this is, some of you may recognize this. This is above, oh, can we go back to this slide. This is Laguna Sir at the border of Laguna Nigel and Laguna Beach. Very, very steep area. To get humans out here on these slopes is pretty treacherous. We actually had to have our crew use ropes to repel down to set the electrified fence. But to get hand crews out here to do, basically, you can see how it's all brown underneath the hills. the goats ate all that, and they really reduced the vegetation there, creating that break in a really steep canyon area, which is really difficult to do with human power. So that was, and you can also see how they, they don't eat everything. That's one of the myths about goats. Goats like Eurasian plants, They like the invasive plants that we have here, and they don't like coastal sage scrub. They don't like sage bush. So they selectively can go around. So we monitor that to make sure we don't have overgrazing. We can move our fences or move our animals off at any time when we feel that they're done. So we really don't get the dusty soils that overgrazing can create or the destruction of native habitat. They are target eaters, which is really fascinating. Next slide, please. Thank you. So this is another one of work that they've done. You can see how clean this area is. This is, we recommend at least two cycles of grazing to really get an effective habitat change. You can see in the yellow flowers, that's the mustard, how they're eating that down. So two consecutive seasons of grazing, instead of getting that really tall mustard, what you'll normally get is a lower growing grass, like a barley grass or some kind of a broom that is two feet tall versus this very tall grass. And so it really, instead of going out and trying to mow it year after year and really battling this black mustard, which actually pulls arsenic from the air and puts it in the ground. It's interesting that it's allopathic. It poisons the ground so that other plants have a hard time growing in it. They can grow in arsenic soils, but a lot of other plants can't. So that's why you get that really mono-topic large areas of the mustard. So the goats actually can break that cycle. Next slide, please. Here's some other work, some physical hand work that gets done on these slopes, and you can kind of see how difficult this terrain is when we have to get in and get people in there doing that. It can be hazardous and quite time-consuming work. work.. This is a Keisha goats don't like a Keisha, for example. They won't need it, unfortunately. Next slide please. Here's some of the things they love. Artichoke thistle which I don't know if any of you have experienced that, but the thorns are about this big. And it doesn't seem to bother them. They like it. There's the black mustard rip cut brome, which is kind of like a sawgrass almost, wild oats, and then the wild radish, which is considered an invasive in native environments. Next slide please. This is a good example of, excuse me, what grazed versus mowing is. You can see how it's a different treatment. You really create a targeted removal where they're avoiding the native species. Next slide. This is actually bomb or canyon. Excuse me, just so we have some water. Sorry. Thank you. This is bomber canyon. So we're looking at pre-grays, which was monotypic mustard, and then post-gracing. Thank you. I'm sorry. Second year, that is native crotin that's actually growing in an area that was exclusively non-native mustard before. So that's a really good example of the habitat conversion that can occur with proper grazing. Next slide, please. There's a lot of support for this holistic practice, practices now. There's a U.S. assembly bill that's going to be available for the next slide. There's a lot of support for this holistic practice, practices now. There's a US assembly bill, there's a state bill also that's promoting grazing for wild land management and fire control. It's a very, very powerful tool in the right hands. These animals can get an awful lot done and in a way that is non-toxic. It also promotes soil health. The little hooves massage the soil. It breaks up the fatch and incorporates that into the top soil. So it actually helps restore the top soil by massaging in organic matter. And then you also have the goat poop, which does not, a lot of people think, oh, well, you're just spreading the seed through the goat poop, but it actually does, and it goes through four different stomachs. So by the time it comes out, the seed is not really a viable seed. So it's a really powerful tool on a lot of levels, on the biology level, on the holistic level, on the lack of chemical level. Next slide, please. So we very much support the Irvine's you know the citizenry of Irvine is alert, sensitive, smart, and really looking for good forward looking solutions. This is a looking back and a looking forward solution and it's something that really makes a whole lot of sense and we certainly support your efforts in finding these innovative solutions. And thank you for having us here today. Thank you. Thank you. Did you have something further, Mike? Oh, thank you, Mayor. No, I would just say thank you very much, Sage. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you, Mayor Shea. And for bringing these amazing animals. If anybody wants to see them, they're still out there. And I hope that we as a city and the city council will be helpful in moving in this direction. This is a, like you said, it's far better than anyone here could in terms of your advocacy and the environmental impact. It really is a 360 degree amazing project that is absolutely like bleeding edge with the technology of the fence, right? That's not harmful, but then keeps them while at the same time is amazingly, amazingly, you know, a primitive act of grazing. And I can just tell you, just from our family, and I know my neighbors, you know, and you know, because you were out there in the Bomber Canyon open space. We had hundreds and hundreds of neighbors. Our activity on that open space was just literally skyrocketed during those periods so that in addition to getting exercise and taking in some great amazing, you know, breathtaking open space, they also got to monitor your project and watch everything happening with these goats and the pens. So it was truly amazing. So thank you so much. Thank you, Mayor Tew. Thank you. Council Member Carroll, I assume this is a receive and file at this point, but two things. One, I think we ought to take a round of questions or comments that council members may have. Also, we have to allow an opportunity for the public to comment. I'd like to just start it off on this round. What do you have in mind for the deployment of goats here in Irvine going forward? Are we talking about a small number? Are we talking about large herds to be determined? That's my question. Yeah, that's a great question. I don't, I confess I don't really have the answer to that. I know that it was a very successful project that ran for a period of time in Bomber Canyon and really the the goal was to bring this forward to us as a City Council to get shine a light on it as far as from a public perspective and see I guess work with partners to see what we can do and at what level. And I think this is something that hasn't really been focused on in our northern open space. So I think there's an opportunity to maybe see if there's pockets or areas and of course working with our partners and our division chief and Orange County Fire Authority to see where those places might be. But I would defer to the experts. I just wanted to bring these folks forward given everything that was happening. It was a wonderful opportunity to get the former mayor's show out here. And. And. I would defer to the experts. I just wanted to bring these folks forward, given everything that was happening. It was a wonderful opportunity to get the mayor, former mayor Shay out here and the group that did it last time. So if the action taken were to receive and file would be with the understanding that staff would explore the possibilities for deployment of goats from one end of the city to the other. All right. With that council member, Traceter requests to be heard. Thank you. I just wanted to express my appreciation for Mayor Shea's goats. They are very sound, ecologically, in terms of how they restore ecosystems. As the presenter mentioned, they go after the black mustard. Black mustard is terrible for our native plants and wildlife. She mentioned the black mustard actually poisons the native plants. Also, it poisons the beneficial microbes in the soil that the coastal sage scrub require. And they also are not a great habitat for birds or other wildlife. So having the goats come in, removing that makes a huge difference. And if you don't have the goats, we have to bring in people that costs a lot of money. We're not as efficient as the goats. And then you have to pay for our retirement. We don't have to pay for the goats retirement. So I think this is a great program. I just wondering is it continuing right now or is it halted? I guess I Right now I think there are no no goats deployed at this moment. Is that correct? There are no goats deployed in Irvine at this moment. But based on the conversation, the presentation tonight, the city staff has worked with sage environmental in the past. And I think the direction has been received loud and clear. Get back in touch with sage environmental, develop a deployment plan, and we'll make sure to keep the council and community informed as to next steps moving ahead. Actually. Yeah, I just want to say that I am pro-goat. Okay. There we are. All right. At this time we'll see if there are any members of the public who wish to be heard. Mr. Peterson? Thank you, Mayor. We have one request to speak from Eric Nishanian. Mr. Nishanian, you may unmute your mic. Yes, I was hoping to speak on public comments. I thought you guys already did the speaking for presentations. No, we're not done with that. So we'll just hold on. We'll be to public comments shortly. All right. And that is all mayor. Thank you. Again, this is receive and file with the understanding that staff is going to be looking into it. Thank you very much for the presentation. That takes us to the City Manager's report. Mr. City Manager, Mr. Chee, do we have a report this evening? Certainly I have a brief report, but I think we have public comments initially before we get to the City Manager's report. Oh, yes. Well, you know what? Since I'm talking with you right now, just give your brief City Manager's report. Certainly, Mayor A. Members of the Council, just a quick report to share it with the Council and the community. We are making terrific progress on the development of the city's first gym facility. If you recall back in August of 2024, the city council authorized the acquisition of a 7.3 acre site located at the of Red Hill and McGaw on which a 112,000 square foot gym facility located in the city's IBC district six area would be constructed. Note, it would be the city's very first gym facility in all of Irvine. We're fabulously excited that it's moving forward. the Council approval, we've been working with the developer to update our plans and specs, get all the necessary permits. I'm happy to be able to share. We're looking to break ground here in the next couple of weeks in mid to late April. We'll certainly be sharing more details with the community and the Council relating to a groundbreaking event coming shortly. The facility once constructed will be one of the premier gym facilities in the region. We're looking to locate 10 dedicated all-purpose courts, 10 dedicated badminton courts. They'll be food service and space for all manner of gym recreational activities. Our team and community service has been doing outreach to various segments of the sports community, including our Badminton community, the basketball community, the gymnastics community. We've talked to table tennis, indoor pickle ball, volleyball, footsaw and handball teams, all of which would be users within the new facility we're looking to establish. Once we start construction in April, we do expect the building to be complete by the end of 2025 with the facility ready to use in the first half of 2026. A little more detail to show on this in the coming months, but we're really excited to be able to deliver this initial amenity for Irvine, the first gym facility that we'll have been able to establish a longstanding goal of the community, all of that starts here in a couple of weeks. I look that Mayor, I don't have anything for the report. Thank you very much for that brief, but truly exciting report, we're gonna look forward to further reports as the project materializes. Thank you. With that, we'll go back to public comments for non-agentized items. This is the opportunity for the public to be heard on non-agentized. In other words, items not appearing on the printed agenda. And it's an opportunity for the public to comment on anything they wish that's within the jurisdiction of the City Council, the subject matter jurisdiction, comments, criticisms, this is your open forum. With that, we will adjust the time. We don't we want to limit the time to basically a half hour for non-agentized public comments based on how many requests do we have, Mr. Peterson, to be heard? Thank you, Mayor. We have 18 requests to speak. 18. So let's limit each person to 90 seconds. That will allow us to get them all in. And anybody who wishes to join and add a further public comment, I guess can do so electronically if they wish or in person here. But let me know if there are more coming in because we do want to see if we can get all the squeezed into a half hour. With that would you call the commenters in order that they requested to be heard? Thank you Marif, I could call forward Susan Sayer, Darren Parker, Mary Frower, E-Planet Thunderstriker, and Ellen Myersson. And we'll start with Susan Sayer. Welcome, Ms. Sayer. Hi, good afternoon. My name is Susan Sayer and I'm Irvine residents. I have not been an enthusiastic supporter of the OSUPA due to the corruption and lack of transparency from OCPAs beginning. However, honesty and ethical standards and public transparency and the need to protect the Earth environment are of great concern to me. I have an ethical and legal issue of concern. As I recall, our City Council voicing concerns about OCPA voted to give notice of intent to withdraw from the OCPA. However, it's been reported that City Manager Oliver Chi has hired a consultant, presumably at Irvine's expense, to create documents that serve to a system with providing presentations designed to encourage OCPA members cities to withdraw from the OCPA. As presentations reportedly stated that after the dissolution of the OCPA, 374.8 million would be distributed to members cities. Allegedly, he failed to mention that before distributing the money in large debt would have to be paid off. These allegations are true. This brings up a couple of questions. First, under whose direction has Oliver G. Tate taken these actions. I tend City Council meetings, and I do not recall Mr. Tate being given the direction and authority to pursue the dissolution of the OCPA by lobbying for other cities to withdraw their membership. Thank you for your comments. You had 90 seconds. Thank you. Darren Perker. Welcome. Thank you. My name is Darren Perker. I am an Ir Irvine resident and I'm here to voice my support for the current dog park plan under the Oak Creek Improvement Project. This is a plan that is ready to go, right? It was to be bit it out in January and all the sudden it's delayed for some unknown bureaucratic reason. There's tremendous support for this dog park plan. We need the new dog park. It's in the right location. It's a very centralized location. It's a properly vetted location. All the neighborhoods around for the most part have support and they want this dog park to be built. It's time. There's no reason despite some bureaucratic nonsense that we can't have this thing bit it out and built and you can do the ribbon cutting this summer. It'll be beautiful. You can have a photo op, the whole dog and pony show. You will love it. Let's make it happen. Let me just say we have some city staff here since you've brought, well, look like a veritable army of support with you. It might be useful if a member of our staff were to confer with you and the others maybe just outside the council chambers and maybe you can be brought up to speed at that point. Okay? So hang on, Oliver. We have somebody? Excellent. Okay. We're cutting the bureaucratic tape right now. All right. Go ahead. Mary F Frower. There's our city staff up at the top. So just hang on. All right. Welcome. Great. Thank you. I'm Mary Fruhar and I was going to talk about the dog park but now I'll talk about something else related to the dog park which is related to the sudden and new change that we had with the parking in the dog park as it is. We came to find that the recycling place had suddenly blocked off one entrance and instead of it going in a circle as it had been, which wasn't the best because for some reason, recyclers of which I consider myself one, could not figure out that they shouldn't be blocking our entrance to it. They just decided to block it so that we had to go in and out the same entrance, and that's extremely dangerous at this point. We do not have enough room in there. There's not enough room for parking as it is, but there's not enough room for us to be coming in and going out the same way, especially since with their dangerous, hazardous waste, they often have it blocked on one lane. So you have people coming in, the only in and out exit we have, at the same time people are coming around, the corner and can't see, and it's blocked. They can now suddenly afford, whereas before they couldn't afford to have one person at this entrance to keep it from being blocked, they suddenly have two people at the beginning. Thank you, your time is up. It seems to me you ought to kind of stick with the group tonight. And let's see if we can address that too. All right. E. Planet Thunderstriker, and if I could also call forward Thomas Renner, Jody Benal. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.rivation of Rights under Color of Law from the oral comments and the documents I submitted on July 23rd in September 10th. Some of those things were related to the music industry, Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, Lorde, and an unknown artist, Elena Cohen, I made public comments and submitted items that clearly anyone in this council could know that it's not a pigment of my imagination. So it's basically my situation is why Taylor Swift transitioned from country to pop. But I'm also dealing with no direct conflict warfare with musicals of cultural influence. You guys know when China gives drugs to the cartels in Mexico that's a form of no direct conflict warfare. Well, when we started with the hippies back when our society was decided it didn't lock its doors, we now have what we have now. So what the music industry is, is their guilty of criminal, their guilty of cultural manipulation. I'm going to be speaking about the bond issue because that is probably here because of my situation related to the music industry is why there's a music school involved. I'm going to speak about the mayor and Treessor's agenda items because they were here on the council floor. They did not do anything and it's not just them conspiracy and racketeering are also involved but that's not evident at face value at face value. Thank you for your value, you've given me a chance to know. Thank you for sharing your views with us tonight. Thomas Renner? Welcome. Good evening. My name is Thomas Renner. I'm an Irvine resident and an avid dog lover. I have two dogs and I'm just here to support the dog park transition to the new area and I've been waiting since I've literally lived in Irvine for this change to happen so we're all in support we're all here tonight all my friends are here to save let's get it done thank you thank you for joining us tonight. Jody Benal. Welcome. Hi, good evening. So I appreciate your listening to me and taking the time to listen. I've been a resident of Irvine next month, 40 years. Well, in the past 15 years, I've been having trouble with waste management. And I would call the city for assistance with them because it takes more than one phone call for them to come and pick up Whatever it is that they need to pick up since we have three Buckets now and it's not just my residence. There's 14 units on our street or cold asack and they miss the whole cold asack Or sometimes they just miss Somebody's house. I don't know how they do that, but I'll call and I'll call and I'll call. Sometimes it goes into the next week. And that's what happened a couple of weeks ago. She even asked me, could we wait till the following week instead of sending somebody, which our cul-de-sac is not even a half a mile from their yard. But besides that, it's difficult to get any concrete and positive customer service out of public works, Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank see to it that somebody speaks with you this evening. Thank you. And we'll move from there, all right? Yes, thank you so much. Thank you. Wing Chow. Welcome. Good evening. Hon council members, ladies and gentlemen, Irvine residents. My name is Wing Chow. I have lived in Irvine for exactly 40 years. This year, I want to comment on three areas first on Merer Aggram's speech two weeks ago. I want to compliment him for speech well done. It was a marvelous speech. We enjoyed it. Not only so, for the work he has accomplished for a seat of Irvine and his leadership. After his speech, along with applauding him, inside I want to jump up and shout, long live Mayor Agram for a job well done. Second, I want to come with me on the first service at Lakeview Center. Since I spoke two weeks ago, you have improved. But I still look forward to the day that we can come to food in the house with one food. Thirdly, I want to thank the seat of Irvine for allowing my wife's art exhibition, displaying 43 of her art exhibition from December, the 13th to March, the 21st, and last Friday. She's going to speak next. Thank you. Mina Chow. Welcome. Mayor and Council Member. Okay. Louder. Mayor, Council, and Irvine residents. My name is Mina Chow, and like my husband said, I had an art exhibition in the city hall, 43 pieces. Exhibits for three months. In the opening, reception, mayor give a speech about the vision for art in the city of Irvine. Not only the children in the elementary school, junior high school college, but also with the adults. He wanted to promote art of the city. That's, I get benefited because I learned my Chinese traditional art in the city, senior center. Prior to the pandemic three years, and I've accumulated some of the art so I'll be able to display in the city hall. And still tonight is still on, it's supposed to end Friday. But I wanna use this opportunity to say the city and the mayor. It's all right, she's gonna make a presentation. Go ahead. And the mayor to promote art, not only fine art, and also performing art. And like last council meeting, Mayor said we want to make the city the safest, the green city and the smartest city, the kind city. And I want to add more and more to make the city culture city. All right. Listen, I understand from your husband you're going to make a presentation right now. Yes. I have one of your paintings. I just want to say a couple of things. One year your artwork is wonderful. It was an honor to have it displayed in City Hall. If people want to take a look on the way out, floors number one, two, three, your wonderful paintings are there. I understand you're gonna present one that would be permanently displayed here. Yes. And I also understand you want to do photographs. So we're kind of deviating from the rules. I'll jump down right away and you've got to make a real fast presentation and a photo and then we're done, okay? Okay, I want to present this. Okay. I wanna present this. Okay. The co-cruis, please count that. So, thank you. Applause. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. I wanna present this. Okay. Okay. It is the nation's beautiful flower with heavenly fragrance. Thank you. Let's. Let's. Thank you. And you know that your artistic talents have been expressed here in Irvine, something you were able to do later in your life. It's a wonderful tribute to what goes on in Irvine, our Senior Center and elsewhere. Thank you so much, Madam. Thank you. All right. Next. Viet Li, and if I could also call forward Jason Gargfield, Critt V, Audrey V, Okshay B and Nancy Solomon. Welcome. Yes. Members of the City Council, I understand if the request is somewhat outside of the remit of the City Council, nevertheless I wanted to give voice to it. I suppose the question is whether or not your rights exist if they cannot be exercised. It's the general perspective of the Asian American community in Irvine that if you are high achieving, if you are intelligent, if you are successful, then that is going to be a protective failings against the excesses of wider society. So in this case, I want to bring the case of Columbia Student Chung-Yong-Sae-Oh. She is 21-year-old Columbia student, valedictorian of her high school. And she is now being targeted for deportation by the administration for simply being at a protest. Now I want to cite text from the 14th Amendment which states that the state cannot deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law nor deny any person within this jurisdiction, each of protection of the laws. Now, Cheng Yong-sale and Mamui Kalu have not been charged with anything, which is in violation of not even foundational text within the US Constitution, but within the Magna Carta itself. I don't know what the city council can do, but I guess hopefully something can be done to define that we're all like. Thank you for underscoring that matter of number of us are following that case very closely. Thank you. Jason Garzfield. Two weeks ago, at the State of the City address a group of agitators stood up and disrupted Mayor Agrin's speech. Mr. Mayor you called for the police to remove them and afterwards you said we celebrate the right of free speech in this city at the same time we know that there are appropriate time place and manner rules that help us live together as a civilized society. I agree with that statement, and I wish you would extend the same courtesy to me and to other residents this city last year, when we came to speak and were shouted down by hateful mask agitators. These agitators should have been removed, as the people who interrupted you were. It's true that Farrakhan was the mayor at that time, but you've repeatedly praised her handling of the issue in question, including saying at your last state of the city address that she did an outstanding job. On October 14th of last year, in fact, Mr. Mayor, you signed on to a letter written by Mayor Khan calling for charges to be dropped against protesters who trespassed and resisted arrested UCI. Why didn't reasonable time place and manner restrictions apply to them? Further, Mar-Las March, you opposed an agenda item that would have set up a buffer zone limiting protests outside private residences. Again, on the grounds of free speech, despite the fact that the Supreme Court is upheld buffer zones, including for abortion clinics, as a reasonable time place and manner restriction, this leaves a perceptive observer with no other conclusion to reach than that you are applying an inconsistent definition of free speech as it suits your political agenda, which does not accord with your stated goal to make Irvine the safest and kindest city in America. Thank you for your comments. Great. V. Welcome. Hello. My name is Crete Van Tyle. I'm here with a bunch of my friends. And I do want to say this that 25 years ago, Central Park opened. Central Park for its time was ahead of its time. It was put back in an industrial area. But it showed a lot of other cities that what could be done. This is our opportunity, the current Oak Creek Community Park Improvement Program, a project to stride forward into the light and again lead our fellow cities in Orange County. And even for that matter, the single largest growing segment of public parks in the United States and Canada is dog parks. This is an opportunity to have a plan that has a jewel to show how it can be done. Not back in an industrial area, but a beautiful park designed by Kathleen Hatton and many comment sessions with the public on multiple occasions to get ideas of what could be done and should be done. We've gathered all sorts of information from other cities like Chicago, which has some award-winning dog parks. Again, this is our opportunity to be out front and show what can be done. And then we will have instead of a few people who are opposed to the dog park, we'll have communities asking for it. The ability to have an amenity built in or near your community that adds value to your home at the cost of the city is a good deal Take it. So this is a great opportunity to strive forward to move forward and when you weigh the pros and cons Thank you your time is up Thank you Thank you for sharing your comments. Well. Hi, I'm Audrey. His wife, actually. He could have my time, really. I'm here to support the orange tree or oak creek dog park improvement that has already been approved. I don't know why we're still delaying it. It's been actually on approved and ready to go for eight years. It started eight years ago. I heard him talk about a gym that was approved last year and is already starting. Why aren't we breaking ground? Why aren't we getting things done? There's no reason for this delay over a few people in the community I live in Orange Tree, not wanting dog park I live there I want it it's literally I could throw a stone and hit it I want it there and many of the people in there want it there you haven't talked to everyone and you can't make a decision based on five or six people that are not not about it that's it I. Thank you. Thank you for sharing your views. Oxey B. Hi there. Thank you very much for allowing me a chance to speak. My name is Oxey and I just want to speak about the Oak Creek Community Park Improvement Project. I fully support the current plan and eight years is too long for it to get done. I want to speak specifically about this plan because I am one of the residents of Oak Creek. I live in the Kenwood community that is on the corner of Alton and Valley Oak. So this park impacts me directly. Right now it's a 35 minute walk for me to go to the current central park. 35 minutes each way, not to mention the time there. So it's very unfeasible for me to walk there. So I drive there. If there are many people like me that do that. If this park was moved to right near my community, I would walk there. And not only would I walk there, I would be able to bring my child with me. I have a three year old. So I think by moving the dog park closer to where people live, it would be a great improvement to the city, reduce the amount of cars on the road and allow an amenity for other people to use more often than having to walk to an industrial area. So again, it would allow me an opportunity to go with my family, go allow my kids to play in the park, and my dogs to play in the park, and it would be a great family activity that would add to the city of Irvine. And so I just wanted to give an example of how it would benefit one person personally. Thank you for your time. Thank you. Nancy Solomon. Welcome. Good evening. I'm Nancy Solomon. I just moved down here from Seattle last year by way of Brooklyn. And the first thing I did was take my new puppy to the dog park. And what I discovered was the dog park really isn't just for the dogs. It's for the humans. It's for the people. You know that nobody has their phone out there. We're talking to each other. We're having conversations. We're learning about meetings such as these. And I, who had been in the DEI space for 36 years, need a place to get away from the current politics. It's like a politics, I got an audience, politics free zone. So I'm just here to say it's good for our hearts, it's good for our nervous system, it's good for community relations and it's good for the dogs. So thank you for your time. Thank you. Well, while this is, well this is not an agenda item tonight, we of course can't do anything up about this matter tonight. But I have no doubt this will be a matter of discussion tomorrow morning at City Hall with our staff and others. So thank you for being here. Shall we take further comments? Yes, thank you, Mayor. We do have one individual who has a video that's here in person. So if I may, transition over to Zoom and then we'll come back to that. Excellent. Thank you. Our next speaker is Eric Nishanian. Mr. Nishanian, you may unmute your mic. Thank you, council members. Mayor Aigren. I agree with Jason Garfield that appears that Mayor Aigren's position of protecting free speech has changed from when he was a council member to when he became mayor. It looked like he agreed with censoring my free speech last meeting and also violating my due process rights. The city permits more protections to the public than the Brown Act, permitting public participation at all council meetings by Zoom and public comments on all agendas, including special agenda items. On February 25th, there is a video glitch. City Council went to recess for 20 minutes to fix the video glitch. On March 11th, there is a Zoom problem with audio. Zoom problems are foreseeable. The city permits Zoom participation. Rather than fixing the Zoom issue during the council meeting to ensure that public comments would be allowed and over the advice of Jeff Melcheng saying that it was a problem that the audio was not working. Larry Aigman permitted the city to censor my speech and permitted the city to violate my due process rights. I direct everybody to read Gorbato Santana's article on the Voice of Orange County on March 17th. The state is considering making a public participation remotely the law and this seat does not have any provisions for how it handles glitches with public participation by remote. Thank you your time is up. Next. Our next speaker is Matthew Mata. Matthew you may unmute your mic. Hello Matthew can you hear us? Hello? Yes we can hear you. Yes, thank you. You know, I heard a lot about Todd's talk. Definitely sure was not that, but I have my own experience with the share on my dog killed in our own. But I lit on the other side of the community park. And ever since there is a death that you look at, you'll still a trail. And this isn't just local to this place, to this park, it is even in the gated community next door Harvard Square, there's coyotes in that park as well. You know, I'm not aware they're coming from, they could be coming from testing, but as we all know, the Irvine company has lost taking both. So this is an issue that should be addressed. These attacks are only escalating. And they're not for survival. My dog's body was on.. You know, let me, we missed some of the first part of your comment. It was cutting out a bit. So let me suggest we get the gentleman's name and number and that we have somebody from staff be in touch with them. All right. Thank you. Thank you for sharing your comments tonight. Our next speaker is Walter. Walter, you may unmute your mic. Good evening, Mayor, city council members, city staff. My name is Walter Breeder. I'm going to point out the continuing orange County Power Quality Misinformation. Unlike times, I pancies of 100% renewable energy. I do my homework and only present facts. The last 18 years of my career, before retiring, I was an operations manager at Wholesore, a very profitable company. Our company never did business with any vendor that tried to mislead us with false information. Yet, the OCPA has done it for several years right from their boardroom, and they then re-is restated by the affiliates at the Climate Action Campaign. In 19, in the 2024, and this year, 2025, they are as repeatedly obliged so often, they hope that it will become a truth in the public's mind. Check this main chart at the last meeting, and you will see the 3% discount liar there. The illustration, this illusion of truth, that the basic choice is 3% discount to S.E.E. means equivalent generation rate, is a lie that they hope everyone will swallow. In actuality, O.C.P.A.'s basic choice generation rate is 9% higher than S.E.E.'s generation rate. Check the joint rate comparison I made and emailed the council. Also, what is O.C.P.A. not telling the public? The council members on the O.C.P.A. much is it? Thank you. Your time is up. Thank you. Natural gas power plants versus the dire, Kaiser, geothermal plants. