I'm not mayor Jerome Stox. He is missing this evening but we'll be joining us next week. I'll be here in his absence. I'd like to call this meeting to order and can we get a roll call please? Yes, let the record show that all members are present with the exception of Mayor Stox. Excellent, thank you. Our pledge this evening, Mr. Bill Dean, would you like to lead us in the pledge? I'd be honored to have your pledge, Mayor. Please join me. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which stands one nation of the God, indivisible, with liberty and justice are on. I saw that I rolled back there, Mr. Dean. It's an interactive meeting we have this evening. We're going to begin tonight with several special presentations and proclamations. The first is going to be a presentation and award of grant funding from Cal South Soccer Foundation for field development at our new Incinitas Community Park that's being constructed as we speak. And I'd like to invite David Dayleon, who's the President of CalSouth Soccer Foundation, to make a presentation this evening. Good afternoon, Madam Deputy Mayor and members of the City Council. On behalf of the CalSouth Soccer Foundation, I'd like to thank you for giving us the opportunity to help the development of the Ncd's community park. We work with city staff in getting the application completed and we're able to award $65,000 towards the project in the development of soccer fields. I would first like to thank John Franken, who is the person we work with during the process and made it easy. And then also want to make sure that you keep us in mind when the project is complete because we always like to see our projects once they're ready to be used. So with that being said, I think the check is here. Sorry I should have grabbed that. It's a code act moment. Council, would you please join me? So again, on behalf of the Council of the Foundation, I'd like to thank you and I'll be presenting this ceremony. You'll check up $65,000. Do you want to get some space again? Yes. So deputy, thank you. Thank you. We like to try to make it easy to give a smile. Thank you for trying to hear what I'm going to go to the other side. You can have it. It's not going to look good. It's going to look good. Do we all fit? Yep. Right. Thank you. We'll see you at the room. Thank you. Thank you. We'll see you at the room. Thank you. I also, my name is Bradley. I'm on the board at the Institute of Soccer League. And on the half of the soccer league, I wanted to also thank Cal South, thank the board and thank City Council for the work they've done to make the Insaneous Community Park happen, and we're looking forward to working with the city as well as Cal South to make that a great facility. So thank you very much. On behalf of the league. Excellent, thank you, Brad. Thank you very much. And don't hesitate to let us know if anyone else has a jumbo check out there for us. Next, we're going to give away a little bit of money. And we're going to go to a recognition of John DeWalden Associates for phase three properties and long-war real estate partners for achieving the silver certification level in the lead for core and shell rating system for the Pacific Station project. Thereby completing the city's green building incentive program and the incentive portion that we have for Mr. DeWal this evening, $2,000 rebate check. And we also have a gift certificate to a restaurant that's located in the new Pacific station so that he can dine in his project. So John would you like to come up and accept that certificate please? Thank you. I thank everybody for all their help in terms of making the six station a reality just to let you know we have sold all our condos and we are having a celebration next Wednesday from 4.32 seven. Apsifixation with food and music and we're unveiling the actual plaque or placard for the lead stuff as well as announcing a few other things. We're officially starting up our SDGN solar installation there. Whole Foods is announcing there's zero waste program at the store here at Encinitas and demably announcing that we've now surpassed halfway towards our megawatt challenge in terms of a megawatt of solar power and down to Encinitas. Thank you. Thank you. Applause. Let's see. First things first. How about a check? And your restaurant certificate. We expect to see you there. Your certificate reads, in recognition of leadership and green building by providing energy efficient measures and achieving certification as lead for core and shell silver. This certificate of appreciation is hereby presented to John DeWalton Associates, phase three properties, Long War Freel Estate Partners, this 12th day of September, 2012. Thank you, John. Okay, next I'd like to invite forward Kelsey Mullen from USGBC who is going to be presenting a lead plaque for our civic center. Okay, good evening, Deputy Mayor Caspar and Council members. I'm Bill Wilson with the City's Public Works Department. I just wanted to give a little history of the project that we completed several years ago and have worked towards this recognition. Back in December of 2007, the council approved the Civic Center roof replacement and energy conservation improvements project. The project included the installation of a new cool roof, the construction of a 95 kilowatt photovoltaic solar array, insulation of skylights and solar tubes and the replacement of the existing heating and ventilation and air conditioning or HVAC system, we replaced that with a central plant that had thermal energy storage system and that project was completed in October 2008. Several efforts that we've done since then to improve the efficiency of this building include the installation of high-efficiency restroom fixtures and hand-dryers LED parking lot and perimeter lighting and the consolidation of server-ins for structure using virtualization technology In April of 2008 council approved the pursuit of leadership and energy and efficient design or lead certification for the Civic Center. The rigorous certification process included documentation of a wide variety of sustainability efforts, including energy and water efficiency, sustainable purchasing and contracting, solid waste management, green cleaning, and other indoor environmental quality efforts. Several notable highlights that we've achieved during this past few years is that we've reduced our energy consumption and cost by about 35% annually. We did a waste audit here in the building and we were diverting nearly 90% of our waste from the building through recycling other diversion methods. And we've seen a 42% reduction in water use on the property. And that has helped us save about $60,000 annually on our operating costs here for the Civic Center since 2008. And finally on August 1st of this year, the City received notification from the U.S. Green Building Council that the Civic Center did achieve lead for existing buildings, operation and maintenance, silver surface certification, and Kelsey Mullen from the U.S. Green Building Council is here tonight to present the city with the plaque and certificate recognizing that achievement. I want to say a few words if you don't mind. This is a pretty special evening for me because even though I'm a national employee of U.S. Green Building Council which is headquartered in Washington, D.C., we do have a very small office located here in North County and North County is where I find my home. And I was proud to find out that the Civic Center was pursuing lead certification and to look down onto the roof and see that giant solar array from the libraries a pretty special thing. So it's a real honor for me to be here today. I'm here representing US Green Building Council and the diverse group of its member organizations that work hard on contributing to the lead green building rating system. Comprehensive, rigorous, and flexible, the lead rating system works throughout a building's life cycle as you're experiencing here with this existing building to build a healthier, maintain a healthier, long-living green building. Twelve years after the first project earned lead certification, lead is now a global green building rating system. With buildings in all 50 states and over 120 countries, through lead the US Green Building Council now certifies over 1.6 million square feet of building space per day. And this building is, it should be very proud to be part of that. And the lead for existing buildings rating system is the fastest growing rating system that we offer and for good reason. Over here today to recognize the City of Incidentities, for your leadership and environmental stewardship and by earning the lead certification in setting a standard, setting standard for what other buildings should strive to achieve and we applaud you for that. We thank you for taking this step towards lead certification and it would be my honor to present to you the lead silver certified plaque. If we could you a question. I'm going to ask you a question. I'm going to ask you a question. I'm going to ask you a question. and the love. All right. You have a beautiful, I don't know. I can't believe the ones who just drop it. Everybody leave it on the ground. Thank you. All right, that's great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. You're welcome. You're welcome. You're welcome. You're welcome. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, Bill, don't go away. I have you up next for the Ed Co. Salonis Center recycling program overview. Hello again. Just a quick background on this