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your comments. Mr. Mayor, that puts us right at 30 minutes. We have one individual person, as I mentioned earlier, that does have a video. We have two more that popped in just a little bit late in Tizum. One has a video of those two. We'll accept no more, but let's go through those three, then. All right. Thank you. Our next speaker is Dylan Slayton. Dylan, you may unmute your mic. Hi, I'm here to emphasize our violence need to stop the laying the implementation of the climate action and adaptation plan. Half for short. That item is Mr. Dylan. I think you're speaking on a on a Gendai's item that's item 5.7. For tonight we're under general public comments on a Gendai's items. My apologies so wait. Thank you. Our next speaker is telephone number 347 347. You may I'm you your mic. Yeah I'm in the speakance of my video. This is Defox. In 2021 Western community energy filed for Chapter 9 Bank Bank of Sea Protection. WCE failed because of its lack of financial resources to continue serving its customers. Much like the Orange County Power Authority, WCE was faced with buying energy in the market on the spot because of its lack of securing long-term power contracts. And much like the OCPA, it came at a time when prices ran high because of the demand for renewable energy. As OCPA dips into its reserves, it is only a matter of time before it declares itself insolvent. When this happens, and the OCPA is unable to pay Southern California Edison to take back its customers, the SE will have no choice but to charge OCPA ratepayers directly for these costs. And this could also mean that the Irvine ratepayers will lose their investment into this risky agency. We need not wait until this happens, especially since we already know from OCPA CEO that OCPA is in financial trouble because of their lack of securing long-term power contracts and now have to rely on their research. How long can the OCPA survive before those completely broke? And just to let people know how the OCPA lack transparency rate pairs are required to give OCPA a six months notice before they want to switch back to FCE. OCPA neglects to tell the rate pairs that. Thank you. Thank you for your comments. Thank you, Mayor. We'll finish with Alan Meyerson. Welcome, Mr. Meyerson. Good evening, Councilmembers. Go ahead and play the video, please. Pay attention to the right of your screeners. This is during the mayor's state of the city dressed. Pay attention to the council members on the right of your screeners. This is during the mayor's state of the city dressed. Pay attention to the council members on the right. As you can see, everybody was paying attention except Councilmember Traceter, who I watched the entire speech on her phone. It's a shame that in the past, when people criticized you, you think you're being abused while you're passive aggressive behavior towards the mayor, and the mayor's office was on display for everyone to watch. It's a shame that you have such disregard for the people of the city that voted for the mayor, not even willing to listen to what he was saying, even if you didn't agree with what he was saying, but to pretend, at least pretend that you were paying attention. I just have a real difficult time with this type of thing. I'm pretty sure you knew about the protest also. The mayor did give the people a chance to protest, but he wasn't going to let him go on forever because he had a speech to give for the people, the person that spoke earlier. So, disgraceful disgraceful. Councilmember Traciter. Thank you. Your time is up. A speech like that was interrupted by cult members. Thank you for sharing your views with us. And that is all mayor. All right, that concludes the public comments for non-agentized items allowing us to move to announcements committee reports and council reports Do my colleagues have any announcements committee reports or City council reports to make it this time. I see councilmember Liu request to heard. Thank you mayor. So I have a few things to say today to announce today. Today the city of Irvine presented a certificate making April 2nd as autism awareness day. Thank you mayor for allowing that to happen. And initiative dedicated to raising awareness and acceptance and foster understanding of autism spectrum to create this inclusive environment. So all Irvine residents will be have the opportunity to thrive. And I'm also thrilled to share that my team and I recently hosted a fantastic women's health and wellness event bringing together local and county organizations dedicated to promoting women's health and wellness. A big thank you to assembly woman, Toddy Petrinoires, Councilmember Go, all the participating organizations into yoga six and rumble boxing for helping make this event a success. Next in celebration of our earth Heroes in Action, I'm happy to share that we have already received several art submissions for our environmental art contest in collaboration with Cool Irvine. I'd like to remind Irvine families with students in great K through six that they can still participate. Artworks can be dropped off at Irvine City Hall by April 11, 2025. Please check out our social media for more detail. And this month, my team and I had the privilege of visiting the OC Fire Authority Open House. A huge thank you to Chief Nick Freeman for the amazing tour. And we're able to actually visit the call center and that was why we wanted to include the call center staff to be recognized today. And lastly, I'm excited to announce our office is in partnership with South Coast Chinese Culture Center and Pretensity to host a kids art contest. This contest is open to all Irvine families from first through 12th grade. The winning artwork will be displayed on the walls of my office and the deadline is April 30th. And you can submit artwork to City Hall, South Coast Chinese Culture Center or Pretend City. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Liu. Council Member Goh. Yeah. Good evening, everyone. Happy spring day. Start a spring. Hopefully, everyone's having enjoyed the nice new weather now. Last Wednesday marked my first 100 days in office, proud to represent the residents of Irvine District 2. My team and I have been hard at work delivering results and serving the community. In the last 100 days, we have hosted two district events, result 12 constant requests presented 35 certificates of recognition and proclamations. I also currently serve enumerous other boards representing the city of Irvine. Next slide, please. In OCPA last week, we met as a board to refine our strategic plan and setting priorities to guide the agency through 2026. 2025 and 2026. And I'm advocating for the board to establish a four-debony programs that provide grants, as well as loans for our city residents and businesses to install solar and battery storage infrastructure. I'm also advocating for investing in new infrastructure at the great park that will generate a significant amount of local renewable energy. Next slide, please. I'm also in the Irvine Barclay Theory operating company board. We, Vice Mayor Mine attended our first board meeting at the Irvine Barclay Theater where we reviewed programming, marketing, and finances for the 25 and 26 season. I encourage everyone to visit their website and attend upcoming shows at thebarclay.org. Thank you very much. Thank you for your report. Councilmember and Vice Mayor, my. Thank you Mayor and good evening everyone. If we could I'd like to pull up the graphic there about EGA Paloza. We'd like you to join us in celebrating the spring season at Ega Paloza on Saturday, April 5th, from 1 to 5 p.m. at William Wallet Aquatic Center. Children and families can enjoy splash time, egg hunt stations, face painting, spring crafts and games, an opportunity to take photos with a special guest, which is the Easter Bunny. Bounce houses and a new addition this year. I'm not sure how they're going to do it, but free train rides at the pool as well. Hope you can join us for this fun-filled afternoon to learn more, visit cityofbervine.org, Ega, Paloza. Second thing is I would like to commend the city, city staff, city manager Oliver Chi, Heather Dionne, and Denise Bennett on the food distribution efforts at Heritage Park. As many of you know, I've been doing this personally for a couple of years, creating food boxes and delivering to homes, and I'm very excited to see this happening in our city at such a scale that is much needed. We have a couple slides here. I wanted to go through them real quickly here. The program launched February to provide 30-pound food boxes monthly to at-risk Irvine residents. The initial event served 40 people with expectations of higher participation in March. The food security program at Heritage Park has been an overwhelming success with over 200 participants in the most recent event, resulting in food boxes running out. Next slide please. The March distribution event, in team effort, both happened on rainy days. The second distribution event happened on March 13th and served 2011 residents despite the rainy weather. The food boxes included frozen fish, frozen chicken, apples, cheddar cheese. The program was implemented with the support of the community services team and youth action team, volunteers, high school students, who helped assemble and distributed boxes. Next slide, please The city is coordinating with CAPOC, Community Action Partnership of Orange County, Orange County Food Bank to expand the program in April to serve approximately 400 participants. This is re at the third event, will be 400. The program is funded through federal and state nutrition programs, including CSFP and TFAP. Next slide, please. Resident enrollment support for food programs in Medi-Cal is offered monthly. Resident enrollment is through Medi-Cal offered monthly in collaboration with community action partnership. The city is providing these programs, these program enrollment support every Thursday of the month from 9 to noon. In addition, the city is partnering with community health initiative at Orange County and through that effort, we are also providing Medi-Cal enrollment assistance at Heritage Park Center every 4th Friday of the month, 9 to 1. I also want to highlight that these programs, we have these available for people enrolled nine to noon, but it's also open for everyone else. We want to make sure everyone is served, not just those that are signing up for this program. So people can come through here. I want to thank the staff again for addressing the serious issue with food costs being where they are right now. And Ego of Carton is a car of eggs is like $17 right now. A lot of people in our neighborhood and communities cannot afford fresh fruit and produce. So thank you very much to the city staff. Thank you, Vice Mayor Mai. Thank you for those reports. As you can tell, reports are increasingly focused on Council members' respective districts. We're all getting used to the new system. A lot going on in District 3 by way of citywide distributions of all kinds of benefits. And we appreciate these reports. Thank you. I have an announcement to make and a request to follow that. I've been hosting mornings with the mayor here at City Hall, and it's been great connecting with residents and hearing your thoughts, your ideas. I invite you to join me for the next session, which is this coming Saturday, March 29th, from 9 to 10 AM. Right here again at City Hall, first floor. You're welcome. It's your chance to share your thoughts. Ask questions, make suggestions. We try to make these sessions comfortable and informal for all those who are participating. So I look forward to seeing you there. No registration is required. Just show up. We'll even have, I think, coffee and donuts for folks who would like to take advantage of that as well. Next, I'd like under announcements to recognize one item O. Do we have that slide? Is that available? Oh, there we are. Okay. Thank you. Here we are. This evening, I want to be adjourning this meeting in recognition of Juanita Moe. Juanita Moe was a 46-year resident of Irvine, whose vision and perseverance helped shape our outstanding bicycle trail system. We take that system somewhat for granted. The fact of the matter is it was Juanita Moe, who rallied others, and built that into our master planning process dating back 50 years and more. As a member of an ad hoc volunteer committee in the early 1970s, Juanita worked tirelessly to promote off-street trails, ensuring that cycling would be a safe and accessible mode of transportation for generations to come. Her advocacy efforts laid the foundation for the extensive network of trails, nearly 400 miles of on street and off street bikeways that we enjoy today. In 2015 the Quail Hill Trail, now of course in district four adjacent to the 405 Freeway, was renamed in her honor. At the time she humbly stated, I alone could have accomplished nothing. She was giving credit to those she worked alongside as was her generous spirit. But the truth is her vision, tenacity and hard work really put Irvine on the path to becoming the world-class bicycle-friendly city it is today. We are grateful to Juanita for her efforts. May her dedication continue to inspire us all to build a more connected and vibrant Irvine. Our deepest sympathies go out to her friends and family and there were many, many friends that she had in Irvine, especially to her husband. He was a professor at UCI, her daughter and granddaughters. A memorial celebration of her life is planned at the Good Shepherd Chapel at Concordia University right here in Irvine on Saturday, April 12th at 3 p.m. and we will be adjourning tonight's meeting in her honor. She also happened to have been a neighbor of ours so she's sorely missed. All right with that we're about a half hour behind schedule but we moved to the consent calendar so if we can make up a little time now. The consent calendar tonight, let me just ask, are there any additions or deletions to the agenda tonight? Mr. City Manager? Mr. Mayor, no changes to the agenda. That's what I thought, thank you. Therefore, moving to the consent calendar, items 3.1 to 3.8, consent calendar items items are considered by the city manager to be routine and will be enacted by one roll call vote. There will be no discussion of these items unless members of the city council request specific items to be removed from the consent calendar for separate discussion. We do a course allow, allow members of the public to be heard. This would be the opportunity now for anyone who wants to be heard under a consent calendar item to anybody who's participating electronically to raise their hand electronically so that they could be recognized and their name put in the queue How many requests do we have to be heard under consent calendar items tonight? We have no request to speak No request while we better close it out right away here then. Let me. Sorry. Yeah. Let me with no requests. I'm so flumics. I don't know what to do now. Mayor, I'd like to move that consent calendar. Well, let me let me first ask if any of my council colleagues would request any matter be withdrawn from the consent calendar for separate discussion. There be no request. A motion is in order to adopt the consent calendar. Council member Carol moved adoption of the consent calendar. Seconded by council member Liu. No further discussion. Let's call the roll. Council member Carol. Yes. Councilmember Goh. Yes. Councilmember Liu. Yes. Councilmember Trisheater. Yes. Vice Mayor Maye. Yes. Mayor Aigren. Yes. Carrie 6-0. We're back on schedule. There we go. All right. That takes us to... Hold on here. That takes us to, hold on here, that takes us to our public hearings section of the agenda. That's items four on the printed agenda. Cureings are scheduled and are a little more formal than we normally handle things. Public hearings operate one at a time and it's my responsibility to move through these public hearings one after the other. First opening the public hearing, taking various staff information, giving the public a chance to participate, closing the public hearing and calling for a vote. With that procedure in mind, I'll turn now to our city clerk. To please identify public hearing item 4.1 by subject. Thank you, Mayor Zoning, ordinance amendment for logistics facilities and warehouses. The recommended staff action is simply to continue this matter. Do I have to declare the public meeting open to accept a motion to continue. You do. I hear by declare the public hearing open. Since this is just a motion to continue, would somebody like to make that motion at this time? I'll move the matter. Be continued. Second. Very well. That would be continued to May 27th, 2025 at roughly 5 p.m. or so and thereafter at that meeting. Any discussion on the motion to continue? There have been none. Will the clerk please call the roll. Councilmember Carroll. Yes. Councilmember Goll. Yes. Councilmember Liu. Yes. Councilmember Traceeater. Yes. Vice Mayor Maye. Yes. Mayor Aigren. Yes. Carrey 6-0. There we are. Just a matter of procedural understanding. Is in fact the hearing still technically open or should we have closed it? It is still technically open. It remains technically open. Thank you. All right. We move now to public hearing item 4.2. Would the clerk please identify this item by title and subject. On dissuance by the California Enterprise Development Authority for Orange County Music and Dance, Linda Consent and Subly C Consideration. I hereby declare the public hearing open. At this time I would invite anybody who wishes to participate electronically via Zoom to be sure you've raised your hand and have been electronically admitted to the queue. Having done that at this, I'll turn to our city staff to make a presentation. Thank you, Mayor Ahrin. Members of the City Council, Steve Torrelli, and with me today is Dale Bullson, the Administrative Services Director for your consideration. This evening is a Tefer Hearing for Orange County Music and Dance, as well as a lender consent and a sublease authorization. Just a little background on the project and then we'll go into the Tefer hearing the lender consent into the sub lease and then to recommend it actions this evening. So the background on this project is for last few years we've been developing at the Great Park and last March the City Council approved pre-development agreements since forms of leases with a number of nonprofit entities, cultural institutions, and the cultural terraces, one of them being Orange County Music and Dance. And we are quickly ticking through all of those elements within the pre-development agreement. We're down really to the last two. We're getting ready to deliver the paths to those projects. And the project proponents are filling their full projects full projects funding requirements and getting ready to enter those construction contracts and that is why the item is before you today for Orange County Music and Dance. As a little refresher, Orange County Music and Dance is about an 85,000 square foot facility that's going to be right there on marine way. It will have teaching rooms, rehearsal and performance halls, offices, administrative, and back of house. It's got about a $50 million project cost all in just under a two-year construction timeline. And as a continuing of their very successful existing nonprofit facility that is currently located here in Irvine. So the way the OCMD has approached their financing for the project is through something called a private activity bond. It is being backed by their donations, their cash on hand, and their current facility. Private activity bonds are nothing new to the city. We assisted Great Park Ice in doing this very same type of issuance about six or seven years ago. We've also helped a number of other local entities. O CMMD is fully responsible for a payment of the bond there's no city obligation to it. And as I say some other urban issuances were great park ice and Korean Lutheran more recently. The internal revenue code that governs these bond issuances does require there's a public hearing before a local board because Orange County Music and Dance is here within the city of Irvine That is why we're here tonight also requires a resolution from the local authority which is attached to the staff report for tonight's presentation Is that it nope? Okay, good couple more for it. Just two more slides. I'll move along as quickly as I can. The next item is a lender consent. So with the bond, whenever you have a financing entity, there's certain things that the city has to sign off on. We've already approved that form of lease last year and so rather than going in and amending that beast of a document. We've attached a lender consent to the staff report tonight. provides that the financing is secured by their interest in the lease, it confirms that the lease is an effect. Of course, this document would not be signed until that lease is signed. It provides the city and being most must provide notices if there's some type of default and they both have the right to cure. And finally, Orange County Music and Dance had a number of sublessies as did Pretend City when their lease was authorized. They have asked for another conforming use to be added to their facility and as we're also asking the council for the authorization to add that to the list of sublessies it's called Ednavated is a public charter school currently operating seven campuses throughout southern California and is a each college preparatory school focused on the whole student. It would operate in some otherwise inactive time so completely activate that campus through the morning and afternoon hours and the sublies is certainly consistent with the site use and character of the cultural terrace. It would certainly be subject also to student trip maximums in our other zoning requirements as all charter schools But look schools are here in the city and with that I have the recommended actions for you on the screen and happy to take any questions We also have representatives from more chemis you can dance here excellent And that concludes your presentation. Yes, sir. We'll take any questions or comments that Council members have of staff. Why don't you remain available for us if you would and we'll turn to our city clerk for public comment at this time. Thank you Mayor. We have one request to speak from E planet thunderstormer Welcome, thank you first. I'd like to start with the fact that my perplexity count has been compromised I mean the things that he goes on in there that was the only only electronic intelligence that I had to deep research this So I don't even have any any notes actually. I was looking at that and what he said. So I don't know exactly if it's relevant why we have somebody from the great park area and somebody from the Irvine area. Because it said that all there's complexities in transparency and oversight was something like that. And something like the city manager doing some sort of the way that it is is I think it's maybe there's not much transparency but I don't know. I mean I know that there's supposed to pay the whole bond back. I also know that the agency had some scandals last year but the way that's structured I't know, but it does bring into question my circumstances when I'm dealing with some things in the music industry and I'm making comments here. And also Newport Beach, they got 50 million dollars last November. And Orange County has a disproportionately high amount of money coming into it. And San Bernardino looks like a second world country. I mean, there are more businesses downtown boarded up than are open, vacant lots are everywhere. So I don't know what the rest of the city of Irvine looks like between here and the school, it's pretty nice. So when they're $50 million going to Newport, $50 million going here, and that's not their maximum. It's a maximum of their typical, but this was like piggybacked on something that was like maybe like a few hundred million more. So I don't know, I mean, there's a lot of things that I don't know. I didn't even know about making requests to councils before I was able to interact with the electronic intelligence because I wasn't able to get any legal consultation based on, I mean, everybody in Santa Barbara knew about me and the music industry and I couldn't get any help there either. But I know that there's something sketchy going on with the council and the fact that I shouldn't be talking to you guys, I already said, well, you know, criminal violations are evident now. For the new people, I don't know if you were watching last year, but there's also conspiracy and recorduring, as a certainty with some of the councils that I've been talking to you, and as far as here, I don't know, I would think so. It just seems like it's possible. They did say that, Chad Gibig said, This is the cliche or textbook way that you're able to funnel money into projects and and there is not evident corruption like with a scandal but you know if it started a whole year ago And there was already the music and I don't know where the bond enters into that But I just want to make sure that everybody knows Some circumstances might be questionable with what I'm dealing with. Thank you for sharing your comments with us tonight. Any others? That is all mayor. There being no others, a motion to close the public hearing is in order. So moved there. Moved by Council Member Carroll. And seconded by Vice Mayor Mai. Would the clerk please call the roll on the motion to close the public hearing. Council Member Carroll. Yes. Council Member Goh. Yes. Council Member Liu. Yes. Council Member Chiseta. Yes. Vice Mayor Mai. Yes. Mayor Aigren. Yes. Curie 6-0. All right. Any further council comments? Mayor go ahead. Move the item. If there's no fair comment. Councilmember Carroll moves staff recommendations here which include adopting a resolution of the council. Do we need to read it or can the city turn? No, it's starting. We don't have to read it, Paul. We don't have to read it. But also approving on lender consent for Orange County Music and Dance, authorizing the city manager to execute and authorizing, Novate as a sub-resie under Orange County Music and Dance's Groundlees. That is the motion. Let me just comment on the motion by saying, although this is a dry and somewhat to financial matter, This is a wonderful project. And the fact that we're going to have Orange County music and dance at the Great Park, part of the Cultural Terrorist West. Exciting things are happening out there at the Great Park. And I know Council Member Carroll has chair of the Great Park board. You're going to be talking about some of these things. A little later this spring. This motion and its adoption gets this project one step further among many others that are moving along at the Great Park. I'm happy to be voting for this. I see no other requests to be heard on this. With that, we'll have the clerk call the roll. Mr. Mayor, I'm not sure that I got a second and I apologize if there was, but I didn't recall hearing one. If there was, I may not have recognized it. So that was a motion by Council Member Carol. I'll second it. Who's seconded by Vice Mayor Mai. Just as in the closing of the public hearing. All right. With that, please call the roll. Council Member Carol. Yes. Council Member Goll. Yes. Council Member Liu Yes. Council member Traceeider. Yes. Vice Mayor Mai. Yes. And Mayor Aigren. Yes. Carry 6-0. Thank you. That concludes that item. We move now to item 4.3. Public hearing. Would the clerk please identify this public hearing by title and subject. Zone changes to allow the research and development R&D land use as a use permitted by right within the 5.6 business park zoning district of planning area 4 lower Peters Canyon and the 4.8 Irvine Center Garden Commercial zoning district of Planning Area 33 Irvine Spectrum Center. This is a public hearing, which I'll now declare open. At this time, anyone wishing to participate electronically? Now is the time to raise your hand, to be admitted to the queue, so that you can participate remotely. Do we have a count on how many wish to be heard? On this item, there's no requests. No requests so far. All right. With that, we'll turn to the city staff. Please identify yourselves and talk to us. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor Aigren. Members of the City Council, I'm Sherman Jones with your community development department. Joining me here at the desk is Plenty Manager, Alissa Mathis. And as mentioned, this is a zone change that was presented to staff by Presiding inates on behalf of the Irvine Company Office of Properties. And again, this has proposed zone change for the R&D or research in development land years. So as you can see on the slide, we have Plenty of Reform and Plenty of Reform 33. And these are two areas of the city where there's currently Not allowed to have they are in the land use as a permitted use and so the applicant is proposing to have The zone change be presented to you to move forward With the RD land use and so on the slide you see plan area four plan area 33 and then the highlighted area of the areas that would be changed with this particular zone change again for the 5.6 business park zoning district and the 4.8 Irvine Senator Garden commercial zoning district in plan year 33. So on the map, excuse me, on the slide, you'll see the map that shows the various zoning districts in the city. And in the zoning ordinance, there is a list of zoning districts that are identified by a project number and also a descriptive narrative. And so on the table on the screen, you'll see different zoning districts that would allow either R&D by right that's the first column the middle column It shows you where you wouldn't need a condition used for it and what the zone changes is proposing for the third column Where staff would be recommending to the council for 4.8 and the 5.6 zoning district. The reason for this change that's being proposed is because of an inconsistency that you can see on the slide where a number of zoning districts that currently allow the R&D as a permitted use but it's not listed and the 4.8 zoning district and it would require a zoning, excuse me, a conditional use permit for the 5.6. In the past R&D uses typically included light industrial facilities, laboratories, and testing facilities that could create undesirable impacts. However, most of the recent R&D uses proposed in the city include businesses and such as testing of software, medical and communication devices, electronic and gaming systems that are conducted in administrative office settings. Additionally, this zone change would remove land use barriers to these only ordinance with the goal of retaining and attracting R&D uses in the city. Finally, the zone change is exempt from SQL because it can be seen with certainty that there would be no significant impact to the environment. Earlier last month, the Planning Commission unanimously voted to recommend to the City Council approve of both zone changes. Staff is also in support of the zone changes as they would remove land use barriers in the zone ordinance. Staff's recommendation and the planning commission organization shows that we should support the zone changes. If approved the council would see the introduction of the first reading of the ordinance that's shown on the screen that complete staff's presentation, staff in the applicant are available for any questions you might have. Thank you. Thank you. That concludes your presentation. That is great. With that, we'll turn to my colleagues if any have questions to direct staff at this time or comments? There being none will move then to public comments. Are there any requests to be heard? No, Mr. Mayor. All right. There being none, I think I can declare the public hearing closed. We'll need a motion then. I'll move that the public hearing be closed. Is there a second? Seconded by Vice Mayor May. Would the clerk please call the roll. Council member Carroll. Yes. Council member Goll. Council member Liu. Yes. Council member Chisedar. Yes. Vice Mayor May. Yes. Mayor Aigren. Yes. Carrie 6-0. That concludes that part last call for any council comments. I'll tell you what all at this time move staff recommendations, which includes adopting an ordinance. So I'll move that we read by title and ordinance of the City Council of the City of Irvine, California approving zone change 0 0 9 3 3 4 9 9 dash p z c To permit the research and development R&D land Use by right Within the 5.6 business park zoning district of Planning Area 4, lower Peter's Canyon, filed by Pirsada and associates on behalf of the Irvine company office properties and introduce for first reading also by title only an ordinance of the City Council of the City of Irvine, California approving Zone Change 0, 0, 9, 3, 3, 500-PCC to permit the research and development R&D land used by Wright within the 4.8 Irvine Center Garden Commercial Zoning District of Planning Area 33, Irvine Spectrum Center, filed by Pursada and Associates on behalf of of Irvine company office properties. Is there a second? Second. You want me to repeat the motion? No. I heard it loud. I'm going to hear it. I'll second that. It's been moved and seconded. Any discussion? There be none. Would the clerk please call the roll? Councilmember Carroll. Yes. Councilmember Goh. Yes. Councilmember Liu. Yes. Councilmember Triseter. Yes. Vice Mayor Mai. Yes. Mayor Aigren. Yes. Carry 6-0. Thank you. That concludes that item. Taking us to our final public hearing item 4.4. Would the clerk please identify this public hearing item by subject and title. Zoning ordinance technical empty. This is a public hearing which I'll now declare open. At this time, those wishing to participate via electronically. This would be the time to raise your hand to be admitted to the queue. Do we have any requests to be heard on this item? Not at this time. Not at this time, very well. That allows us then to move to staff presentation. I'll turn it over to staff. Please introduce yourselves at this time and let's hear what you have to say, all right? Thank you and good evening, Mayor and members of the City Council. I am Tiffany Lynn, a senior planner with the Community Development Department. And I'm joined by Planning Manager Alyssa Matthews. And the item before you this evening is the citywide zoning ordinance technical update. This update typically occurs on an as needed basis and aims to introduce new regulations, streamlining existing procedures, and address inconsistencies within the code. The first updates I'll be going over involve introducing and modifying definitions within the code. Specifically, the community facility definition is proposed to be modified to clarify what constitutes a community facility, and this definition is consistent with how other jurisdictions define these facilities. A new definition for an existing use is also proposed to be created for online vehicle sales. The next item proposes to update the administrative relief procedure chapter of the code to allow private schools to request for administrative relief, which allows private schools to request deviation from the code at a notice public hearing. The appeal procedure chapter is also proposed to be updated to incorporate appeal procedures specific to California Environmental Quality Act or SQL appeals, which have requirements that are distinct from the city's standard appeal regulations. The next item proposes to introduce a new application type, an administrative use permit, which is a common application type seen in other cities. The administrative use permit would require certain land uses such as commercial schools to obtain this a permit type, which review and approval at the discretion of the community development director. Currently most of these uses are permitted by right however given the unique operational characteristics that require further review this new application type allows city staff to further analyze the proposal through a discretionary application. Next commercial schools and commercial recreation uses are proposed to be introduced to the 5.4 general industrial zone as there is a demand to provide for more of these type of uses and the zoning district is appropriate for the establishment of such uses. The following item proposes to replace public community facilities as permitted by right use with community facilities as a conditionally permitted use in the 5.6 business park zoning district, which is consistent with how this land use is treated in other zones. The public meeting and hearing chapter is also proposed to be updated to include additional individuals and agencies for noticing purposes and to allow for electronic copies with mailing information to address procedural changes due to technology improvements. The home occupation update provides correct information throughout the zoning ordinance pertaining to which zoning districts allow for these type of uses, which is wherever residential is permitted. Next alternative healthcare provider land uses are proposed to be updated in the 4.5 through 4.8 zones and in planning areas 33 and 34 to provide for consistent information across two different areas of the zoning ordinance and to ensure this land use is permitted consistent with current practice. Lastly, an update is proposed to the zoning district citywide to extend a new existing provision within some zones that allows land uses not listed to be conditionally permitted by the planning Commission. This addresses new and unique land uses not listed in the code to be considered at a notice public hearing. In summary, the proposed technical update provides for more accurate and consistent zoning ordinance. Therefore, staff does recommend the City Council introduce on first reading the attached ordinance implementing the zoning ordinance technical update. This concludes staff's presentation and we are available for any questions. Thank you for that presentation. It's appreciated. Any questions of staff comments at this point? There being none will turn to the city clerk again to see if there are any public participants who want to join us on this? No request to speak Mayor. There being no requests from citizens to be heard at this time. I'll move to close the public hearing. Is there a second? Second. Seconded by Vice Mayor May. Would the clerk please call the roll. Councilmember Goh. Yes. Councilmember Boulou. Yes. Councilmember Trisider. Yes. Vice Mayor May. Yes. Mayor Aigren. Yes. Carries 5-0 of the members present. Public hearing is closed. Motion is in order. I'll move staff recommendation, which is to introduce for first reading, reading by title only. I am reading it now. An ordinance of the City Council of the City of Irvine, California. Approving zone change, zero, zero,-PZC to amend the Irvine zoning ordinance by providing new and revised zoning provisions related to chapter 1-2-definitions. Chapter 2-2-administrative relief procedures. Chapter 2-5-Apple and call-up review procedure. Chapter 2-23-Public meetings, hearings, and notice procedures. Chapter 2-33-administrative use permit. Chapter 3-37-Zoning district land use regulations and development standards. Chapter 9-33-planning area 33, Irvine Spectrum Center, and chapter. the 30th . 9-33- 33- 33- 33- 33- 33- 33- 33- 33- 33- 33- 33- 33- Council Member Liu seconded the motion. Any discussion? There be none with the clerk, please call the roll. Council Member Goh. Yes. Council Member Liu. Yes. Council Member Trezeater. Yes. Vice Mayor Mai. Yes. Mayor Agrin. Yes. Carries 5 to 0 of the members present. Thank you. that takes us now that we've gotten beyond public hearings takes us to council. the members present. Thank you. That takes us now that we've gotten beyond public hearings takes us to Council business. At this time Council business consists of about six seven items tonight. The first being is $5.1. Consideration. I'll just let the city clerk identify this item by subject entitled. Consideration of a request by vice mayor might have discussed the establishment of an inaugural Irvine nonprofit week program. Very well with that I'll turn to Councilmember and vice mayor May to introduce this item presented to us and call for whatever action he may wish to have us consider. Councilmember vice mayor Mayor May. Thank you, Mayor Egrim. According to IRS data, Irvine serves to home to more than 2,900 nonprofit tax exempt organizations, more than any community in Orange County. This is a tremendous fact that should be celebrated by the city because in my experience, charitable nonprofits truly embody the best of our country. These organizations provide a way for people to work together for the common good, transforming shared beliefs into positive action. Whether the charity, the charitable entity, is seeking to feed, heal, shelter, educate, inspire, enlighten, or nurture, nonprofit organizations give shape to societies, boldest dreams, highest ideals, and noblest causes. Here in Irvine, we have 330,000 residents. A little known fact, as everyone believes that Irvine is a very affluent community, which we are, but there is a community in need. Over 60,000 people in the city of Irvine qualify for Medi-Cal and are in need. I've long observed that nonprofits play a fundamental role in creating a more thriving community. And in an effort to support the creation of more interconnected nonprofit ecosystem, I'm proposing that the city work to establish an annual nonprofit nonprofit week program. Through this effort, I would hope to bring greater awareness to the tremendous work being coordinated by our local Irvine based nonprofit entities. Further, through this annual Irvine nonprofit week gathering, the city can create a forum where our nonprofit organizations can come together to find resources, strategies, and fellowship to better support their efforts to live their individual missions. Nonprofit week will serve four tenants. One is the community. Those who need resources highlighting awareness. Two, existing nonprofits showcasing their services. Three, nonprofits that are new or established to find resources, create workshops, possibly help incubate new startups. Because there are plenty of people that have great ideas that would work for nonprofits and lastly it would serve to bring volunteers together with nonprofits. Irvine is one of the strongest cities and a leader in Orange County. There should be no reason we can't be one of the kindest taking care of everyone in our community. Staff, if you can pull up a picture I have of Hogue, you have there? Okay, well they're working on it. I just wanted to express that there is a great, well, there it is. So not only do we feel that a lot of people also feel including the Melinda Hogue Foundation, Mayor Aigren and I last month visited at the Melinda Hogue Foundation and just in his speech, his state of the city speech, he mentioned that the Melinda Hogue Foundation is going to be making a sizable donation to our city creating a non-profit center here at Heritage Park. Tens of millions will be invested into our city and what better way to have a nonprofit week rolling into this as well. Given these factors, I respectfully request that City Council direct that the city manager work to develop inaugural Irvine nonprofit week to take place some point in 2025. And I'd like to make that motion. Would you restate the motion? Yes, the motion is for City Council to direct City Manager to work to develop an inaugural Irvine nonprofit week program to take place sometime this year. Very well. Is there a second? I'll second the motion. Emotions properly before us. Why don't we have council members speak briefly to it now? Then do we have requests from citizens to be heard? We do, Mayor. We have three. Three. Okay. How many are in person? How many are electronic? Two in person, one on zoom. All right. We'll just hold that public comment. We'll let council members speak briefly on this round. Council member Liu. Thank you, Mayor. So I have to speak from experience that we are not short of volunteers. There are lots and lots of people in Irvine willing and able to help. And from my experience working with lots of different nonprofits. As a volunteer it's been a great experience. So I am so glad to see this happening so that we can all row in the same direction. And I'm a firm believer of the saying many hands make light work. And so I just have a minor suggestion that I recently had a visit at the Molina Hogue Center. And a lot of the nonprofits in the facility are also based in Irvine or have offices in Irvine. And so if we can open it up to nonprofits that also serve Irvine residents, not just the ones that are based in Irvine, I think it will be a great opportunity for people to come and help Irvine residents. Thank you for that comment. Did you wish to respond, councilmember Meyer? We just want to hold that thought. Absolutely. The thought of this at the Militahogue Foundation, which houses 30 to 40 different nonprofits. They're all over Orange County, such as Choc, United Way. Many other organizations helped me grow OCE, they're based everywhere, but they do service Irvine. So we would definitely want to include not just Irvine-based nonprofits, we would like to include everyone that serves everyone across the region as well. All right, at this time we'll turn to public comment. Oh, I'm sorry. Councilmember Goh. Good question. In terms of the week, are we looking to move around the different districts in Irvine or do you think it's mostly in one or two locations? Well, I would like to leave that up to the staff, but the thought would be having it in your district just because of the facilities there and it could be a gathering point. But that would be really up to the city manager and the staff to determine which location that would be. No, that's fine. And also another comment would be see if we can try to get UC Irvine involved as well. As far as the business school, the law school, and the different avenues over there, I know they're quite a bit of nonprofits, initiatives. Also, thank you. Well, we're gonna let me direct a question to council member. Do you have in mind, ideally, or otherwise, when the nonprofit week, the inaugural nonprofit week, would take place if everything, when according to, you know, staff study recommendations are further consideration and so forth? I think it would be based on staff's timeframe, maybe the end of June, if possible, but I really don't know how fast they can move on it. If it wound up being in the fall on staff's recommendation or whatever, that would be okay with you. Absolutely. I feel like we should just be here to tell them what we want to get done and they will get it done in their time frame. Excellent. All right. At this time, I'll turn to our city clerk. Would you please identify the public commenters and we'll hear them water to time. Thank you, Marif. I could call forward Ron Skolzding and E-Planet understrager. And we'll start with Mr. Skolzding. Welcome, Mr. Skolzding. Hello, Mary-Grinn. Good evening, Council. Thanks for your time. Just wanted to show my tremendous support for a nonprofit week as a founder of a nonprofit myself. It's really, really difficult to get it off the ground, nowhere you're going. And even if you get it started to get any support, any grants, volunteers, all of the above. And so to have a week like this that could potentially highlight local nonprofit organizations will be huge and tremendous. There's a lot of residents out there that are looking to give back to the community and they don't know where to start. And a nonprofit organization is a great place to start. And it could literally be anything. It doesn't have to be rocket ships. It could be literally a bunch of people getting together to fight for the cause of dog parks All kinds of interesting things that people may never even know and so I am in huge support for this That's it. Thank you. Thank you for your comments You planet thunderstorm So part of my scandal involves when China meld see through Taiwan shipping company. Kitty Perry went to India, talked about this, somebody started this thing, didn't work out there as a border conflict. I went to Chinese consulate, made a suggestion. Countries have the option for two slots. One is the government individual. They stopped biting at the border. They mailed sea through Taiwan and only saw that I have it's Taiwan thunderstorm strike. So this sounds great. I mean I know I have political leverage here. I mean right it's like you guys don't go to jail if you guys support this organization. I'll work with that you know I don't know what's going on. And they talked about maybe when. Well if it's a whole week I wanted to do a global holiday on both equinoxes. And so if we had like a whole week, the equinox is different times, different years, and it could be like maybe the first for the end where we have that. So if you guys like were interested in supporting that, I don't have anything done yet. I mean, I can't, my emails don't go through all kinds of problems. But like what that guy said, you know, people are interested in doing, That's what the world citizens' organizations they should do. Be like, oh, just all kinds of things. I mean, anything you think about people that are doing things like public comments and Things like nonprofit organizations mixing those together. That's only like one fraction of what a worldwide systems organization Could do in America other countries will be more restrictive but because we but because we have that rule, it can go down anywhere. And now China will go with it. That's why a lot of countries will be pressured into it. It can be go anywhere. So we're actually talking about a really practical possibility of real peace like really soon. And I just don't think that's a fantasy. I think more of a fantasy is getting the corruption in America results that I can do something like that. But I think you guys should keep that in mind. Thank you for your comments. Our next speaker is Eric Nishanian. Mr. Nishanian, unmute your mic. Thank you very much council members Mayor Agrin. I'm opposed to this first because of sustainability and only continues as long as vice mayor Maynay has power our sits on the dius I'll give you an example of the innovation council under Mayor Kong that's no no longer operating. There's also a tech week. I thought tech week was in April. I haven't heard anything about it. And again, this comes down to failing to censor people because, you know, Vice Mayor James My, he's got three foundations, three, three charities. Let me proceed that by saying, I've created charities 501C3 here in Irvine and Orange County for free. I interned at Legal Aid in Orange County 30 years ago. My firm provides pro phone or services to human options and volunteers there. So going back to Jay's mind, feeling to censor him. He's got three foundations in testing. One of them is the Jay's My Foundation, which he did not list on the 700, form 700, and one of those foundations that I'm aware of have paid their business licenses in testing is encouraging a nonprofit sharing or vying not to pay their business license taxes. And rather than censor him and let the public know that this kind of conduct is not actually a legal under our ordinance or some misdemeanor for not paying a business license. It's not commendable conduct and it should not be followed. You're getting a platform to make it seem like he's doing something good for the community. Look, if the not-profits could do this amongst themselves that they want to promote more nonprofits, they don't need the city of Irvine to do it. And that for certainly vice mayor, it might not be the spokesperson for that, as a representative of the city. When he cannot pay his business license taxes for his own foundations are with all of them on the 700s. So, you know, this is kind of like, you know, look at all the goods that I'm doing. But it's not really getting to the heart of the matter that this person should not be representing the city in non-profit matters when he can't even keep his own business with not-profits kosher. Thank you. Mr. Mayor, we have one more pop into the queue. If that's okay with you, they'd get 90 seconds. All right. Please go ahead. Thank you. Our next speaker is I am. I am. You may unmute your mic. You have 90 seconds. And this will be our last speaker. Sorry. Hit the button. May to join. But I just wanted to say as a fantastic idea. I would really love to see that this is scheduled at a time though that is more accessible for people. A lot of these city events and activities tend to be scheduled during business hours or school hours. I work in an industry where I see the benefit directly of volunteers and I just can't. I can't express enough how much I'm in support of this as a community member. Thank you. Thank you for your comments. And that is all there. That concludes public comment on this matter. There is a motion before us to council members wish to comment on the motion. If not with the clerk, restate the motion and then we will vote. Sure. The motion is to direct the city manager to work toward the development of an inaugural Irvine nonprofit week program to take place at some point in 2025. All right, with that motion now properly before us with the clerk, please call the roll. Council member Carol. Yes, council member go. Yes, council member Lou. Yes, Council member Trezeater. Yes, vice mayor Mai. Yes, Mayor Agrin. Yes, carry 60. Very well. Itemeter. Yes. Vice Mayor Maye. Yes. Mayor Aigren. Yes. Carri6-0. Very well. Item 5.1 having been considered and acted upon. We moved to item 5.2. Would the clerk please identify this item by subject and title. Fourth of July, celebration of the. Thank you. I see that we have staff here on this item. Let me just say once again, those who wish to participate electronically should now raise their hand so they can be admitted to the speakers queue. Having said that, do we have any speakers who have signed up yet? We do, Mayor. We have three in person, one on Zoom. Excellent. All right. We'll take staff presentation at this time. Well, actually, I should have probably called on Council Member and Vice Mayor I'm going to go to the next slide. Well, actually I should have probably called on council member and vice mayor. Did you wish to say anything by way of introduction or should we just turn to staff? No mayor. Please turn to staff. All right. Welcome. Wonderful. Good evening, Marin City Council. My name is Melissa Haley. I'm the Director of Communications and Engagement. And with me this evening is Community Services Superintendent Curiennally. On February 25th, the City Council unanimously directed staff to assess a Fourth of July celebratory event and return in 30 days with an update to include potential options. Staff explored several event possibilities, considering various themes, venues, entertainment options, and logistical arrangements for the event. City staff believes that with support and resources, the event can provide an engaging and festive experience that will foster community spirit, celebrate civic pride, and offer an inclusive opportunity for residents and visitors alike to gather and commemorate Independence Day. Recognizing the importance and significance of such celebrations for our community, staff quickly move forward and engaged in productive conversations with several community partners, including the Woodbridge Village Association and Pacific Symphony, to evaluate feasible options given the condensed timeline. With the limited planning window, staff identified the great park as the optimal venue for the event location. The location provides the necessary infrastructure and capacity to host a large-scale family-friendly celebration. In conversations with our partners at Pacific Symphony, they are aligned with the opportunity to create an enhanced fireworks experience. I did want to note that the conversations with the Woodbridge Village Association were highly collaborative and promising, and we are going to look to the 2026 calendar year for partnership efforts, as it affords us the additional lead time for proper planning and collaboration, and it will also be their 50th anniversary, as well as the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. As part of the event at the Great Park, staff were proposing a community parade where families are invited to bike, roll, or scoot along the Great Park timeline in Patriotic Attire. A bike and decorating contest will add a fun interactive element. Family games and activities engaging attractions will be available for all ages such as craft stations, lawn games, balloon and carousel rides and and themed photo backdrops. Live entertainment and dancing at Hanger 244. Sorry. Performance is by live bands, DJs, and a dance floor to create an energetic festive environment. Food and beverage options in addition to inviting attendees to pack a picnic, the event will offer a selection of food trucks and food opportunities with a variety of snacks, meals, and sweet treats to enhance that celebration. And finally, a fireworks and or drone show as the evening will conclude with one or both providing a spectacular conclusion to the celebration. Additionally, guests will have the opportunity to purchase separate tickets for a live performance by Pacific Symphony at Great Park Live, adding another layer of entertainment to the event. Based on research and planning efforts to date, staff estimates that the event will range from $200,000 to $250,000, and expense not previously included in the fiscal year 2325 adopted budget. An event at the $200,000 range would include a aerial fireworks show. Should there be an interest in expanding the celebration to feature both fireworks and a drone light show, the estimated budget would increase to approximately $250,000. This estimate accounts for general operations, logistics, programming, staffing, and marketing and reflects the increased costs associated with holiday staffing rates. General fund savings up to $250,000 from the fiscal year 2325 budget could be identified to fund and support this Fourth of July celebratory event. To advance the planning and execution of the event, staff will focus on developing event branding and marketing materials, finalizing programming and logistics, preparing a detailed event budget and seeking sponsorship opportunities to offset the costs. The recommended action before you this evening was to receive an update from staff and to approve a budget of up to $250,000 of fiscal year 2325 general fund savings for the implementation of a 4th of July event. This concludes my presentation and we're available for any questions you may have. Thank you. Are there any questions of staff at this time? Councilmember and Vice Mayor James Mye. Thank you staff for that presentation. I just had two comments. One is are we able to set something up to welcome sponsorships now? It just in talking with the community who have several entities that would like to sponsor already They were like a point of contact or maybe a form something online if you'd like a sponsorship packages For example Paris Baguette, which is located. I believe, in Costa Mesa with multiple offices here or multiple retail locations here in the city of Irvine along with City of Hope and other entities. They're very interested in sponsoring. So if we could set something up ASAP for that because I know we're on a time crunch as well that would be great. Absolutely. We're happy to be building a sponsorship package similar to we do for other large- scale events and would put this information out fast and furious. Thank you. Thank you. Unless there are further comments or questions of staff will turn to public comment at this time. Thank you, Marif. I could call forward Doug Elliott, Susan Sayer and Alan Myerson. And we'll start with Doug Elliott. Welcome Mr. Elliott. Thank you, Mayor, and good evening. I will say as I always try to, my name is Doug Elliott, and I'm a member of the Community Services Commission. As usual I'm only speaking for myself but tonight I'll be speaking in the words of Thomas Jefferson. In Congress July 4th 1776 the unanimous declaration of the 13 United States of America. When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bonds which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature's God enable them. A decent respect for the opinions of mankind requires that they declare the causes which impel their separation. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are doubted by their creator with certain uneelionable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Just to hear these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the government. That when any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it. And to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form as to them shall seem most likely to affect their safety and happiness. Prudence indeed will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes. And accordingly, all experience has shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evil areils are sufferable, than to write themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations pursuing inevitably the same object, events is a design to reduce them under absolute despotism. It is their right. It is their duty to throw off such government and to provide such new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient's sufferance of these colonies and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former system of government. To be continued by Susan and I thank you. Thank you. Susan Sayer? Hi, good evening. My name is Susan Sayer, and I'm an Irvine resident. In my opinion, Irvine should reserve the extravagant July 4th celebration for next year, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which is the basis for the creation of our country, the United States of America, I'll now continue reading from the Declaration of Independence, which lists the grievances, which constitute the reasons for its creation. The history of the present king of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and I can't pronounce it as a bit about any way. You're surpassing. You're surpassing. You're surpassing. You're surpassing. You're surpassing. You're surpassing. You're surpassing. You're surpassing. You're surpass these estates to prove this, the facts be submitted to a candid world. He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good. He has refused to pass other laws for accommodation of large districts of people. He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states for that purpose, obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners, refusing to pass others to encourage their migration hither and raising the conditions of new appropriations of lands. He has obstructed the administration of justice by refusing his ascent to laws for establishing judiciary powers. He has made judges dependent on his will alone for the tenure of their offices and their amount and payment of their salaries. He has erected a multitude of new offices and sent hitherto swarms of officers to harass our people and he doubt their substance. He has been cutting off our trade with all parts of the world. He has imposed taxes on us without our consent.'s deprived us in many cases of the benefit of trial by jury for transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses, for taking away our charters, the ballasting our most valuable laws and altering of fundamentally the forms of of our government for suspending our own legislatures and declaring themselves invested with powers to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever. He has excited domestic insurrections among us next is Alan Myerson. Thank you for your readings. Alan Myerson. And I'll just continue Alan Myerson. In every stage of these oppressions, we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms. Our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the rule over a free people. Nor have we been wanting and attentions for our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to an extend an unwarrant bold jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our immigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consign, new way to itty. We must therefore acquiesce in the necessity which denounces our separation and hold them as we hold the rest of mankind, enemies in war, in peace, friends. We therefore, the representatives of the United States of America. In General Congress, assembled, appealing to the supreme judge of the world for the rest of the two of our intentions, due in the name and by authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly, publish, and declare that these United colonies are and are right ought to be free in independent states and that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British Crown and to Donald Trump and that all political connection between them and the state of Great Britain is in ought to be totally dissolved and that as free and independent states they have will full power to love a war, conclude peace, contract the alliances, establish commerce, and do all other acts in things which independent states may have right to do. And for support of this declaration with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor. While those are some words, it's amazing to me when I read this for the first time in my life, the full document, how much of it can be applied right now in this country. It's pretty amazing when you think about it. Yeah, that's all I want to say about that. I want to also say forget the extra fireworks. Just go with the drone show. I appreciate Council Member Traciter's support of a drone show. We don't need more pollution in the air. What the Pacific Symphony is going to do for fireworks is fantastic. Don't spend more money for more fireworks. Spend money on the drones. Thank you. Thank you for your comment. Thanks to all three of you for that reading. Our next speaker is Eric Nishanian, Mr. Nishanian. You may unmute your mic. Thank you, council members, Mayor Aigren. I'm opposed to this agenda item, not because I don't like the fourth July, or I'm not a proud American. I like the fourth of July. I love America. But I noticed that on March 17th, the Finance Committee did not have a meeting. And I noticed that there's no committee recommendations one way or another regarding this agenda item. And in light of it being expedited, certainly there should be more eyeballs on it, rather than less. And I'm surprised that Don Gellers not here to speak to this. And I'm surprised that none of the council members are speaking to this either. Why have these council committees, if they're not being used or employed to look over these things. That's all. Thank you. That concludes our comments or is there another one? We have two more that popped in a little bit late. All right. The whole you hold? We'll be 90 seconds each. Is that correct? Correct. Go right ahead. Thank you. Our next speaker is Don Geller. Mr. Geller, you may unmute your mic. You have 90 seconds. Yes, here I am. Good evening, Mayor. Vice Mayor and Council members. Don Geller here, long time resident of Burvine. the Finance Commission. The purpose of the Finance Commission is to give advice to the City Council regarding revenue and expenditures and how it affects our city's budget. So as chair of the Finance Commission, I am concerned about rushing this through and pulling a quarter million dollars from our 2025 budget for a 4th of July celebration that was not previously planned for. I think I can speak for my fellow commissioners that whenever possible changes in our budgeted expenses should always flow through the commission. My recommendation would be to postpone this new event until next year so we can build this expense into the city's budget. Staff is currently working on the upcoming budget so this is good timing. This will also allow additional time to plan and coordinate this fantastic ongoing event. It would give more time to promote the event so we can get commercial vendors to help offset some or all of the expenses. I would like to remind the council that there are currently two firework shows in our city that our residents can attend for this year. And thank you for your consideration. The Finance Commission will look forward to approving this in the 2527 budget. Have a very good evening. Thank you. Thank you for your comments. Next. Our next speaker is Jason Gargfield. Jason, you're my, you're my, you're 90 seconds. Hey, just popping back in to say that I fully support this. You know, there's not a lot in Irvine that is kind of a citywide community building event. And so I'd like to say that if there's anything worth bringing urbanians together, it is the Fourth of July and then stay and love for this country. I do respect those who are concerned with fiscal responsibility and the logistics of it, but I believe those are hurdles to be overcome and hardly instrumentable to the hosting of this event. So yeah, that's all and I look forward to coming this summer. And that is all mayor. Thank you If your comments. That concludes public comment. Do we have a motion in front of us? No mayor. Would you wish to make a motion at this time council member Mai? Yes, I'd like to make a motion to prove up to $250,000 of the fiscal year 2023-25 general fund savings for the implementation of a July 4th event second been moved and seconded comments. Councilmember Liu. I also have concerns about the price. And also as a former finance commissioner, I agree with Chair Geller about whether this should have been reviewed by Finance Commission. Having said that, obviously I'm not going to post a celebration for further July, but you know, do we really have enough time? I mean, City staff already has a lot on their plate and they're also planning a belief sickle is happening. because cyclle with ample time we actually are able to have plans on what kind of a sponsorship package, how much money we're projected to bring in and how much the city is going to actually pay out a pocket. So I was hoping that we'll be able to have that kind of time. But really because of the unfortunate timing, this is creating a concern. And I want to echo what Mr. Meison had expressed about having drones in, we already have fireworks, so maybe additional fire works would not be necessary, and that could maybe bring down some of the expenses. That was evident from the staff report that if they went with just drones it would be less. Obviously. Councilmember Mai did you wish to... Well, let me offer my comment at this time. I think we should move forward with this. It seems kind of obvious to me that over time the great park will be not just the transcendent venue for fourth of July celebrations. But... not just the transcendent venue for Fourth of July celebrations, but not just for the benefit of Irvine, but for all of Orange County. It is the Orange County great park. It seems to me that, particularly now that we have a resident orchestra that has its own pretty dramatic concert and fireworks associated with it on the 4th of July. And the great park generally accommodates a lot of people on the 4th of July, who are there to enjoy the park. I think this will grow organically over time, but we can kind of super charge it for this year. And I think we can accommodate the concerns that are expressed about costs. I think part of the staff review of this matter ought to be include taking it to the Finance commission and also giving a candid assessment of how much in the way of community and corporate sponsorship might be involved. To tell you the truth, I can't imagine for the asking that we couldn't cover all the costs. They're in the $200,000 range. That's relatively minor considering the magnitude of the event associated with it and not was standing previously expressed concerns by Mr. Dogg Elliott, which I share to some extent about commercializing and corporatizing these kinds of events. The fact of the matter is I would hope the Fourth of July is something where we could all come together. Corporations, small businesses, individuals, groups of people in celebration of the importance of this event and what it stands for. I just think this is an opportunity that we shouldn't forego. So I'm supportive of the motion. I do want to ask our city manager, do you see any problem with bringing this in front of the Finance Commission asking for their advice and review of what it is that you are developing or for that matter the Community Services Commission that might offer some useful ideas as well as a critique as we go along. Is that problematic for you? No, that wouldn't be problematic. I think we were wanting to come back get some council direction quickly on whether or not we should engage an effort to try to establish a fourth of July event this year given that we're into the end of March already if the direction is to move forward. We certainly will and are happy to engage with the finance commission and the community services commission solicits an input from both of those bodies. Regarding the funding for the event and the time frame we're open to the council's feedback. What I can tell you though is the work that Melissa and her team did included an assessment of where we currently stand in the current fiscal year. We are projected to run a healthy surplus for the current fiscal year. And so the $250,000 allocation from this year's budget is available if the council would like to make that expense. We certainly could delay also and not move forward until after talking to all the commissions That would create I think complications for the staff and delivering the program Which is really I think the reason we're here back before the council right now based on the council's direction last month Again based on what the council does this evening the direction is to move forward. We're engage with our commissions during the next couple of months as we work to pull it together. If the decision is made to delay until next year, we will also engage as we work through the budget process moving forward. Excellent. So if this motion were to be adopted, you would come back to us when with a report of If that motion is adopted I would interpret the motion is saying move forward with the event this year We would engage all efforts to begin producing the event once we have the initial plan together We'll go and solicit feedback from finance and community services commission will certainly keep the council in the loop. But ultimately it would be direction of the council to produce the event and deliver a July 4th coordinated celebration at the Great Park as Melissa and the team have described. All right. That gives me a better understanding of how we would operationalize the motion or it to pass. Any further comments on the motion? I see. Did you request? I was just going to ask Vice Mayor if we could friendly amendment to just work through the commissions in a receiving file but it sounds like City Manager Chies going to do that so that was that that's wonderful and I think this some really nice robust not just finance but on the parks and recreation side on the community service side I think it's some great ideas will come out of that so if that's part of it that's's great. Really appreciate it. Thanks, Mayor. Bill, Councilmember Mai, Councilmember Lut, did you want to be recognized? Well, you looked like you did. Councilmember Mai is requested here. Do you want to be heard? No. So I was just wondering if it's received and filed and if they're not really doing anything then there's really no point going through it unless we are allowing them to see where the motion is. There's a motion now that provides direction. I think that motion is properly in front of us. Councilmember Mai, I'll turn to you. I just wanted to add, I fully believe that we're going to have more than enough sponsorships and interest from local businesses small and large that will be a part of this. I just wanted to add that that people are very excited about this. And just like Mary Agrin said, there's going to be a lot of people that this is a small ask of many of the businesses in Irvine We have 20,000 business licenses in Irvine so small and large I think a lot of people that I've spoken to already have already expressed Express interest to the point where they say where where do we give the money to so just get ready to accept it All right Anything further There being no further comment from my colleagues. We have a motion properly before us. Would the clerk please call the roll. Council member Carroll. Yes. Council member Go. Yes. Council member Lou. With reservation yes. Council member procedure. Yes. Vice Mayor Maye. Yes. Mayor Agrim. Yes. Carry 6-0. Excellent. We move on now to the next item item 5.3. Would the clerk please identify this item by subject and title. Establishment of design build and progressive design build contract procurement procedures. All right. At this time, one more time, those who wish to be participating with us electronically, please raise your hands. You can be admitted to the queue. We'll take public comment shortly. Right now we'll turn to our city staff. Please introduce yourself and tell us what's in your presentation. We'll do a good evening mayor and council. It's my pleasure, Luis Estivez, your acting director of public works and sustainability. It's my pleasure this evening to present to you a proposed ordinance establishing and implementing some new alternative public works project delivery methods. The City uses a traditional and, or also a conventional methodology to deliver public projects, capital improvement projects. It's typically known as the design bid build method. The process starts with the project concepts developed for a project. We will then engage the services of a design engineer, receive proposals from them, the council would award a design contract, the design team then moves forward and prepares a full plan, specifications and estimates for the project. The project then goes out to a public bid. The contract is then awarded by the city council to the lowest bidder and then of course then the project moves forward into the construction phase. There are some advantages to this traditional method of delivering projects. It's completely transparent and objective process. And really the metric is that the lowest bid wins the contract. And it also provides a city with complete control over the project design elements and performance standards. So the construction documents that we prepare, the technical specifications, basically take the contractor step by step by step through the process and deliver the project matching specifically exactly what the city is looking for. Of course, the drawbacks to that is that the low bid contractor is not always the best qualified or the most experienced. The delivery timeline for projects is also linear. There's very limited opportunities to sort of stagger the design and the permitting process and the construction activities. The process starts from A to E and the first step has to finish before the next step can begin so that of course takes longer, takes more time to deliver projects as a result of that. It doesn't allow for any kind of collaboration really between the designer and the contractor and the city, those are all separate entities. It's all based off of the formal design that the city's designer prepares and that the contractor bids on. And this can sometimes lead to disputes and construction claims when you have a contractor that for instance misinterpreted the plans or perhaps there's an issue with the plans that the designer allowed to get through there. And so fortunately that does sometimes result in some claims in construction disputes that can result in higher project costs ultimately. An alternative method to deliver projects is called the design build process and that's where the designer and the builder are actually one joint entity. The process starts fairly similar. You have a concept of the project. You then procure a design team to provide some preliminary engineering, typically up to the 30% complete process. And then at that point, you undertake a pre-qualification process. So if you have a project that's particularly complicated or fairly unique and you need to hire a contractor with a certain set of skills, you go through a pre-qualification process to ensure that only those contractors with that specific skill set or experience can participate in the bid process. At that point you would then solicit proposals and negotiate proposals from the contractors and the design build teams on your short list. And then you could award a contract based on, also on qualification, cost is also a factor as well, but you're really awarding the contract based on qualifications, not the lowest bid. And a side benefit to that is that when you award the contract, you're awarding it for a guaranteed maximum price. So when you sit down with a design build entity, the designer and the contractor are able to collaborate on the most efficient and effective ways to design and deliver the project. And in doing so, they're able then to provide you with a guaranteed maximum price. So we'll deliver this project everything contained within these plans for this set price. If there's any particular cost overruns or other issues related to the project those are costs ultimately that the design build entity have to incur. And then of course with that team you move into the final design process and then as soon as that process is complete or most of it is complete they can actually then begin construction in the different phases thereof. The advantages to this method is again you're especially if it's a project with particular skills that are needed qualifications you're awarding the contract based on qualifications as well as cost but you're also afforded the opportunity now to stagger the design process and the construction process thereby speeding up the timeline to deliver the project and that is of course through a collaborative process with the city of the design builder entity. Then of course any design issues, any problems with the design package or the construction that's really the design builder's responsibility then to remedy because they've given you a guaranteed maximum price. The selection process is not as straightforward as the low bid selection. There is some subjectivity there, whereas the low bid process is very objective. It's the lowest figure wins. The specifications are not as comprehensive, so you do end up losing some control to the design builder, whereas the traditional method where most of the city's projects are delivered provides maximum control to the city in terms of the outcomes. And then sometimes, not all the times, but sometimes you'll have design teams that would rather provide a full design package and working with the contractor as opposed to just providing the 30% bridging document. So you may have some trouble sometimes finding design teams that want to participate in that process. And lastly, the last alternative that we've identified here is the progressive design build, design build methodology. It follows the same process as the design build methodology. However, in this particular instance, if you're not able to come to terms with the highest ranked contractor design build entity that you've been working with, it provides you sort of an off ramp at that point. You can then break away from negotiations with that particular team and then open up negotiations with a new team. Whereas with the design build methodology, you really have to start the process from the very beginning. So you have to go back and reissue new qualification documents and pre-qualify a list of new contractors and design build firms. Here you're allowed to basically go back to the existing list, saving you some time and to open up negotiations with a new team and to negotiate with that team into your arrive at terms. This process also provides, or this methodology also provides a guaranteed maximum contract price as well. So it certainly helps the city of the agency control construction costs in that way. Again, the advantages and drawbacks are similar. Again, the big advantage to using the progressive design build method is that it allows you that opportunity if negotiations fail with the first team that you work with you could go to the list and start negotiations with the second team. These two methodologies are now allowed under the public California public contract code These particular sections noted here. It does allow for cities to award these projects in excess of $1 million for each project. And then for projects that exceed $5 million, agencies are allowed to award up to 10 of these contracts for projects through January 1, 2030 2030. And this is applicable to all public works projects and we are required to report any of these types of contracts and arrangements to the state as well. The typical projects, as I mentioned before, the vast majority of our projects and local government projects are the traditional design bid build process. But when we have projects that are particularly time sensitive, that there are time time frames that need to be met, whether it's grant related or other factors that play, projects that are sufficiently complex or unique in design and construction. And then those projects that can benefit the most from new innovations, whether it's new materials, methods, things of that nature. This is the kind of project that you would want to use this kind of methodology on, gives you the greatest amount of flexibility. We have some notable projects here that have been delivered in California through this type of methodology. And here in Irvine, we think that there are certainly some great part projects that we could utilize this methodology on as well, library facilities, any community health and wellness facilities that we make instructing the future as well as aquatic centers, pedestrian bicycle bridges, and freeway ramps and interchanges in particular as well because there's so many different agencies that you have to work with and kind of work through. And a lot of those projects are many many years in the making as a result of that. So another good candidate project to use is methodology on. If adopted by council after the second reading on April 8th, the team will need to develop a handful of new documents in consultation with the city attorney's office to have specific RFQ requests for qualification templates develop for this specific contract language developed for these kinds of projects and we would have those documents on the shelf frees in the future. At this moment, we don't have any projects right now that we would suggest using this methodology on. However, it does provide another tool in our toolbox for us to be able to deliver projects faster and more efficiently. Tonight's recommendation essentially is to adopt the ordinance as presented to incorporate the design build and progressive design build construction methodologies into our municipal code both under chapter four within design build projects and chapter four point seven progressive design build projects. And that concludes my presentation this evening. I'd going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. following what this is. Let me just try to ask you a couple of questions, and then I had a chance to read all this. There's no public comment, there's so nobody's following what this is. Let me just try to ask you a couple of questions, and then I'm going to suggest, and very quickly suggest what I think we should do, and then I'm going to turn my microphone off so we can keep going because we have a million other items. This was put on by staff, not by, it's a council business, but the staff put it on. I don't want to appear, I think, agendized this. So, to understand the limitation is $4,000 correct under the city charter right now or wherever it's set up and if we go to progressive time when it goes to alex progressive design build your authority goes staff goes to a million right. No mayor council any project above $2,000220,000 has to go to a formal bid process. Right. In terms of awarding contracts that believe anything over a million dollars would have to be brought forward to the city council for its consideration and approval. So just to just to just boil it down, you're requesting that the city council give you additional authority from what to what? The additional authority is to create a framework from which we can, rather than using a traditional bid methodology, is to go through a qualifications-based analysis. The dollar figures are that it has to be, by state law, the projects that qualify are above essentially a million dollars, and then you're allowed to do 10 projects in excess of five million dollars. Those dollar figures would still require the council's approval. So if it was a five million dollar project, a 10 million dollar project, the city council would still have to approve that. The benefit to the city is that we can secure a contract with a contractor based on their qualifications, not by the lowest bid receipt. And the detriment to the five of us up here is we lose our decision making process up to that point. If I may interject, we're not. I apologize, council member. It wasn't clear The staff isn't looking for any additional authority or change in authorizations. All existing authorizations would be maintained the same. We're looking for Council direction on whether it would be okay to have a new contracting method. The current way that we contract, you have to first completely design the project, then go out to bid and then select the lowest bid contractor for the particular project. We're looking for a proposed update to the municipal code that allows us to change the bidding process where instead of having to design everything fully and then bid it, you can hire a designer and contractor together so that there's a maximum price established up front. The process and the approval thresholds, nothing is looking to be changed there. It's an additional procurement method through which, for larger capital projects, the real benefit is you can save some time and usually the costs are a little bit more competitive where the process allows you to bid the project out differently. So there's no change in any of the thresholds or approval amounts only a process change as it relates to how we procure a contractor. I just think from my perspective just trying to watch all this stuff go by is we're like the busiest city in the state of California, maybe the nation that my thinking would be and I'm done and appreciate that same manager, that we would put into this, the recommended motion from staff, subtype of not just orally telling, hey, let us know when you're going to go now, progressive design bill, but alert us formally in some manner. So, if we can incorporate that, I mean, I'm happy to make that motion to incorporate in the ordinance that the council will be alerted before staff decides to elect the The progressive design build route and I think that probably gets you guys where you want to go for me at least it gets me Feeling more comfortable that I'll have a little more visibility and you know We can kind of track it our staffs can track it we can interface better with you guys and your team and public works team Absolutely if you guys yeah,, yeah. Okay. Thank you, Mary. Appreciate that. I don't believe there's any concern with that. In fact, we can even before starting a progressive design build process seek authorization before engaging that process from the council, it really is just a procurement method that speeds up project delivery and allows us to save some money. Well, I just want to say I do appreciate this. And again, I wanted to say that presentation was pretty detailed. That was pretty meaty. So thank you. I had appreciate this. And again, I wanted to say that presentation was pretty detailed. That was pretty meaty. So thank you. I had some questions from the staff report, and I think the presentation, the slide deck, really dialed it in for me. So I just want to thank you. I know you're acting. I know you're in term. But that was a full-time position report, right there. So thank you. That wasn't easy. I've been up here a long time listening to staff reports and some of them are not easy and that was way up there. So thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Council Member Carroll. I'll turn to Council Member Traceeater at this time. Thank you. Yes, I really appreciate this presentation. And I can understand the need for streamlining this process. I do have a question just a little bit about the procedure. So, would this mean if we pass this, we would reach out to certain contractors and invite them to be the design builders or is there going to be like a formal bidding process at any point? Yes, it would be formal to the extent that we would put out a call for proposals. And so it would be open to any and all design build firms that are interested in the particular project that we're looking at. And then they would have a due date and winces submit their proposal and then the staff would review the proposal much in the same way that we would review a request for proposal at RFP process. So it would be noticed publicly and so everybody in the contracting and the design community would see it and be able to propose on it. Okay, thank you. So then what happens when you're evaluating the bids? It seems like you're saying that now we go with the lowest cost bid And that makes sense. But how will you evaluate those bids if we pass this? the the evaluation process is focused initially just on the qualifications of the firm and once a a The top qualified firm the entity has been identified Then that's when you start opening discussions about the cost. And so you will have up to that point is about a 30% preliminary project study report that they'll be able to review and understand what it is that we're after. And they'll be able to propose a price. And it's a guarantee maximum price. And then the city can evaluate that and go back and forth and negotiate that price until we come to terms. Okay, and how do you decide the other qualifications other than price-see? It's going to vary product to projects. So projects, if you've got a project that has, you know, particularly unique building materials and methodologies you'll want to make sure that you're talking to firms that have some experience with that So they'll have to provide References and sample projects similar projects that they've worked on things that we could go out and see in the field We could talk to those agencies as well and see how those contractors performed As well see there's any issues or problems with that So it's really going to be a matter of show us what you've done previously and we'll take a look to see for ourselves the quality and the veracity of their work. Okay, thank you. Yeah, I appreciate the need for this and it certainly is tempting. From my perspective, it seems like it would reduce the transparency of this process and especially with the great park, we have hundreds of millions of dollars going into these projects and I just want to make sure that we have some oversight and make sure that we have a very clear method by which we're evaluating the bids But I do understand why this is, this could be helpful, I'll just say thank you. Thank you councilmember Trisita councilmember Liu. Thank you Mayor. Just a quick concern. I understand that we need to streamline it with all the construction going on. All the projects going on that the great park and I appreciate you guys having this thoughtful process. But my only concern is is it going to be, would we unfairly limit the opportunity for smaller firms that are doing construction or design? Or are we hoping that maybe some of them can partner up in this method? Is that a possibility? That is a possibility. Some could also, instead of being the general contractor serve as a subcontractor and some kind of specialty capacity. But we're talking about projects that are really next level and complicated and stuff that you don't build very often. And so there's only a handful of companies out there that do these kinds of projects. But that's not to say that a lot of the smaller firms could not participate in some capacity as well. Thank you for thinking about that. Thank you, Councilmember Liu. Do we have public comments at this time? Thank you, Mayor. We do have one request to speak via Zoom from JB. JB, you'll be, unmute your mic. Hello, Jake and Iris. the . . . . . . . . . Yeah, I'll go ahead and make a motion. Council Member Carroll. I apologize. Thank you, Mayor. Yeah, I would respectfully make the motion. Just again, further line that we just, that we mentioned earlier, that staff's recommendation with the addition of the, just, a learning of the council, which can just be, you know, by email city manager to us all, that staffs thought about a process in this particular project, a project so and so, and that we've decided, this we're gonna, you know, do the progressive design build, which doesn't seem to interfere with public works and city manager office goals in proposing this. That would be a lot more. That would be good. Let me just make a suggestion that staff will take that as instruction direction. But what we really need is a motion to introduce, I will have first reading. Are you ready to read it? We'll have to say a turn to read that for us, but I would like to introduce to that. Thank you, Mayor. All right. And I'll read the title of the ordinance. It's an ordinance of the City Council, the City of Irvine, California, amending section 6-10-102 of chapter one and 6-10-201, and 6-10-215 of chapter two, Division 10 of Title VI of the Irvine Municipal Code to chapters four and four point seven of part three of division two of the public contract code. Is that a motion? I would move that accordingly. Thank you. Councilmember Carroll moves it. I'll second it. Any further council discussion? There be none with the court please call the roll. Councilmember Carroll. Yes. Councilmember Goal. Yes. Councilmember Lou. Yes. Councilmember Traceter. No. Vice Mayor Mai. Yes. Mayor Eagren. Yes. Currie's five to one with Councilmember Traceter voting no. Thank you. That takes us to item 5.4. Would the clerk please identify this business item by subject and Title. Consideration of a request by Council members Liu and Go to discuss reviewing vehicle and pedestrian traffic control. Thank you to whom should I turn first? Council Member Go, Council Member Liu. Do you wish to be heard or do you want to just hear from staff? Let's start with the staff report, please. All right. I guess staff took a look at this and you can bring it before us now. Yes, good evening, Mayor Agrin and fellow city council members. My name is Wyatt Singh and I am the traffic engineering administrator within the city's public works and sustainability department. I'm here tonight to present on the topic of leading pedestrian interval as it relates to pedestrian and vehicular traffic control. pedestrian interval where LPI as it's known is a traffic signal timing tool aimed to improve the visibility of pedestrians within a marked crosswalk at signalized intersections. LPI is programmed to delay the green indication for corresponding vehicular traffic while providing the walk indication to pedestrians. The image on the right is an example of pedestrians observing the walk indication and entering the intersection while the green indication for vehicular traffic is provided later on or delayed, if you will. LPI needs to be thoughtfully implemented to avoid traffic congestion and or traffic safety related issues. Beginning in 2016 the city has piloted the implementation of LPI in the city of Irvine. The city is one of future stick to institute LPI's in the region with 25 locations currently featuring LPI at various crosswalks at set intersections. The map on the left shows the locations in the city where LPI has been implemented and are color coded by the year in which they were implemented. We have chosen to initially focus on implementing LPI at locations with dual right turn movements or two right turn lines and or unprotected left turn movements and unprotected left turn being defined as a movement in which there are no protected green arrow indications for said movement. Today LPI has been implemented on a case-by-case basis. Staff is currently in the process of retaining a consultant to develop uniform standards and guidelines for implementation at additional signalized intersections within the city. Standards and guidelines aim to consider the following items for implementation. Pedestrian and bicyclist volume, vehicular volume, collision data, signal operation characteristics such as corridor synchronization and left turn operation. We'd like to highlight the importance of the corridor synchronization as the implementation of LPI will impact the amount of time needed to service movements within an intersection. Additionally, we'll be considering and reviewing as part of our standardization and guidelines process intersection geometry such as the number of lanes on a roadway, as well as the crosswalk length, we'll also be reviewing existing turn restrictions, as well as proposed turn restrictions that come with the implementation of LPI in order to accommodate said improvement. System enhancements such as upgrades to pedestrian push buttons, add an intersection to act actuate the crosswalk walk and flash walk indications. And lastly, we'll be considering pedestrian line of site and visibility with respect to other multimodal users at an intersection. With that, staff is here to answer any questions that you all may have. Thank you for your time and the opportunity to present on this item. Thank you. Questions of staff. Councilmember Carroll. Oh, thank you, Mayor. And thank you very much for that presentation. You know. questions of staff Council member Carol. Oh, thank you, Mayor. And thank you very much for that presentation. I'm always amazed that as a former community services commission chairman and a former planning commissioner and a former planning commission vice chair and not being my land use, not being my background and public works, I'm always amazed at the level of effort and just the level of service that the city delivers to people and at the level of service that the community development team delivers to applicants seeking land use development and public works. to you guys and to your predecessors doing the six and a half years now, I'm just so fully impressed. I came from a place, a region called Long Island in New York. It did not have the benefit of master planning. It was a place that was really just kind of put together in a sense that it was very old in terms of Populations so the main roads that were near my house where I grew up were Native American trails that were paved over Basically and they didn't have the four you have a foresight of the the ability to set this May to look at all the ways that things are done in terms of left pocket turns and you know, this one particular road I'm thinking about, there was just no width for it. So you have a suicide lane, which I think you probably know is you have a one direction lane and another direction lane and you have a lane that shoots through the middle and these cars just try to navigate it and they crash into each other and try to make these road lefts. Irvine is the furthest thing from that that I could possibly imagine. I may not be a public works expert, and a circulation expert like you all, but I do know the difference having lived the first half of my life in a place with no planning and a place like Irvine which has amazing, amazing planning. That being said, it sounds to me like we don't need this agenda item and it is 8.40 pm and you're already doing LPI so I'm, I had no offense to my colleagues but there's nothing to vote on here. I just think you should keep my opinion is just keep doing what you're doing. You're doing great work. We don't need to do any more. No one needs to score any wins here and let's keep moving. This, this appears like a receiving file because you've been doing LP ICES in 2016? Yes, that's correct. OK, so I guess that that's... here and let's keep moving. This appears like a receiving file because you've been doing LPI since 2016? Yes, that's correct. Okay, so I guess that's our answer. I guess it'd be great if we put stuff on the agenda. Staff could tell the council members, hey, we've already done this. You know, because just, you know, that would probably, you know, help us all get home to our families. I don't mean that, just respectfully, I'm just saying, This is great. But if I want to know about LPI, I could just I could ask you guys for a briefing, right? So thanks. Thanks, Mayor. home to our families. I don't mean that, just, just, just, just, just, just, just, just, just, just, just, just, But if I want to know about LPI I could just I could ask you guys for a briefing right so thanks Thanks mayor Thank you councilmember My councilmember Liu and then councilmember traceter Yes, thank you mayor. I would like to also just kind of Understand what the motion would be on this because It seems like we're already doing this. We're doing LPI's already. There's 25 locations. What have those studies shown us? The only thing I see here that is interesting or of note is the cost for a consultant. Everything else is you guys are already doing it. I mean, I want to to see the has anyone thought of the traffic impact or the numbers on how much it would cost for a consultant for this. I mean you guys are already doing this so I'm not sure what this why this exists here and why are we talking about this when we are already conducting these studies. Let's turn to Councillor Member Liu, who might want to answer your question. So, just to answer some of those questions, does issue first came up from residents who approach us and asks us about putting in LPI's or actually some of them are just expressing concerns about crossing some of the intersections in the city that they feel that are not as pedestrian friendly. And so we brought this up with the city staff and we were, we actually had a meeting to consult the experts and we were told that there had already been 25 locations where we are experimenting or trying on these LPI intersections to increase pedestrian safety. And so for us the direction that after we talked to the city staff and got additional information direction, we're trying to give city staff is to maybe consider additional intersections with the focus on areas with students, heavy student traffic, and maybe with people with a higher area with seniors who are having issues crossing the street in time and are less visible. I personally have witnessed some seniors or people with disability on wheelchairs having a hard time when there's turns and they're in the crosswalk and it could get quite dangerous. So that is what we're hoping to achieve with this memo and with this motion. And I believe that was, we're not requesting any additional study. It's basically just we're asking if we'll be able to collect some data. And thank you for supplementing our meeting with additional data that really gave us a little more directions to form our motion today. Thank you. Let me just make my own comment and suggestion. There is no motion before us. I did read this with some interest. It sounds to me, you know, there's always this trade off, pedestrians versus motorists and making traffic flow much more difficult. It sounds to me like you don't have a sufficient record to put in front of us to say this is actually very much preferred intersection by intersection. Sounds like you're piloting these efforts various intersections, but I didn't see any data accompanying this report. My feeling is, all of this is very important and very interesting. It's the kind of thing where perhaps with the passage of a little time you can make a more fulsome presentation to to us later in the year and we can really have the benefit of your analysis as to how the trade-offs have worked out. I can imagine some places where this would make a lot of sense. I can also imagine some places where it wouldn't make sense. In fact, would be counterproductive, more dangerous. That being the case, those are my comments at this time, which kind of suggests this ought to be a receive and file. But with that, I'll turn to Council Member Traceeter, who's patiently waited, then Council Member Go, and one more time, Council Member Liu. Yeah, thank you. I appreciate your report, and thank you to Council Member Liu and Goh for agendizing this. It appears from the evidence that has been collected in other cities and countries that leading pedestrian intervals really do reduce harm to pedestrians and bicyclists. It seems like a fairly easy, straightforward way to make our city more friendly to pedestrians and bikers. I think that's something that in general we're hoping for for the city. And I can tell you there are two intersections near University High that could benefit from this right now. I live near University High and I've heard from many of my neighbors about the intersection of Benita Canyon and Turtle Ridge being particularly dangerous for kids and bikers also colder in campus. And in And in fact, they are getting pretty frustrated, and I'll see a little bit angry about the situation there. And I think that LPI's could help in this case. And probably many other cases, this is just a place near my home that I know about. So I'm definitely supportive of this. It is hard for me to see why one wouldn't support it. I'd love to hear from my other colleagues. Thank you. Council member Goh. Compassion. That's why this is on agenda. I know as a car culture, I'm guilty of it as well. I drive a lot and we get impatient. But I'm guilty of it as well. I drive a lot and we get impatient. But I'm also a cyclist. I'm a runner. I'm a pedestrian. I ride my scooter to commute. And to have that fear of getting run over or not being able to come home anymore is what here for and that. And as I see Chief Freeman up there, he can tell you, he's never going to hear from a motorist that lost three seconds. But what he does see is a cyclist that's either dead or can no longer walk because somebody couldn't wait three seconds. So to respond to my council colleagues, I just want us all to have some compassion as we use our roads every day because some of us are just trying to get home to our families and really it's important that we keep everyone safe and I understand the traffic is a concern and I'm not looking to make it so that every single light is implementing this because that won't make sense. But there are a lot of street corners and I have a list of 25 of them here that we have implemented and you commend the staff that we've started this since 2016. So we put this on there to shed light on this because my fellow commuters should not be dying in our streets. Thank you. Thank you councilmember Goe councilmember Yeah, oh, I think you were the final one councilmember lose name is off All right You're gonna say something further recognize. I saw it. I took it off because I thought you recognize me already. May I? Yes, Council Member. So just to address this that there is a 2022 state law that requires all Caltrans intersections to be replaced with the OPI's system whenever they are getting updated or replaced. Although I do not believe in cookie cutters that fits in every situation and I will defer to the experts here that we have the excellent city staff here that know what's going on and they have the data to back it up. And the other issue that I would like to address is that there is a false economy of motorists versus pedestrians. If we want to make sure that the city is becoming healthier and greener and trying to encourage people to ride their bikes and walk instead of always driving, then maybe we should try to continue to make the streets a little safer, which the city of Vervine is already doing. So I'm really hoping that we can, you know, bring this awareness and continue to add more, or maybe if we don't need it anymore, we can reduce the number of intersections with the delay. I mean, it's really something to bring awareness and maybe give a focus on where we should be looking for that we might need to add them if needed. And the other thing is we've already learned that there is a way to do a timed period that will not stop the flow of traffic, right? Because currently these systems are not or computerized. The The streets like, it's our computerized and we're able to change the program. And maybe what we can do is to, you know, around the school where there's high student traffic during drop off time and dismissal time. Then we can have the delay for pedestrians in that sense. And then the rest of the day, we can have normal traffic lights so we're not causing more congestion. All of these could be technologically available. And I don't see how this could be an issue up for debate that whether we are going to value humanize more than any money. I mean, we're talking about spending a quarter million dollars on a drone show. So I think this would be a small price to pay for human lives. And with this, I would like to see if we have any public comments. I see a lot of people sign up. If Mayor will allow that to be open. I'll be happy to all council member Mai. And then how many requests do we have for the public to be heard? We have 13 requests to speak. Oh my goodness. All right, we're going to stop at 9 and decide what we're going to do going forward Councilmember Mai and then we'll call on public commenters. Sure. Yeah, I just want to say this is an issue about compassion or Lives being lost in the street or anything like that. It's not about the substance of this The question is why are we even doing this why are we even discussing this when constituents come to me and they have an issue On things that are already being done in discussing this. When constituents come to me and they have an issue on things that are already being done in the city, I defer them to city staff. There's no reason that we should be discussing this here for this reason, or it exists. If there's anything we should talk about how this was a pilot program since 2016 and it hasn't been moved forward. If that's something that you wanna talk about, we should talk about that and have something constructive and productive versus just flexing on whatever for whatever reason. Let's move on. All right. With that, let's turn to public comment. Do you say there How many requests? Actually, no now we have 14. 14. Let's make them 90 seconds each. Okay. And then I think we'll have to decide how to dispose of this. Okay. Thank you, Marif. I could call forward Doug Elliott, to Moscro, David and Yusuf Kadesh. What I'd as they're coming forward, I just wanted to ask staff, do we have data-driven reports on how these various intersections since 2016 have been performing? Have they in fact been rendered safe or safer? Nothing quantitative at the present as part of our efforts moving forward. We do want to create criteria for implementation and then do a frequent follow-up analysis for those future intersections once implemented. All right, thank you. Mr. Elliott, welcome. That microphone's not quite working. Is this better? There it is. Once again, I'm Doug Elliott, a member of the Community Service Commission, speaking only for myself. I actually want to thank the council members for putting this on the agenda because it's something important to a lot of us who experience trying to cross busy streets as pedestrians. And the staff's presentation was informative. I was, but I really want to echo Councilmember Goes comments, which I thought were eloquent and really get to the heart of whatever I would try to say. So rather than try to reiterate all that, I'll just say that I think anything that can enhance pedestrian safety such as this is a small price. The 33 extra seconds for a driver is a very small price to pay. With that all conclude, I see my friend Commissioner Kadesh is in line and I'm sure he'll be more articulate than I am on the issue. So thank you very much. Thank you for your comments. Tomas Castro. Good evening, Council members. My name is Tomas Castro. I'm a longtime resident of Woodbridge, and I would like to urge you to move forward with leading pedestrian intervals on the agenda tonight. I want to thank Councilmembers Go and Lou for bringing this item forward. I grew up walking to school, first to springbrook, then South Lake, Woodbridge, then Ivys. At every one of them, my friends and I faced the dangers inherent to streets designed solely for cars. Several times, I had friends who were hit by cars while biking to school. LPI's are low-hanging fruit that we can use to address basic pedestrian safety. By allowing kids a three to seven second head start crossing the street, we increase their visibility to otherwise distracted drivers. The efficacy of LPI's is well-founded. Studies have shown that cities with this basic safety measure reduce pedestrian vehicle accidents by 59%. Let's make sure Irvine is one of those cities. Thank you. Thank you for your comments. David? Mr. Mayor, members of the city council, my name is David Martinez. LPI's provide the following benefits. Increased visibility of crossing pedestrians. Reduced conflicts between pedestrians and vehicles. Increased likelihood of motorists yielding to pedestrians and enhanced safety for pedestrians who may be slower to start into the intersection. That is not me saying this. That's the United States Department of Transportation. Another Department of Transportation, Count Trans, contends that LPI's increased pedestrian visibility, reduce conflicts between pedestrians and vehicles, increase the likelihood of motorists yielding to pedestrians, and enhance safety for pedestrians who may be slower to start into the intersection, additionally costs for implementing LPI's are very low since only minor signal timing alteration is required. This makes it easy and inexpensive countermeasure that can be incorporated into pedestrian safety action plans or policies and can become routine agency practice. CalTrans also indicates that LPI's can reduce pedestrian vehicle crashes by approximately 40%. 40% is what you guys can do right now. CalTrans has a state law where they say that they have to implement LPI's on residential districts, business districts, business activity districts, safety corridor, school zones, and areas with a high concentration of pedestrians and cyclists. I would encourage you all to implement LPI's in those places as well. Thank you Thank you for your comments. You said Kadesh Good evening, Mr. Mayor and the City Council. My name is you so long time resident Irvine also a member of the Transportation Commission I mean it doesn't get LPI's don't get more low There's nothing more low hanging fruit than LPI's and you know I think in terms of next steps the question is not put them everywhere like no no one's suggesting that. It's just study it find more opportunities out there because there are more opportunities I feel very strongly that there are more opportunities. You know, there are lots of school areas, lots of senior communities. There are lots of high pedestrian activity areas in the city where we're trying to, you know, especially where there's high-density housing, things like that. And, you know, it's just, study it, slow, we're not going out of our way enough to explore this technology. That's what the merit of discussing it today is. And I can mention cities of Costa Mesa, Placensha, Fullerton, the county has a program to install 59 of them throughout their jurisdictions. CalTrans mandates it through all new intersections that they have. and Irvine, if you've seen, for example, Culver in the five, the world hasn't ended because cars had to slow down for three seconds, it's traffic is fine. It's a very, very small price to pay for immense safety benefits. It is truly, people don't notice it most of the time, it is truly low hanging fruit as it comes and I was just asked to thank your time is that to just start studying it and gradual implementation. Thank you for your comment. Let me before we take further comment. Just understand I just need to understand something. Are we actively pursuing new sites for this now? To this point, our next step in our LPA analysis had been internally the development of new standards. How do you assess the viability of LPI's? Where should we be implementing them in the future? To this point, the implementation, as you heard from staff, has been fairly haphazard. It's been based on requests from public when staff has seen opportunities where it might make sense in a very narrow band of area. The challenge with LPI's is that when you implement them at one intersection, if it's not coordinated across a series of intersections, it may just be three to six seconds of time, but that three to six seconds on a long stretch of road can create additional traffic-related issues or safety issues that the engineering staff analyzes and cesses consistently. And so currently the 25 intersections, there's routine assessment and review of do we need to tweak the timing a little bit here or there. We have a full traffic management staff that monitors every intersection in town to assess traffic flow and pedestrian safety. Our next step really had been internally. This year we're in the process of engaging a consultant to help develop a master plan of standards. When would it make sense? When would it not make sense? As council member Lou and council member go mentioned we did have a chance to sit down, identify sort of what the existing work plan is and I think the conversation tonight was really going to be geared towards is there anything else that the council would like us to do on this front or not? I think it's been all undercut. Again just to understand you're going to be engaging consultants and that will be covered in the next two year budget. I believe it's already budgeted for currently where we're in the process of engaging the consulting team now. Okay. So nothing is being asked of us tonight. This is moving forward, is that correct? This was in response to the memo submitted by Councilmember Goh and Councilmember Liu. And I think the request in the memo was, if I recall correctly, to assess other locations where LPI's might be viable if I read the memo correctly. And if I understand you, we're doing that. Correct. Okay. Okay. So this is mostly informational. We're doing this. Is there an inclination to accelerate this in some way? If not, the direction to use basically keep doing what you're doing. You know, again, I would defer to the council to really inform, are we meeting the council's expectations? Unless we begin to address that, we're gonna be sitting here another hour talking about something that may be ongoing now. I think everybody's of the same mind. If this is providing extraordinary benefits, well, we wanna move forward with it, but it sounds like we are moving forward. All right, I would concur with that. This is why I ask of my colleagues, when you put something on the agenda, be prepared to come with a motion that provides some direction. Otherwise, we're sitting here talking among ourselves, I'll try to kind of make a motion in our minds when perhaps not as even needed here. May I be recognized to make a motion please? All right council member. Okay, so I think this will provide some clarification so we can stop the discussion of whether this memo is redundant. So here's my motion. I move to direct staff to identify opportunity areas for increased leading pedestrian interval LPI signal timing and begin gradual implementation where appropriate. I also request that staff specifically evaluate the following areas for potential LPI and Intersections with permissive left turns in double right turn lanes, school routes, senior communities and intersections with high volume of pedestrian. Sorry. Activity and to return to the city council with their findings within the next 60 days. This will give the staff a little more specific direction and a more systematic study on what we're doing to implement LPI. And this is not because we just kind of feel like telling staff to continue doing what they're already doing. Do you have the wording on that motion? I'll be honest, Mary, don't. You want a little too fast, council member? Do I apologize? I'm sorry. Just trying to save everybody time. I'll read it again, solar. I moved to direct staff to identify opportunity areas for increased leading pedestrian interval, LPI signal timing, and begin gradual implementation where appropriate. I also request that staff specifically evaluate the following areas for potential LPI installations, intersections with permissive left turns, on whether this is feasible. All right, the motion is offered by Council Member Liu. Is there a second? Second. on their expertise on whether this is feasible. All right, the motion is offered by Council Member Liu. Is there a second? That can be seconded by Council Member Goh. Do we? We're in the middle of hearing from residents. This is another reason, forgive me for sharing this, but I ask for people to come forward with specific motions in advance of council meetings so that we can also make those motions available to the public so they can speak to the specificity of the motion. We'll struggle through this, I know tonight, but believe me, it just makes it so much easier for everybody if council members get a motion in front of us preferably in advance of the meeting but certainly in advance of consideration of the item. With that is there a second? That was go. Who seconded? I have three requests to be heard. Councilmember Carroll. Yeah, thank you, Mayor. I'm sorry. Were there more public speakers? There are more public speakers. I'll hold back. If you would hold off then and the others will hold off. We'll hear from the public speakers. If they absorb the motion they may wish to speak to the motion. That would be helpful as well. Go right ahead. Thank you Mayor. Our next speaker is James. James, you may unmute your mic. Good evening members of the council I'm James from Woodbridge I support the motion in its entirety so I will give you a story of two places where I walk. One is near the Spectrum Irvine Center Drive and Pacifica. there when when I am trying to cross Urban Center Drive to get to the Spectrum for lunch, I'm with a crowd of other office workers. And there's a handful of cars turning right. And when the light turns green, the pedestrian signal is on, I always have to watch out. There's so many instances of drivers just not watching. When they see green, they just have an automatic reaction to hit the accelerator and there has been many, many close calls I've had where I am about to step out and the car just lowers it and I feel the wind pushing against my face. That is not how I want to be experiencing walking. But when I lived in the area near Heritage Park, I often frequented Heritage Plaza, and there was a leading pedestrian interval there. So when I crossed the street over there, the pedestrian light would turn green for a few seconds before the cars turning. Got the green and because of that, even if the driver is not paying attention to their sides, they can see the pedestrians going right in front of them. And that makes it all different. Our next speaker is Anker P.. On her you may unmute your mic. Hi, I'm on quirk preek. I'm a senior at Warwick High School and I want to thank council members Liu and council member go for bringing this forward. As a cross-confident a lot I run a lot of the city. And I see a lot of cars that make right turns without looking at pedestrians first. It's especially when they're going 40, 50, 60 miles per hour. It's not very safe for pedestrians or runners for cyclists crossing the street. when there's a leading producer in Arabic, such as that University in Culper, being in the street before the light and green, it really improves the ability. It's a lot safer across and it's not a great intersection across the still wide road, but it's considering better than other intersections. I would also want more definitely in your school, let's students walk in a bike in a school that we're going to have lots of people that have to have to school, which reduces congestion on our roads, and also reduces our environment to impact as more people can walk in a bike in a school. I strongly support the American Food. We expand, we improve here, we improve our air growth, especially near schools across the city. Thank you. Thank you for your comments. Our next speaker is Dylan Slayton. Dylan, you may unmute your mic. Hello, I'm a student at Cal State Long Beach and I walk and bike often in Long Beach where we have a lot of LPI and I find that it really makes me feel safe. I haven't had any close calls or incidents. I really find that as a band-aid solution it does work very well in many pedestrian focus areas and I think that it should be expanded not to everywhere of course but is very helpful for a car-centric area. I would like a much better focus towards car alternatives for transportation, but in the meantime, I think that it should be something that should be used a lot more with some good thought. Thank you. Thank you. Our next speaker is JB. Jay, you may unmute your mic. Hello, Mr. Sorry for the mic not working Massline and Benures. I wasn't really going to talk about OK eyes, but just listening to this meeting, I thought I could chime in with my thoughts. I think the polarization of this issue from both sides is false. You know, this is a topic that we actually just think about level-headedly. And the way forward is the case-by-case basis that we have been doing. I read the presentation in this form that was presented could have been just a receiving file. But the fundamentals of city councils that each council member is allowed to be to be genderized, but they want when they identify a need that's not being met. So I think this might be on the fault of council members who are going to go, but the actual way to move forward, productively and concretely with this, is just ask which specific intersections they actually want to have LPI's and then talk about the specifics of if they should be implemented or not afterward. And I think that's something that's encompassed in the motion that was presented. Just speaking as an urban resident, I saw in the presentation the Yale portal intersection is an LPI. And I've got to say, as a Northwooders, Northwood student, there's a lot of car traffic and mornings going into Yale, turning onto the Yale into the interest in Northwood. and there's a lot of e-bikes, bikes, pedestrian traffic that goes across to get into North of the entrance. And I was surprised that there's no P.I. there, but it's definitely since fitting, because you got cars rapidly turning into Northwood. And you've got kids that are crossing. Thank you, your time is up. Thank you for your comments. Our next speaker is Nishka. Nishka, you may unmute your mic. Good evening, my name is Nishka and I live on Woodbridge. This is my first time giving public comment and shows how strongly I feel about this. I really would like our vine to implement more LPI's. Just a few weeks ago a family member was crossing the street and was hit by a car turning left to not seeing her in the intersection. She was not jail walking, she had the walk signal and it was broad daylight. She was thankfully not badly injured but regardless this kind of thing should never happen in any city at any intersection in her situation and in so many others, and LPI could have prevented the collision by allowing her to get into the line of sight of any turning cars before they even enter the intersection. From a driver's perspective, I've had a lot of urban being a few extra seconds really doesn't matter and wouldn't matter to me, but it could make a world of difference for pedestrians and bikers and has the potential to save lives. LPI's are operationally very easy and cheap to implement, especially relative to all of the other measures Irvine considers to make the city safer. Their low cost higher reward. And in my mind, this is a no-brainer to implement at least initially with some of the low hanging through intersections that Councilman Rillou mentioned and others have mentioned on the round schools. I'm for you to please implement more LPAs in urban. Thank you. Thank you for your comments for a first time call or I hope you'll call again. Our next speaker is Dean Carstens and Dean you may unmute your mic. Hi, can you? We can hear you. Hi, I just want to say that I'm extremely in favor of LPI's. There was a comment from Council Member Liu that I really liked that they are a small price to pay for human lives. And that's really how I feel about it. Do I think that these are the end-of-be-all and that they will completely solve traffic deaths? No. Do I think they're a low-cost high-impact solution that could save some actual human lives? Yeah, I do. And I think that's worth the money. And therefore, you should support them wherever we can afford. Thank you. Thank you for your comments. Our next speaker is Melissa Mosry. Ms. Mosry, I'm your mic. Hi. I just wanted to get, sorry, I just wanted to speak out in favor of this motion. I wasn't planning on speaking today because I worked like 12 hours with the youth and I'm a little tired, but I felt like this was very, very important. So I ride my bike, I walk, and I drive, and any of those activities are impacted by these lights not having the LPI's. When I'm driving, I sometimes can't tell whether the pedestrian or the bicyclist, which way they're planning on going. So I'm waiting anyway. If you have any kind of conscience, you're gonna wait anyway until you're sure they're going in which direction they're going before you decide to turn. And so this should not impact traffic because people should already be waiting when there's pedestrians. And for the people who aren't, then they really need that signal. For people who are tired after work, not paying attention, it's dark. more and more when I go ride my bike at night, I see lots of views out there. And they that they really need that signal. For people who are tired after work, not paying attention, it's dark more and more when I go ride my bike at night, I see lots of youth out there. And they need all the help they can get to be safe. You know, there's so much that's not being done that we need to do to embrace our youth. And this is one very simple cost-effective solution. I spoke to a whole bunch of bicyclists outside of Target who were like 1516 and once they realize I was not there to attack them because I'm 50 and they're used to being asked negative questions and being given negative comments by the public. And I said, you know, hey, there's no bike racks and they said, yeah, we're going to get our bike stolen. We don't have anywhere to park. We don't have anywhere. Thank you. Your time is up. They started talking to me about these safety issues that they're worried about. And I tried to get them to come to City Council, but they told me. Thank you for your comments. Our next speaker is Adriana Maiestas. Adriana, you may unmute your mic. Hi there. I frequently walk in the city and experience how dangerous our intersections are. I have almost been hit by cars several times even when I have the green go signal for pedestrian crossing. I'm tired of feeling like I could become pedestrian roadkill. So little is done to protect protect pedestrians in the city compared to other municipalities that it feels like city leadership doesn't want residents walking around the city. So I support the motion in any effort to protect pedestrians such as LPI's. Thank you for your comments. Our next speaker is Jason Gargfield. Jason, you may unmute your mic. Yeah, hey everyone. So as you all know, I take um, traffic safety very seriously. I've spoken about that before. I'm both a driver and a possession. But let me propose to you that one of the reasons why drivers might keep running through intersections is because driving in the city sucks. It takes half an hour to go two miles. And if those problems were fixed, I think paradoxically you might see a lot of drivers going slower. So when we talk about three seconds, it's important to remember this is cumulative. This is going to add up to many hours. And there's a number of things we could do to reduce traffic fatalities, including lowering the speed limit to five miles an hour. So we do, at some point, need to take into account trade-offs. Now, I remember last year the city attorney spoke about using the stick to climate goals, and that would theoretically involve doing things to make driving more difficult, like getting rid of parking spots. So this would seem to be in line with that, and I'd like to express my concern in that regard. So three seconds is a very small deal, then I suggest we first find a way to make driving through seconds faster, and that shouldn't be too difficult for the city, and once that's done, I would suggest we consider putting this in place. Thank you for your comment. Mr. Mayor, we have one lead sign up. I'll defer to you if we take it. One last one. One last one. OK, we accept no more. Thank you, Mayor. Our next speaker is Joshua Moore. Mr. Moore, you may unmute your mic. Hi, I'm Joshua Moore, resident of Woodbridge. The public testimony has made a highly compelling case that LPI's are effective at saving lives. If the approach to implementing them so far has been, as the city manager said, haphazard, it seems like the city council ought to provide instruction to staff that they be more thorough in their approach. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Moore, for your comment. And that is all, Mayor. That concludes the public testimony. I can see two of my colleagues, which to be heard, Council Member Traceter followed by Council Member Mai. There is a motion before us. Council Member Traceter. Thank you. Yeah, I really appreciate all the public comments. Very informative. It's good to get an idea of challenges that pedestrians and bikers are facing across the city. I also think that this discussion is very helpful between the council members. I understand we're all tired and it's late, but this is important. These are potentially children's lives that could be saved. I think it's worth doing this. I also want to give my support to council members, Lou, and go for the memo that they wrote. It was very informative. To me, it seemed clear what they were asking for. It is the discretion of the council members when they make a motion. They're not required to make a motion right at the outset. Sometimes you might want to listen to the discussion. In fact, I think that sometimes that is really beneficial. So you craft a motion that tends to be more readily accepted by the majority. So I just, yeah, overall, I think that this is very useful. I appreciate Council Member Zulu and Go, and I appreciate the staff for this report, and I appreciate the public commenters. I think this discussion is important. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Traceter, Council Member Mai. Yes, thank you Mayor Aigren. You know, this is again not about the substance. It's not about LPI or not to LPI. I live in an area where LPI is implemented and it's beneficial to the children. I have two children that cross streets. I walk I bike and it is beneficial. That's not the question here. This motion and the discussion of this and even this motion. The staff is already doing this. I do not see why are we directing them to do something that they are already doing. It's just we're using emotions. It doesn't change reality. The reality is there's already a pilot program in place. There's already a consultant being consulted on. We need the data. We need something productive. We need something moving forward. Telling them to do the exact same thing that they already are doing is not beneficial. Thank you, Council Member Mai. Council Member Liu, then Council Member Carol. In case the last two times that when I read my motion was not very clear, it was to allow a more, well the purpose of this motion is to allow a more proactive and systematic approach to implementing LPI in the city. And like I said, we did after receiving numerous resident complaints or actually requests that we have had meetings with City staff to understand and thank you for all the information that you've given us to educate us. And not once were we told that this is something we've already been doing and there is no point bringing this motion. And just like Council Member Jacieta mentioned, that the fact that there is no motion in the memo is because it will be better for us more beneficial to have a motion crafted based on what feedback we're getting from public comments from the additional presentation prepared by the staff and also the opinion of the council members on the dias and I don't understand why we spend this much time on something that you all thought was a waste of time but I would like to see if we can move on with this. Councilmember Carroll. Great. Yeah. Thank you, Mayor. Yeah, I can try to explain some of that from my perspective. I'll be voting no. I believe this is going to fail 3-3 and we spend an hour on it. The staff is already doing it. There are two things. I learned doing this six years, I'll just say to the audience, and the video, and everybody up here is, you learn that there's like, track ones, this is what's happening, what you see with people calling in, say, and then there's track two and track three, what you don't see. So what's happening is, I guess if my colleagues had said, instead of thanking staff and praising staff, I said, Steph, we love you, you're failing. Engineering, you're not doing a good job. This LPI is a mess. It's a patchwork, it's not working, and we need to do something different. Staff was not called out. Staff was praised by the people up here. So it's either, to me, logically, staff engineering has failed in its approach on LPI, which I wholly disagree with, based on what the city manager is briefed on. Briefed with all on just now. Or this is an open streets movement. This is a people over cars movement, which is fine. I disagree with it. It's OK. The same people that are here on other issues want to talk about that. The same people want to call in to talk about cars, streets are for people, not cars. I think our transportation commissioner once said. And he comes up here and he talks about this. And I think it's great. We respectfully disagree. And I'm the guy that got elected, so I get the vote. So here's how happens. And again, we have a lot of inconsistency council members because this item, and by the way, let me just say one other thing, staff council members are never going to tell you, don't put that on the agenda, okay? Staff is not going to dissuade you. They're going to do everything they can. They're an incredibly helpful staff. But let's just call a spade a spade. So if if you're gonna propose something, say engineering has fallen down on the job and be honest about it and be respectful, or say this is an open street, this is a people over cars movement. And that's okay too. I'm still in no on both. And this is gonna fail and this was an hour and five minutes. I think that's the point to say that this is a waste of time. It's kind of funny because I agree with the proposal that it is a complete waste of time. I don't know if we're going to get to these other items now because of this. There's your important items. And again, just let me just, let me try to conclude with something positive, which is, again, from the consistency perspective, we have these bodies. Each of us get appointees. One of them represented that he was a member of the Transportation Commission. I don't remember the chair of the Transportation Commission or my commissioner to the Transportation Commission get to see this, where the council members like to send it down there. Because the Transportation Commission, see, I was a commissioner. I wasn't appointed a commissioner, I was appointed for an election title, okay? I was appointed commissioner by then Mayor Stephen Choi and I sat on these commissions for about eight years, okay? So let's get real here people. Send this down to the Transportation, let you, Seth, and five other colleagues deal with it and have have a study session. That's what we did on the commissions. And then have them send something up here for us to look at. But with all due respect, there are no traffic engineers up here on this day. Thank you, Mayor. I'm voting no. Thank you. Council Member Carroll, Council Member Traceeater. I think we should just vote. Thank you. Council Member Carroll, Council Member Traceter. I think we should just vote. Thank you. Council Member Liu. If I may address that last comment, it was just about, I mean, maybe I'm wrong about this because I'm new to Council, but I'm assuming this is what we propose and then there's a study and then I'll go to a commission, right? So I don't know if this is completely out of line, but I obviously have not accused of the staff of doing anything that, and I know that staff is very supportive of all what we're doing, but I believe Councilmember Goen and I are of decent intelligence to make to understand the difference whether it is a waste of time for us to write a memo and conduct more study on this and quite frankly spending up the last hour of our lives trying to defend something that we didn't think would be controversial so with that said I would agree with councilmember Trisita that we we should just go for a vote. Well first I'm going to comment. I have no further request for comment on the motion and I'm going to be voting in favor of the motion which basically to me says keep on doing what you've been doing, but do some more specific things as well, which is fine. That's fine by way of direction. This is an important issue. For some of us, it's kind of unfamiliar terrain. I'd love to see some data when I heard about what CalTrans studies have shown. That to me is very, very impressive. It's something I didn't know. All of which suggests to me that kind of in keeping with what Council member Carol said, we need to invoke a procedure that we used to use a lot more, which is to schedule on this issue and perhaps other traffic related and safety related issues. A study session, kind of an open-ended study session, where we can quite literally receive reports and study what has been going on in this area, where we've been making progress, and coming out of that would be some real forethought about what direction we ought to take or how we ought to accelerate policy or whatever. Again, maybe it's the lawyer in me. I like to see things written out in advance, proposals written out in advance. So you can give some thought to it in advance and not just have what amounts to kind of a bull session up here. That to me is not good governance. I am gonna vote for this with the understanding that when this comes back to us, it might be with a recommendation that we schedule it our further review or further direction. We schedule it as part of a study session. It could be inclusive of the Transportation Commission if that's appropriate. I just think we have to do a better job procedurally if we're going to make headway on this and other issues that otherwise wind up on the Council agenda. With that, Council Member Carroll, did you wish to be heard? I do. Thank you, Mayor. So I too agree that we do have to kind of stand on process and we do have to stand on the way things are done around here. And we have a number of commissioners, even in the audience here at 10.35 tonight, and I see a few. I would like to make a substitute motion, which I think could be, or my colleagues, could be supportive of, which is we do the right thing from a process perspective, which is not necessarily take this and turn it upside down in this way or that way, because I think that the study session that you speak of mayor is properly agendas. I mean, there may people just want to rush this right now, but each of us appointed a transportation commissioner. I know the commissioner said, woo, some of the intersections are actually right where he lives that we're talked about tonight, is going to want to dive into this, just like he dives into and spends scores and scores and hours as each one of our transportation commissioners do, council members, on these issues. Not one transportation commissioner, but the other five, the total of six, and there will be a seventh soon. So I'd like to make the substitute motions simply that we send this memo and staff and you know city manager G down to the transportation commission. The commissions are a they serve at our pleasure. We created them as a city council many years ago. We're allowed to direct them to hold a study session. I think we should do that That we my substance emotion that we direct the Transportation Commission to hold a study session on LP on on on this LPI have the same staff group and they can spend four hours on this and a study session is for everyone's knowledge is brown act The same speakers can come on in they can still get their win We can have this come back to the city council, and we could have it heard in the next 30 days. If that, it would be able to have this transportation commission hold a study session on council members, Lou and goes memo in the next 30. They would probably be in the next transportation commission, the one thereafter would that be, is that just from a process, I'm not sure. That would certainly be a proper request from council, if that was the council's desire. I mean, that would be my substitute motion, that we have our properly designed commission, all of which have dove a lot deeper into transportation, then I'll speak for myself. Mike McKimishiner is about as good on transportation as any late person who's not an engineer can get. And he's been doing it for years and years and years, six years. I'd like him to hear this. So that's my the substitute. Second. Seconded by Councilmember Mai. Let me speak to the substitute motion. I think it would be we're going to wind up spending 20 minutes on the substitute motion. This was going to happen. So I would just suggest that the idea of getting the Transportation Commission involved, which is a good idea, and they could hold an in-depth study session. I would just suggest that this be tacked on as an amendment to the main motion, the main motion being subject to this being referred as well to the Transportation Commission to study the matter. I think that way, that way the main motion can go forward. And we will have the benefit of the Transportation Commission's involvement. Sorry mayor, I don't agree with that. And I'll tell you why. Unfortunately, again, the process is there, I appreciate it, but it feels like Solomon to me., but I'm not saying that, but I'm not saying that, but I'm not saying that, but I'm not saying that, but I'm not saying that, but I'm not saying that, but I'm not saying that, but I'm not saying that, but I'm not saying that, but I'm not saying that, but I'm not saying that, but I'm not saying that, but I'm not saying that, but I'm not saying that, but I'm not saying that, but I'm LPL is, and the Transportation Commission can kind of come along as a caboose. We're sort of like to me, we're defanging the Transportation Commission. That's why my motion is to send it. And we can vote on the substitute motion right now. It's fine if no one wants to speak on it. I think two members do. You know, I'd like a vote on that, I'm sorry. All right, speaking to the Substitute Motion, Member Traceter, Council Member Liu, Council Member Mai. In that order. Thank you. I prefer the original motion. I appreciate the thought of sending it to the Transportation Commission and fully support that. I just don't want that to be a mechanism for delaying this. It sounded like from what many members of the council were talking about it a pair earlier that this seems pretty It's already being done. It seems pretty straightforward. We don't even need to discuss this So I'm not sure why we also need to stop and then have the Transportation Commission assess it and then come back and have a study session. I think that probably we have the information we need to vote on this now. Thank you. Councillor Member Liu, then Councillor Member Mai. So I would not be opposed to amending my original motion to go through the Transportation Commission but just to remind her that the commissioners are not all necessarily people who have the expertise like our city staff and that's at least I know that my commissioner has the expertise in urban planning and traffic type information or issues but I'm not sure that's you know I mean I'm a lawyer I'm knowing you know knowledge and finance and I was appointed to finance commission but just by way of its gamble. So I would not be opposed to that I'm so sorry let me finish. So having said that I hope it doesn't cost any more delays and I think it will be actually more efficient if the city staff actually have something for the transportation commissioner's to review rather than have people who may not have the expertise on road design and traffic safety, have the four hour or however many long hours of study session to decide whether this is a good idea. So Mayor, I appreciate that you proposed that alternative. So if that is acceptable. That's fine. You know what I'm doing? I'm, that's fine. You know what I'm doing? I'm, that's fine. You know what I'm doing? You know what I'm doing? You know what I'm doing? You know what I'm doing? You know what I'm doing? You know what I'm doing? You know what I'm doing? You know what I'm doing? You know what it occurred to me. It doesn't even require an amendment. The Transportation Commission could put it on its own agenda. And staff would show up. Would you not? You would. Yes. All right. So again, we're getting so bogged down in procedure here, it's really nuts. And as I indicated, I'm okay with voting on the main motion. I just think it's kind of obvious to me that you do want to involve the Transportation Commission. I think that will happen. Just any one of them can put this on the agenda and they can look at it and they should look at it and we can move forward on two tracks at once. All right. Anything further, Councilmember Mai? Thank you so much, Mayor. once again. It's not about the substance. I think what council member Carol was saying is is a practical matter of practicality We've already done this with the city staff nothing against city staff you guys do a wonderful job I'm not criticizing you in any form shape or way But I think that going to the transportation commission could possibly move the needle forward and be productive. As it is, we're already doing this study and it's happening, it's been happening, the pilot program's been happening for years. Again, it's been happening again and again for years. Let's just get it going, let's get some sort of direction, some sort of production here. I mean, we can, we don't even have a study, we don't even have a data analysis of the benefits on here. I mean, we can say all we want, yeah, we have an opinion, a personal opinion about LPI's. I have a personal opinion, I think it's great. Again, it's not the substance, but we need some factual data and something there to say, say, hey, we should expand this into certain areas into other areas. We don't have anything like that right now. We just have opinions. So, I mean, you guys are already doing that. Move it forward. May, might I offer one bit that may help Luis Wyatt in terms of the study that we're currently coordinating? Can you provide the council with a quick overview of the timeline? And then based on that that can provide maybe some insight into how we can hopefully move this whole thing forward in a productive way. It sounds like there's consensus on the council. We should look at this. The process is what we're trying to figure out right now. So internally, what is the current timeline and plan for engaging the study that you've been working to develop? Yes the current timeline as previously mentioned we are trying to get a consultant on board. We have their tentative proposal in hand and city staff is reviewing it so we're hoping to get them on board with them the next you know handful of weeks to a month. And then from there we're hoping we can have the comprehensive standards and guidelines created, you know, maybe three to four months after that. And from there, that gives us the opportunity as an agency and as a department to be more proactive in implementing this, intersections moving forward. You know, based on that process, what I might suggest for the council's consideration is allow the staff to finish the assessment and then provide us direction to review the findings with the Transportation Commission in a more intensive study based on their review, then we can bring the whole item forward here in a couple of months with full recommendations on how we we might forward in implementing LPI in a way that might make sense. That seems reasonable but it's different from the motion that was offered. And again, whatever the council's direction is, we're happy. I'll say that. What do you want? My recommendation would be what was just laid out. us to We probably can shave some time off of the duration of the study, but if you can give us 90 to 120 days to finish the assessment we will have the assessment done Review the findings with the Transportation Commission shortly thereafter bring the recommendations from the Transportation and the study back to council for final review I think that would be a logical way to move this forward based on the comments I've heard from council this evening well that's very different from the motion that was offered but it sounds eminently reasonable to me that's just me and I'm happy to now I say council member Carol wants to heard. I just want to very quickly say I would happily, if the primary makers, I would happily remove the substitute motion. We could just, I think we could probably get 60 on that. The City managers, you know, if they want to go in that direction, that's exactly where we wanted to go. All right. Councilmember Lue. if that's the timeline that I will require, I mean that's essentially what our motion is asking the city staff to do, but you know minus the timeline. So if that is the timeline that is required realistically to have a comprehensive study maybe that I will be happy to amend that. So would 90 days be sufficient? Would that work for the team? Yes. Thank you. So you're just changing your motion or you're just accepting what the city manager said? I am augmenting my motion. So instead of 30 days, we'll have 90 days. And if that is applicable? Absolutely. And if it's okay to also move this step with the Transportation Commission, I think that can add some value. I can also add specifically that it has to go through Transportation Commission. All right now I just want to know what the motion reads has now. I based on my understanding I think the motion is that within the next 90 days that staff would complete our LPI study bring that study then upon completion to the Transportation Commission for Review and Analysis. Once Transportation Commission is finished with their analysis, bring all of the recommendations and the study findings back for full-city council consideration. What specific focus on the areas? All right. Alright, so we're really taking Mr. Cheese words here. And those are now constituting the motion. Can we have. Can we have Mr. Siddiquler repeat the motion just so we know what we're all. Yes, yes, go right ahead. Thank you. So then the motion as I understand it is to give staff 90 days to Complete the LPI study and then refer to the Transportation Commission for its review and analysis and return to the City Council for full consideration and then Councilmember Liu added and to I to specifically analyze specific areas That's motion as I understand it. All right. Do you take that to be your motion? Council member Liu or does somebody else have to move that as a substitute? If you would just take it as your own motion withdrawing your previous motion in the second. Well, I'll be a little more specific. I'm sorry, I just, with the specific focus on permissive left turn, double right turn lanes, school routes, senior communities, and intersections with high-volume pedestrian activities. I'm sorry, we're away now. So Councilmember Liu added about evaluating specific areas, specifically intersections with permissive left turn and double right turn lanes, school route, senior communities, and intersections with high volumes of pedestrian activities. Isn't that part of your study anyway? That is correct. All right. All right, we sort of have a hybrid here. Mr. Cheese words and council member lose words, combined together in a motion. Is that all right with the second? Who seconded? I seconded. You seconded it? Yes. All right. And you seconded as I seconded. I seconded. I seconded. I seconded. I seconded. I seconded. I seconded. I seconded. I seconded. I seconded. I seconded. I seconded. I seconded. I seconded. I seconded. I seconded. I seconded. I seconded. I seconded. I seconded. I seconded. I seconded. I seconded. I seconded. I seconded. I seconded. I seconded. I seconded. I seconded. I seconded. I seconded. or is it inclusive? I can't understand. Because the Transportation Commission should be able to really dig it and do everything they can with staff as part. So it wasn't clear to me, Council Member, is that an inclusive list or an exclusive? I don't want to go ahead and vote on anything. I'm happy to provide a yes, but it felt like that was an exclusive list. It will be in it. It will be in it. It will be in it. submitted to. It will be inclusive obviously of based on it. Then I can actually ask my commissioner to look at it. OK. All right. Why don't we have a roll call now? Council member Carroll. Yes. Council member Go. Yes. Council member Liu. Yes. Council. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes all be headed home by 10 o'clock. As a courtesy to the public at large, as well as to ourselves and our staff. That mean the case, I'm going to try to do that for tonight. That would mean taking some of these things off the agenda and putting it on a future agenda. I'm willing to take the item that I I have on the agenda regarding the master plan for forestation, getting a report on that and giving further direction on that matter. It would be very brief, but it can wait. Mr. Chi, aren't you in agreement that could wait to another agenda? All right. That leaves two other items. One is Councilmember Liu regarding the establishment of a permanent library and community center and District 1. That's a big topic. I don't think we can do a justice in 10 minutes or even an hour in 10 minutes. I would request that that be put off to a future council meeting. Even if it necessitates our call in a special meeting at some point in the near future. Would you be agreeable to them? I thought it was pretty straightforward because it's just a request for a study to get started. Well, people are going to want to know the study of what and where. or a library, we don't have a where and that's what the motion is for. That we're lacking a, well may I start speaking on this item? Well, let me just also say we've of course got the matter of the climate action and adaptation plan. An update and Council Member Tracee-Durz-Memo was I think appropriately expressing some urgency and frustration and I don't want to be unfair to her either. Well, if that's the case then, you know, can we move it to the next meeting because what is our agenda look like for the next meeting. I'm willing to move my memo to the next meeting. All right. My item. Mr. Chief. Apologies. We can certainly accommodate the item at our April 8 meeting and with Mayor Egrillow you mentioned perhaps we sit down and we can look at what's coming and if there is the need for a special meeting consider that to be able to handle all the business before the council. All right I want to get all these things kind of handled in advance of the budget as well because some of these things have budgetary implications for the future. Councilmember Traciter, do you wish to move forward tonight with Year Item 5.7? Consideration of a request for a climate action and adaptation plan update. We could start that now. Yes please. I'd be grateful. Thank you. All right. If we started it now, my hunch is we're going to get somewhat into it. And I'd ask you to think about maybe we continue in it to the next meeting as well once we get into it. Alright. With that we'll move then to item 5.7. I'm going to ask the clerk just for the record to identify it by title and subject. Consideration of a request by Council Member Traceter for a climate action and adaptation plan update. Thank you. With that, to the extent that the public wishes to get involved, those who are participating remotely can electronically raise their hand and be included in the queue. And we will take public comment perhaps a little bit tonight. With that, I'll turn to Council Member Traceter who put this matter on the agenda. Thank you so much. Yeah, I really appreciate the Council considering this tonight. I just want to finalize that cap. We've had a draft of the cap for two councils. The council before the last council asked for a cap. The last council asked for a cap. And we've had a draft for quite a while. I just want to be able to tell folks we have a cap. Right now we can't. I can't say that. I have to say it. We have a draft of a cap. I'm hoping this won't be too controversial. The draft is already made. To me, it looks good. I would love to just have an upper-down vote on it, please. I know the mayor would like a heads up about what I would be asking for. The staff presented a, a preparatory presentation, which I appreciate. They recommended four potential actions. I would prefer number one. Consider approval of the cap is developed currently, which assumes a 2040 carbon neutral date, and 100% renewable energy electricity option. And direct the staff ring the final, draft of the cap document back to the city council for adoption in June 2025. And then also number four city councilman ride direction as it relates to sequestertify in the cap and cap related projects. I'm not in favor of sequestertify in the whole cap but I'm happy to consider sequestertifying particular projects in the cap. So and and I don't wanna belabor it anymore. I'd love to hear from the staff. Good evening again Mayor and council. It's my pleasure again to present to you a brief presentation on the staff's efforts in delivering to the city a climate action and habitation plan. The city's been engaged in a really extensive program in the development and outreach process to establish Irvine's first climate action adaptation plan. And when approved, our cap is intended to house a roadmap of projects which when implemented would allow Irvine to meet ambitious greenhouse gas emission reduction targets. Today we're providing a quick update on the status of the cap. We're completed to date and critical path items to publishing, adopting and implementing the cap. There have been many technical deliverables prepared over the last three and a half years in this particular effort. effort. All these deliverables have gone through several iterations and revisions based on feedback received by the project team. Implementation of the cap will impact life of every individual that lives, works, and interacts with the broader Irvine community. And given that factor in December of 2022, the city began extensive stakeholder outreach to share details related to the cap and to obtain community input. There were two public workshops, 23 virtual and in-person community presentations, five industry specific targeted stakeholder meetings, hosting tables that various community events and we conducted a robust interactive online survey to go with that. To date the staff have presented on the cap to the former Green Ribbon Committee three times the Sustainability Commission three times and the City Council previously three times as well. The City Council awarded a contract just by way of background. The Council awarded a contract to begin preparing the cap back in June of 2021. The cap development process was kicked off the very next month with support from the sent environmental as the city's consultants on this project. Again in August of 2021, the City Council adopted a resolution addressing climate change in Irvine's achieves resolution, which states that the city of Irvine will endeavor to achieve a zero carbon local economy consistent with 2030 targets based on the most recent climate science. Staff and the consultant team analyze a scenario to meet carbon neutrality by 2030. There are also two important changes in direction that staff received that has altered the project's trajectory and therefore a timeline for completing it. In April of 2024, the Sustainability Commission, the Commission made significant modifications to the proposed CAP program measures and directed or requested that staff recommend to the City Council to meet a new target of net zero emissions by 2040, which was subsequently approved by council in June of last year. However, in December of last year, the council gave direction to opt down Irvine customers to OCPA's basic choice plan of 47% renewable energy with the possibility of withdrawing from the agency completely in 2025. This place had temporary pause on the finalization of the cap due to the implications on the greenhouse-related gas reduction. So by way of sector, in total the city generates about 2.2 million metric tons of greenhouse gases a year. 51% of that comes directly from vehicle traffic trips originating here within the city. The next highest category of emissions generated in the city are from our buildings, specifically the electrification of all the buildings, they're the residential, commercial, industrial buildings in the city. Together they make about 88% of the total emissions generated here in Irvine. Solid waste is the next highest category at 7%. That is the refuse generated in Irvine that does end up in local landfills. Smaller percentage of that, 3% is caused by off-road vehicles and heavy equipment on construction sites here in the city and the least amount of emissions created at 2% come from various water well sites and wastewater treatment plants which are energy intensive uses. When we originally looked at the 2030 neutral analysis, we realized that it would have to essentially result in a complete transformation of the local economy. It was, as you can see in terms of what's been laid out here, the level of changes that would be choir, quite honestly, were just not doable. You can see that we would have, in order to meet those goals by the 2030 deadline, you would have to retire over almost 200,000 like duty internal combustion equals. You would have to add another 200,000 of zero mission vehicles retire another 13,000 heavy duty vehicles as well. You're installing over 160,000 private level one and level two EV charges, public fast charges as well, and over 6,400 level two EV chargers. So based on these factors here, we realized that, especially with vehicle traffic, representing half of the emissions in the city, we would have to relook at that particular goal. Same goes for buildings in particular and waste as well. That would have required us. 60% of the housing units in Irvine's use natural gas. As heating fuel we would have to electrify these homes at the rate of about six years at a rate of about 11,000 units per year. All appliances and homes and end users would have to be electric by 2030 as well. That's all your indoor cooking appliances, both residential and commercial closed dryers, outdoor grills, outdoor heating units, fireplaces, and your swimming pools in your spas. So again, these were very significant requirements to meet these particular goals. And as a result of that, the City Council in consultation with the Sustainability Commission made the decision to go into the 2040 updated carbon neutral goal. This was done in June of last year. So subsequent to that determination staff updated the cap analysis with the following assumptions that we were now targeting a 2040 carbon neutral goal and that we would have Irvine electrical customers enrolled in the 100% renewable energy program through OCPA. Through various stakeholder engagement the current draft of the cap is evolved to include 54 sector specific measures with over 195 actions that map out an aspirational but still an achievable pathway to realize aggressive emission reduction goals. These changes have been made as a result of public, stakeholder, staff, and city commission input. In addition, new state legislation and court rulings have changed the sustainability landscape with several project measures having been modified to accommodate recent changes in law. So it also in June 24 another important decision that the council made was to develop the cap as a program document and not as a regulatory measure and as a program document. Each project that it required would be implemented via a separate sequel analysis process. The benefit of a program document that it provides a city council with add-of-flex ability to adjust and modify. The institute projects is needed without a requirement to update the overarching cap document. However, as a regulatory document as a sequestertified cap, that would make that document into a regulatory requirement and And most importantly, failure to achieve GHG and mission reductions in a sequestrified cap could potentially result in the city being vulnerable to legal challenges in the future. Those legal challenges could of course then prevent the implementation of future programs and developments or the issuance of permits and really stall our efforts in implementing the programs out line in the cap. The 2040 carbon neutrality analysis essentially gets us to where we want to be, where we're seeing in the target and within this particular scenario, assuming at 100% renewable choice, we would meet that 2040 goal. The OCPA decision in December did complicate that, however, and so we had been intending to bring the cap forward for formal adoption in this part of the first half of 2025. However, in December of last year, Council voted unanimously to direct the following with respect to OCPA and that would be to withdraw Irvine from the OCPA at some point in 2025. Transition, all electric Irvine electricity customers down to the basic choice level. And then directing that Irvine's OCPA directors take all the necessary steps to protect the city of Irvine's interest as a relate to operations management and finances of the existing ongoing OCPA operations. Given the move to transition Irvine customers to the basic choice, which is the 47% renewable option, we paused the cap at that point. Our work had been predicated on the 100% renewable option, this change meant that the 2040 carbon neutrality date was no longer achievable With a docked document that we had already prepared So just by way of reference we have that obviously the two main power providers Available to us obviously the legacy provider of SE On the left calling you'll see the various programs that they offer. It should be noted however they are not currently accepting any new applicants for the green rate program due to capacity constraints. On the right calling you'll see what OCPA is currently offering and the issue for us last year with the 100% renewable choice is that they are unable to provide this option in 2025 and 2026 without significant rate increases on all ratepayers. But of note, we need to again just note that under existing state regulations, all utilities that's SE, OCPA, all of them must provide 100% renewable power starting in 2045. So all electricity providers again are required to comply with that legislation and that's to provide a renewable carbon-free electricity that's under Senate Bill's 11020. These pieces of legislation provide procurement targets that increase in stringency over time, getting to 100% carbon-free electricity statewide by 2045. The state requirements are shown in the black dot in line on the chart. On this chart here, the SE and OCPA, again, are subject to those same requirements. OCPA offers several tiers of clean electricity currently that does surpass the state requirements as shown here in the blue line. The OCPA's highest tier of clean electricity is provided through their 100% renewable choice plan which has been procuring 100% renewable energy since the offering began in 2022. It's expected that this offering will continue though it is currently not available as a default option for Irvine in 25 and 26 again because of the significant rate increases that were required to continue providing that. OCPA's middle tier of clean and electricity is provided through their smart choice plan. In 2023, their smart choice before it was 93% carbon free and their 2025 offering includes 55% renewable electricity and additional 40% carbon free for a total of 95% carbon free power. OCPA's lowest tier of clean electricity is provided through their basic choice plan, which is now the default provider in Irvine. This has an electricity portfolio of 10% renewable, 27.5 nuclear, and 29% renewable energy credits for a total of 66 and a half percent carbon-free electricity. All options eventually get us at the 2024. Some get us there a little bit faster, obviously, but ultimately these options that we've laid out here do ultimately get us to carbon neutrality in 2040. As Council Member Trisiter mentioned previously we do have some options that the City Council could consider. Option one that Council could consider developing the cap or adopting the cap is currently developed with the 2040 carbon neutrality date and 100% renewable electricity provider. The cap could be then adopted as a work plan document, not a regulatory document. The approval of the cap as staff has developed would allow the city to continue working on delivering sustainability projects included in the cap work plan. to is to adopt the cap to reflect a 2040 carbon neutrality date with a 47% renewable option. That does require us to expand or readjust our existing work plan to account, excuse me, for the lack of 100% renewable electricity power. And lastly, the council could direct staff to adopt the cap with a 2045 carbon neutral date that would comport with the state requirement for all electrical utilities already to meet with a 100% renewable energy mandate. And this option basically means that the cap work plan that we currently have can be developed with the projects as outlined currently, would be sufficient again to meet the 2045 goal. In terms of next steps, staff is asking Council for direction on these various options. Of deeded we will continue to analyze a GHE, a technical analysis as well based on the electricity provider decision. And then based on council direction staff can complete the final draft document. We can commit to releasing it for public comment within 30 days. Concurrently we would prepare the implementation plan and the cost analysis for the various projects we've mentioned previously. And then we would commit to the council to return it no later than June of this year with the final document for approval. And so that dovetails into the recommended actions and choices that the council can consider this evening again consider approval of the cap developed currently which assumes a 2040 carbon neutral date and a 100% renewable electricity option. Council can also consider directing staff to finalize the cap to reflect the 2040 new carbon neutral date and a 47% renewable electricity option. And staff could also, or council could also consider adopting a cap that reflects the statewide mandate of 2045. And then of course also as staff is requesting a direction from council as it relates to sequestrifying the cap or individual cap related projects. That concludes my presentation. I'd be happy to answer any questions to the council may have. Thank you for the presentation. Are there questions that Council members have of staff at this time? There being it is right now, not as a regulatory document but as a policy document. I am pleased to hear from the staff that even though we're on basic choice, we can still meet our goals by 2040, thank goodness. Yeah, I mean, the staff has been out there for years now. That is well just vote on it. That's my guess. That's my hope. Thank you. All right. How many requests are there from citizens to be heard? We have 17 requests to speak. My thinking is that the prudent thing to do is to take some public comment, but not have, Look, this is a very, very important issue, obviously. And I think the Council ought to be delving into it and doing a good job and then voting on an appropriate motion. I don't think that's possible. To. and doing a good job and then voting on an appropriate motion. I don't think that's possible to do tonight. I'm ready to kind of begin this process. Again, I'm ready to schedule a special meeting if need be to deal with this, but I'm very doubtful about the wisdom of voting on an up or down motion tonight. How many pages is the draft? I believe we're about 85 pages. And it ain't got it ain't got the attachments. Without the attachments. And then with the attachments and the 180 projects to look at and so forth, how many pages does it run to with attachments? Probably close to several hundred pages, I think, all that with the technical appendices and all that. I will confess before the whole world, I haven't read it. I'd also promise you that if it were put in my hands, and I was given the time to read it, I would read it. I would intensely read some aspects of it, and I'd be able to, I think, bring to the dius a point of view that might be beneficial, but at least it would be an informal one. So again, I'm not taking an upper town vote tonight. At least if my colleagues insist, I'll take the vote, but I'll vote it down. I'm not gonna just be rubber stamping something, certainly something I haven't read and understood. That's my point of view. So with that, well, I'll call and councilmember Traceeter and then we can take some public comment. I think we should put a time limit on when we want to get out of here tonight. All right, let's think about what we can do between now and 10.30. Councilmember Traciter, this is your item, and I want you to say whatever's on your mind here. Thank you, I appreciate that, I will. So I understand the desire to read the draft thoroughly. I believe this draft has been in existence for about five months at least. And we discussed it in the last council, the previous council to this. I am not sure why we should delay it further. That is why I am interested in upper down vote and I'd love to hear what my colleagues have to say. Thank you. Very well, I'll call on Council Member Carol. Yeah, just briefly, I think I kind of closer to the mayor. I do want to make sure everybody has a chance to speak, and I want to hear from everybody here, and I feel like the public testimony is not going to be able to beef. And again, and just speaking for me, I want to be able to process it. This is the kind of item that should be number one on the agenda, and that's no one's fault. It's just the way it works, and we all have equal opportunities. This is the big one. There's a lot of attachments. There's individual driving limits for cars and mandated solar and OC. I thought it was... the way it works and we all have equal opportunities. This is a big one. There's a lot of attachments. There's individual driving limits for cars and mandated solar and OC. I thought it was OCPA 100%. But I can go back in and look, but I can't make, I don't know if I have informed a vote I can do. Concerned about costs. And again, this is just from a process perspective. I want to hear what everybody's got to say. I very often find new things and things, new things, and I'm moved sometimes about what people are saying. And... I want to hear what everybody's got to say. I very often find new things and things in front new things. And I'm moved sometimes about what people are saying. And there's a way to get here. I'd like to do that. I can't possibly see a legal. I know at this point, so a lot of the speakers about not going to be able to get to a legally enforceable meaning, get the city sued by a climate action campaign like San Diego has been. That's just not where I would be. So yeah, we're in a little bit of a kind of, I would probably be more in favor of continuing it to the sugarano very one here, but we can hear testimony and keep going. All right, Council Member Traceter, I'll call on you once again. Thank you. Yeah, I think there's always a reason to delay this and it has been delayed for a long time. That's fine. I don't expect everybody. I think Council Member Carol voted no on the previous discussion the last council Just want to get these votes on record. That's all. Thank you. All right. Let's Take some public testimony Thank you, Marif, I could call forward E planet thunderstormer Doug Elliott Emily win Tomas Castro and David and we'll limit this to 90 At Lumbiae, City Council will determine which other remaining blah blah blah. All meetings are scheduled to terminate at 12 midnight. So you just dropped yours and you tried to do this because maybe I was going to some public comments about, well, if I started talking to you last month and you didn't do anything, maybe that's understandable, but then I follow up next little bit later and nothing happens, no motions or anything. That gives the appearance of racketeering and conspiracy. Today the chief I had face face contact with, I'm talking to the community outreach team not police officers, they said they can't take a report. So I was going to try to talk about some things like, well, the media collusion that they're colluding with the criminal enterprise that it's not negligence based on no direct conflict warfare at the hippies when we were aside at Dean Lockhart-Dorff's dealing with what we have now including the corruption that I was going to read, distraction from institutional negligence, maneuvering, coordinate distraction, systematic failure of governance, that just happened with you. And how about the possibility that maybe the cartels are actually behind the scenes are supported and encouraged by their government, but at the face value, they don't do that. That is definitely possible. It's a way to do social engineering. And oh man, I'm just, really, I mean, it says right here in the thing that everything is supposed to be considered up until 11 and you stop at 12 and what are you doing now? You're trying to get the public comments chopped off. I don't even want to talk to you anymore. Thank you. It's a citizen to us. Doug Gallia. Thank you for your comments, Mr. Relia. I don't know about this stuff. I rest you, I rest you. Why is that person on my butt when he should be talking to you and you? He should have my back, not up in my face. Why don't you arrest me? Thank you for your comments, Mr. Elliott. Thank you Mayor. Again, I'm Doug Elliott, Community Services Commissioner. And in this this context I'll also add that I've been serving on the Community Advisory Committee for for the Orange County Power Authority and I Want to acknowledge and appreciate the vice mayor Contacting me last week and asking me to continue in that capacity So having said that once again, I'm only speaking for myself. So climate change is here. The fires that devastated so much of the state, they're not seasonal anymore. They're a year round danger. And it's not only California and the West. We're seeing reports of wildfires in Long Island in North Carolina and beyond. It's become a nationwide and continent-wide probably a global phenomenon and climate can't wait. It seems as though the city since 2021 has been kind of backsliding a bit in its climate goals. It slips lighting away as Paul Simon put it. So I would favor option one. I don't think we need to go back to 47% renewable option or delaying until 2045. Cleaner energy will be available. Your time is up. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Elliot. Emily Wynn. Hi, City Council and members and thank you so much for taking the time to listen to me. If you would pull the microphone down so we can hear you a little better. Sorry. My name is Emily Nguyen. I'm a resident and student at UCLA studying environmental health. I served on the Green Ribbon Environmental Committee under Irvine City Council about four years ago. So I was there for the passing of the Achieve's resolution and the development of the cap. And I can say we've been talking about it for quite a long time. I can sit here and talk about the horrific fire that we experienced up in LA, but I just want to say that we have had our fair share of fires here too and they're becoming more and more frequent. So by adopting a plan as bold as option one, I think that having something that we can mitigate and have control over, we should be able to implement that. And around that same time of the fires, I found out that I had developed asthma for the first time in my adult life. And so that is the same for many residents of Irvine, children and adults, and so I could say that acting now will prevent our condition from becoming worse. And with that, I urge Irvine to move forwards and also avoid withdrawing from the OCPA just because it not only puts the cap goals at risk but also puts more lives at risk as well. No more delays. Our future is dependent on you so thank you. Thank you for your comments. Tomas Castro. Welcome Mr. Castro. Thank you Mr. Mayor. Good evening Council members. My name is Tomas Castro with Climate Action Campaign and a long term Lime Time time resident of Woodbridge. I want to thank Council Member Traceter for bringing this item forward. The last time this council discussed our cap was in June of 2024, the nine months that have passed since then have only served to delay the implementation of this plan. The cap represents our city's strategy for addressing climate change. The more we wait, the more unready we are for the decades to come. There's no reason for further delay. I encourage this council to move forward with option one to implement the cap with all deliberate speed. It also bears remembering that the cap goals cannot be met without participating in OCPA. OCPA offers our city more renewable energy than with SE heat. much is clear in staff's own presentation. In the past few weeks it came to light that our city manager has been playing games with our local CE. At whose direction we can only guess. We cannot keep undermining the climate policies designed to protect our community from the impacts of the climate crisis. Please move forward with option one and stay on OCPA. Thank you. Thank you for your comments. Next, David and a fact that also call forward Umadevi Rao, Kevin Lee and Tiffany. Mr. Mayor and members of the City Council, thank you. I'll keep this short and I'll keep this quick. You've had you've been working on this since 2021. I've seen Irvine work on things a lot quicker than this and I know you guys can do it for this item too. So I'll just say adopt the cap, do it as fast as you can since you can do it for other items, and adopt the cap with a 100% renewable electricity option. And that can only be achieved by being an OCPA, so I encourage you to stay in. Thank you. Thank you for your comments. Uma Devi. Hi there. My name is Uma Devi Rao. I'm here to support the cap. I believe that the cap should be adopted with all expediency. I was lucky enough to be born here in Irvine, and now I've gotten my chance to move back out here and enjoy this amazing place once again. When I was searching for apartments, my mother commented to me about how 30 years ago, when she first moved to this country and was living here in Irvine, all the streets I saw before me now were filled with orange groves. I fear that by the time I am telling stories to the next generation, they will no longer be able to grow those oranges here. The implementation of a cap is our opportunity to ensure that pollution does not go unchecked and that we work to preserve the city for future generations. In addition, I believe that we will only be able to meet the goals laid out in the cap by staying in OCPA. The state of California is requiring a 40% pollution reduction by 2030 and one of the most expedient ways to achieve that goal is by using power from renewable sources. OCPA provides over 40% of its power from renewables where so-called Edison does not. Please implement the cap and stay in OCPA. Thank you. Thank you for your comments. Kevin? Good evening, council members. I know it's really late, so I'll keep this brief. Please adopt option one. Stay in OCPA because it will be the easiest way to keep our renewable options, protect Irvine residents' choice. I'm a long time resident of Irvine in District 3 and would be really sad for my option to be taken away and it would be very difficult for Irvine to maintain its climate targets by 2040 so Thank you very much and please adopt the cap as soon as possible Thank you for your comments next Tiffany Good evening Irvine City Council members. My name is Tiffany. I'm a researcher in the biomedical industry and a climate advocate. We the people need you to act with urgency the climate crisis requires. There's no room for broken promises. Planting trees in Irvine is not enough. Solar rooftops are not equitable. F fuels need to be reduced significantly at a faster rate, and as clearly stated by the presentation given, the best way to do that is through community choice energy programs like the OCPA. We're already seeing the effects of climate change with unprecedented wildfires and intensification of hurricanes and record breaking drought. It's not all doom and gloom though, there are many possible outcomes. The good news is we already have all the technology we need for a livable future. We don't need to invent something new or gather more data to prove that the climate crisis is happening. What we do need is decision makers like you to do the right thing. So, respect democracy, keep your commitment to reduce fossil fuel emissions at the rate we need and stay in the OCPA and vote for option one. Thank you. Thank you for your comments. Our next speaker is Anker. Anker, you may unmute your mic. Hi, I'm Anker. I'm a junior at Orange High School and I know that myself and a lot of my peers in my school believe and know that the higher crisis is a huge issue It needs to there needs to be a certain action to solve this at every single level in the city to the national government And we want our environment to be a leader in sustainability for us and for our futures I would love that the city strongly support the CPAs that residents can have a choice of cheaper and greener energy, but we cannot reach capables without the CPA renewable energy. In addition, I think that providing alternatives to driving in and questions and questions and questions and questions and questions and questions and questions and questions and questions and questions and questions and questions and questions and questions and questions and questions and questions and questions and questions and Slayton. Dylan, you may unmute your mic. Hi, thank you for having me. I want to highlight the importance of Irvine's need to speed the implementation of the cap. I have friends whose family members have died on the pavement from heat stroke. I don't want to be someone who has to tell that same story, but the climate crisis can change that. We have to both mitigate and adapt to it. And regardless, California legally requires us to produce emissions by 40% at 2030. And at minimum, the cap should be updated as a part of the general plan anyways and It would be shooting ourselves in the foot to withdraw from OCPA. I I cannot stress this enough Renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels, but We can't achieve renewables under a profit-based system. SCE won't achieve that for us. We'll still have more expensive bills anyways. We need a community-choice power like OCPA to achieve Irvine's and California's goals. We have the opportunity to be a leader for Orders's County. We have the ambition to do it and we should do option one because of that. Thank you. Our next speaker is James. James, you may unmute your mic. Good evening, members of the council. James from Woodbridge here. I grew up hearing that climate change was coming, that it was the biggest problem facing humanity and I was aware of it on some level but I had never hit home until in 2020 orchard hills had a major fire and climate change was not just happening to someone else. It was happening to us and And the year after the climate action plan got started. And what here we are four years later that fires and LA have just happened and we still haven't adopted the climate action plan. We've had enough time to read enough time to deliberate. The time to act is now we need to adopt option one implement the climate action plan with all due haste, and as shown in the presentation, OCPA is going to be absolutely critical to achieving the climate and carbon emission targets that are being set. So please help save the planet, help save Irvine and adopt option one. the other one is the other one is the other one is the other one is the other one is the other one is the other one is the other one is the other one is the other one is the other one is the other one is the other one is the other one is the other one is the other one is the other one is the other one is the other one is the other one is the other is the other one is the other one is the I just want to mention a couple things. One, obviously the necessity for OCPA as shown in your own slides to be a part of this. And to stay with OCPA, please. Both for personal choice and for the need to actually do something about the climate. I'd also like to mention, kind of push back a bit on something when council members said about the commissioners may be not being, you know, very knowledgeable. All the commissioners that I've known and that I've met and worked with have been incredibly knowledgeable and have worked for years more than some people on the council and trying to improve urban planning and push for positive change. Finally, I would like to mention that if you want to look at the people who are most capable of speaking on this matter, I'm head of a science department with like four science credentials in California. And you have on-city council, Dr. Kathleen Traciter, who is, I'm just reading this off her website, off of the website about her professor, ecology and evolutionary biology school ofological Science, fellow ecological society of America, fellow American Association for the Advancement of Science, fellow American Academy of Microbiology, PhD, Stanford University, Biological Sciences, research centers, microbial biogeochemistry, ecosystem ecology, and global change. So listen to the people who know what they're talking about. Thank you. Thank you. Next, how many more do we have left? So listen to the people who know what they're talking about. Thank you. Thank you. Next. How many more do we have left? We have five that originally signed up and then we have four additional requests that came in after. Let's just go with the five right now. Go ahead. Our next speaker is telephone number three four seven three four seven. You may unmute your mic. Yes, this is Deepak. It's pretty clear that Katherine Schroceder initiated all these people to come forward here tonight. They want to talk about the wildfires. The wildfires started because of Southern California Edison. That was who's to blame for that. So to blame it on climate action, our climate change, I just don't get that. And all these people say the same thing. They don't want to get out of OCPA. So you don't want to get out of an organization that is full of fraud in their corrupt. So you just rather say, well, let's stay in there for climate change. Well, that's not going to do any good, especially when we're not even getting 100% renewable energy anyways. These goals are just so unrealistic. You can't tell existing homes to stop using gas furnaces or gas stoves. I mean, that's never going to happen. Not in a million years is that going to happen. Stores aren't going to stop selling gas stoves. They're just not, you know. And all this is going to cost, I can't even tell you how much money to go through all this. It's never going to work. It's just, it's a fake thing. And it's an illusion. And renewables are an R cheaper. You're right, so then why is OCPH charging more for renewables? That makes no sense. And then people wanna blame the city manager. What for? City manager didn't do anything. You come with these allegations, but you have no proof of anything. Thank you, your time is up. Oh, okay, thank you. Thank you for your comments. Our next speaker is Craig Preston. Craig, you may unmute your mic. Hello, Mayor and City Council. Thank you for staying late. I understand we all want to get home. Thank you to the staff person that spoke about how Southern California Edison is no longer offering renewable energy 100%. I've tried to get on that plan and was rejected. And so I'm glad that they are aware that SEE does not offer it right now. And in terms of the last speaker, I just want to say that the economics are a piece of this. There's science and there's economic science. And so right now we have a problem because we've been successful to wake people up on the need for green energy, but it takes time for them to build the capacity. And so that's why these prices have gone up temporarily, but we know that it's coming. They're going to bring that renewable energy price down. Thank you for your time on this. I'm right across the border across the border, in Costa Mesa, but you guys are a leader in Orange County, and thank you for your years of leading in terms of being city planners and doing OCPA. I'm very supportive. My niece and nephew are the most on my heart. I appreciate Councilman Carol saying, you know, let's care about our families, even if we want to get home tonight to them I care about my family as well and want them to have a safe future in many years to come and right now speed matters Just talked to anybody that knows about the Titanic crisis that it's time to turn the boat and turn it fast So we can avoid the worst of the worst with climate change. Thank you Thank you for your comments Our next speaker is Casey Gallagher. Casey, you may unmute your mic. Hello, my name is Casey Gallagher. As a climate activist and future environmental professional, I'm just heartened on a daily basis as I watch our federal government slash transformative climate policies and got the necessary regulatory agencies that protect our public lands. Every day, I see a headline that breaks my heart for our planet. Given these circumstances, I believe that local climate action is the last beacon of hope for securing a liable future for generations to come. That being said, I am advocating that the City Council direct staff to implement the climate action adaptation plan with no delay. I'm sure that the Council is aware that the State of California legally requires a 40% pollution reduction by 2030. In order to be successful in this pursuit, City Council must direct more people and energy toward the implementation of a cap that will achieve this goal. One way that the Council can work for achieving this legally required pollution reduction is by directing staff to develop a cap to mitigate emissions in the general plan update. Climate policy is most effective when there are active adaptation and mitigation strategies to implement. Finally, and I know you may not be happy to hear this yet again, but discussions of implementing CAP must recognize the necessary role that our revised participation in Orange County of Power Authority will play in achieving climate goals. Remaining in OCPA will make achieving CAP reasonable and leaving OCPA will make achieving CAP nearly impossible. Please implement option one. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your comments. Our next speaker is Harvey Liss. Harvey, you may unmute your mic. I, I'm Harvey Lissler, I'm resident of Vergonne and the licensed professional civil engineer. App has a crazed wrong assumption that when a subscriber at the OCPA is enrolled in 100% renewable, is that they are actually contributing towards an energy contract that would put that amount of renewable generated energy on the electric grid. However, the grid is already saturated with renewable generated energy when the sun is tiny, which is why presumably SCE puts people who want to subscribe with their 100% renewable rate on a perhaps now long time waiting list. To get more renewable energy on the grid requires renewable energy provided during the evening, solar panels with battery storage where hydraulics storage, or wind power, and we're awaiting construction of those facilities. Now, I don't understand how OCPA was able to put more renewable generated energy on the grid while SE was a hundred years of experience with their own experts was not able to. Their answer is obvious. OCPA could not. It's a scam. I strongly suggest we will be any perceived contribution to reducing fossil fuel usage by OCPA to zero. Irvine ratepayers have been paying roughly an extra $20 million per year to OCPA for so-called 100% renewables. I think it would be far better and actually accomplish benefit in the environment if the money would be spent on solar panels and battery backup with city subsidies than throwing away the money on OCPA. That would actually be a 100% renewable energy. I have a real impact. Thank you, your time is up. To emissions instead of, thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your comments. Our next speaker is Ion Cretian. Ion, you may unmute your mic. Hey, evening council members and staff. Ion Cretian with Climate Action Campaign. I wanna thank the staff for their steadfast work on the cap and for persevering despite changing direction from different councils. Wanna highlight a few things in this discussion. First regarding OCPA, slide 12 shows that some of the problems with the discussions to leave OCPA. First is that SE's basic product, it shows right on the slide, is much dirtier than OCPA's basic product. Also, the SE's green rate product is not available. It's great to have that clear because we've heard contention about that in the past. Also important to note that so-called Edison has increased rates 90% in the last 10 years. Irvine residents deserve a choice. Also what is missing from these discussions of Irvine's participation in OCPA is the tens of millions of dollars in funding that OCPA will be able to provide Irvine in the coming years for all the things that Irvine is going to need to decarbonize the city for all of the energy-efficient appliances for the batteries for the EV chargers. How will Irvine pay for those without OCPA? The answer is they won't. That those programs just won't happen because the money won't be there. So I also want to appreciate the council's deference to commissions tonight and point out that the Sustainability Commission last year recommended that the Council adopt a cap with measures consistent with zero emissions by 2040 The Irvine has now spent approximately $750,000 of taxpayer money on the cap Legonne Beach recently finished and adopted their sequel qualified cap and much less time than Irvine has been planning to plan.ines. Thank you for your comments. And Mr. Mayor, that concludes all the original requests to speak. There's four more in the queue. All right. Let's take the floor and then figure out what we're going to do. Thank you, Mayor. Our next speaker is Brennan. Brennan, you may unmute your mic. Thank you. Implementing the cap for Irvine is not just necessary. It's urgent. As a UC Irvine student, majoring in environmental science and policy, I'm deeply concerned about our cities slow progress towards its climate neutrality goals by 2040. Despite ongoing development since 2021, tangible actions towards actual implementation of the cap seem to lag significantly. This is particularly alarming as we move away from initiatives like the OCPA, which support our transition to 100% renewable energy. Considering that building energy usage constitutes nearly 40% of our greenhouse gas emissions, this shift could undermine our efforts to mitigate climate impacts. Moreover, the potential withdrawal from OCPA is not just a step back, it's just a leap in the wrong direction. By my calculations looking at the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of the city of This is a massive setback in our fighting against climate change. I appreciate the mayor's candor and admitting that he has not read the cap, but we're now four years into its development, and it's time for the city to take more device evaction. While I acknowledge concerns about rate increases associated with renewable energy, it's critical that the city also accelerates other measures, particularly in transportation, which is the largest source of our emissions. We need bold decisive action now to ensure... Thank you, your time is up. Thanks. Thank you for your comments. Our next speaker is Raquel. Raquel, you may unmute your mic. Hi, my name is Raquel and I have background in public health and I understand the importance of prevention, whether it's in healthcare or climate action. In public health, we know that investing in preventative care saves lives and reduces long-term costs. It is often undervalued because people don't see the immediate benefits. The same applies to climate action. We must invest in bold preventative measures now to ensure a livable future for our community. Extreme heat, worsening air quality, and growing climate threats are not abstract issues they're personal. Irvian is pride itself on being a leader but we're falling behind on climate commitments. Climate change is not just an environmental issue, it's a justice issue. The most impacted communities in Irvine particularly pickpile color and low-income residents are already experiencing higher pollution burdens. I urge the council acts now, implement option one for the cap without delay, integrate it fully into the general plan, stay in the OCPA, and commit to real emission reductions. We can't afford empty promises. We need action now. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for your comment. Our next speaker is Sid. Sid, you may unmute your mic. Hi, can you hear me? We can hear you. Okay. So I'm just going to make this quick. I'm actually first time doing public comment. I am a seal beach resident. And I actually am under SoCal Edison. So I'm already facing the devastating cost here in SoCal Edison. And I even installed solar panels, but it didn't drive the costs down. So I'm just, I'm actually kind of interested in OCPA despite its own past. I think it can be fixed because like, I know that Irvine actually created OCPA. So I'm saying just take care of your project, take care of your baby, don't abandon your baby, you know. That's all I have to say. Thank you. Good night. Thank you for your comments from CEO Beach. And our last speaker is Don Geller. Mr. Geller, you may unmute your mic. Thank you, Carl. I'm glad to be the last speaker. I'll make it real quick. I'm a long time resident of Verrvine, and I also serve on the Finance Commission. As everyone knows, I'm a real advocate for the commissions. And we have a new council, and we have new commissioners on the Sustainability Commission. And it would be, I think, vital to listen to their opinion. They can go through these hundreds and hundreds of pages of documentation. That's what they do. We also have a consultant and let's take advantage of what the consultant has to say. We're spending a lot of money on this program and let's get our money's worth from it So my recommendation is not to have a vote tonight bring it back to the council after Sustainability takes a look at this. Thank you so much and good night Thank you for your comments that concludes Yes, I see that Council Member Traciter, which is to be recognized. And Council Member Mai, let me just say what my intention is. We're going to. I'm going to I'm going to offer a motion to adjourn at 11 o'clock. And obviously, that would mean continuing this to an appropriate time when we can give it the appropriate time for further review and further public comment and final action. With that, I'll recognize Councilmember Traceter. Thank you. I move that we approve the cap as developed currently, which assumes a 2040 carbon neutral date and 100% renewable energy option. Thank you. There's been a motion offered. Is there a second? A second. Council Member Liu, seconds to the motion. All right. Would my colleagues like to speak to the motion? Council Member Mai. Not the motion, but I would like to add some comments in general. I'm sorry right now. You could do that sure No call for the question yet. Thank you so All this came before the previous council before we were here You know 2045 we have a state requirement coming up and as many of you know, I am the vice chairman of OCPA, but I'm speaking as a council member here, but you know, I want to make it clear that when we made a motion or when we spoke to withdrawing OCPA, it's not like we're able to turn off a light. It doesn't work like that. There's a lot of procedures, a lot of policies to actually do that. And it's not gonna happen overnight. People are concerned about that. That's one thing. And as we spoke earlier in the day, maybe five hours ago, director Go, who's on OCPA with me, are working with OCPA in terms of finding out how they can contribute to Irvine meeting our goals as well. So this is an overnight thing. I'm not sure why this is the big discussion on this here because it's not going anywhere for a while and you know we're trying to work through it. I also want to say climate is an issue and I believe climate is an issue as well. When the fires happened just months ago, I personally coordinated 15 trips up there to help people with supplies and clothing. You know, one thing I also did not review this cap fully as well. It's a long, pretty huge regulatory document. And one of the things I always look at is the fiscal impact. Maybe it's in there, maybe it's somewhere I don't know. But I didn't see any fiscal numbers. We are elected to represent the people here. And a lot of the people that I talk to on a daily basis or call in or write me emails or I meet in person, they're very concerned about CEQA. And they're concerned about a lot of the regulations that are coming down. And these are people that their low income, their fixed income seniors concerned about what are they going to do after one of their utilities break. I mean, how they're going to be forced into this. There's a lot of miscommunication. There's a lot of things that you know I know council member Triscedor said that she's agreeing with a lot of them but not 100% of the items here and of course we shouldn't because there's some of the things are overreaching in terms of how many apartment units do we have in Irvine, 50% of people are renters. The landlords are gonna have to upgrade their utilities. I mean, they're not the utilities, but they're gonna have to upgrade all their water heaters, solar, I mean, there's a fiscal impact there, and I would like to see that as well. I'm just adding some some commentary to that Some of the things that I consider and some of the things that the people that I represent consider and Would like to know more about before we do anything I think that there needs to be a little bit more discussion than going into a rushed Rush vote tonight as well, but I'll leave that up to my colleagues. Council Member Traceter. Thank you. Yeah, I really appreciate the vice-merer's concern about CEQA and I want to emphasize that CEQA is not part of the motion. We already, the previous council had indicated that we do not want the cap to be bound as a unit by Sequel. So I'm hoping that that's not a concern. Yeah, I think we all know on the council that the cap is on the table. It's something that folks discussed during their campaigns. We know that it is coming up. I assume I just I had thought the people who said that they really emphasized the environment and want the city to be the greenest city would be very motivated to read the document, the draft. Again, I'm not quite sure why that has not happened. But let's just have a vote on it tonight. I just would love to see where everybody stands on the council. And again, if we really want or vying to be the greenest city, this is the foundational document to do that. It has many, many measures that could accomplish this, including trees, including expanding the number of trees. But this is way beyond that. And it is something that we should be doing as a city. We can't have it both ways. We can't say, yes, we want Irvine be the greener city, we emphasize the environment, and then keep delaying the cap. Thank you. Let me just make a comment. I got a briefing from our staff about expansion of our transit system. Irvine connect. Will we see you there? Would you lower that screen so I can see your face? Thank you. You gave me an outstanding briefing. And one of the options was to take the successful experiencing with Irvine Connect and to extend it. There are four different extension options. And looking at them, I was very, very impressed. This was a dramatic transformation of our feeble efforts so far to turn the corner on transit. That's something that's real. It's real and it's doable and we have identified funds that we can do it for. This is the kind of thing I want us to focus on. Adopting a climate action plan tonight doesn't do anything. It does not do anything. It's the hard work of implementation that makes the difference. Now I don't know, maybe I've been asleep the last six months. Where is the plan with all the appendices and the 180 measures? Have you distributed those to the council? No. Hi, Mayor. Actually we have only distributed internally within staff. Yeah. So, you're re-nast to vote on something we haven't even had the opportunity to read. I promise you, if I get the draft plan with the 180 measures and the appendices that really are where the rubber meets the road, I will read it. I will study it. I would feel like a fool just voting yes tonight as though we're doing something. With regard to something, none of us is red. If anybody else other than Councilmember Traceeter has read this, I'd like them to raise their hand now. Have you read it? You read the whole thing? The appendices as well? Okay. All right. Council Member Carroll. Thank you. By the way, let me just say before turning to you. Unlike you, I'm not only sympathetic, I'm actually enthusiastic about real implementation of a climate action plan. But just saying yes tonight to something that hasn't even been distributed to us seems Seems to me to be a very poor example of government. The policies may are the cap document and the measures were considered last June by the City Council adopted and moved forward. There's an implementation plan and additional technical memos that we've been working on. There's technical memos per the staff presentation. Don't comport given the to carbon neutrality in 2040 given the recent decision in December by the City Council related to OCPA and what our enrollment is. The recommendation that the staff put forward, I think that Councilmember Tr trecedors offering is that we finalize, publish for 30 days, my understanding of the first option, Luis, correct me if I'm wrong, is that we finalize the document, publish it for 30 days, and then bring it forward. And so apologies, we haven't published the final document yet. Everything that we've been talking about is based off the document that was published last June Thanks, can I can I go now? Yes councilman. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so Far be it for me to tell the truth up here So yeah, I'm not for this. I'm not for individual driving limits for cars and forcing families in many vans to stop driving and have their car stop or whatever these advocates want to see. I'm against removal of gas stoves, gas barbecues, and gas fireplaces and single-family homes like my own. I'm also against, let's say, mandated solar for fixed income seniors that will have to retrofit their houses for solar at 89, 91, 96-year-old widows and widows trying to sell their homes and transfer title. I'm against a lot of it. Well, talk about being enthusiastic mayor. I'm not enthusiastic about political trap. So when I talked about track one and track two is unequivocally extremely clear to me that the Democrat Council member number one is trying to trap Democrat Council number two. I don't wanna be part of this charade. I don't even want this continued. I want this off the agenda. I would like to move the table. It was someone wants to second that. Because I'm not interested in this. It's 11 o'clock and this is a clear trap. No one on staff called me. When did you get the memo staff? When did you get the memo to put the hundreds of pages of climate action adaptation plan that I've read, and correct me, or haven't read it recently. When did you get that memo to put this onto the City Council agenda in Irvine, California? When did you get it? We received the memo last Tuesday. So that's how many days ago? Seven days ago. Seven days ago. OK. OK. I appreciate all public commentaries and I'm going to thank the mayor for taking every last one, although I would have taken it differently. But you did that. I also don't want to see it being trapped, even though you want to have a climate action campaign. So we'll see who really is consistent around here, we'll see who's really authentic around here by giving the mayor a lifeline and letting this person review it as opposed to track getting trapped into a silly vote because you know what I wanted 20 minutes ago. I wanted a vote and vote real no real fast. I don't want to do that now. I want to table it. And when the mayor feels like it's appropriate to be held before the City Council of Irvine, he can bring it forward, or work with Council Member Traciter and bring it forward. So, you know one can second this, but I move the table to side him. Well, let me ask you a second. Can I ask for a second? I move the table to suggest item. Well, I need a clarification on, I'm not part of the procedure. I need some help here. A motion to table is not debatable, is that correct? That's correct. Thank you, ma'am. I need some help here. A motion to table is not debatable, is that correct? That's correct. Thank you. May I have a second? That's why I motion the table. Well, that's why I'd like you to... It's not debatable. Can I have a motion, please? What's on my second, my motion? I have a second. Thank you. Can I have a vote? All right. Motion to table is before us. Table indefinitely is that correct? Correct. Until you and Jeddah till someone wants to bring a before us and we can bring everybody but I'm ready when you guys are ready. I'm not ready for the motion to be indefinitely. Done with the sherry. With that with the. Clerk please call the roll. Councilmember Carroll. Yes. Council member Go. Yes. Council member Liu. Yes, we forget a chance to come back and review that. You could agenda for the next meeting council member. Okay. Council member Traceeider. No. Vice Mayor Mai. Yes. Mayor Aigren. No. Carries 4 to 2 with Councilmember Traceter and Mayor Aigren voting no. All right. The matter has been tabled. That concludes our business for the evening. With that, I'll offer a motion to adjourn in memory of Juanita Moe, who was absolutely instrumental in the wonderful bike trail system that we have today in the city of Irvine. So moved. I moved it. Oh, second. Second. All those in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed. Meeting's adjourned.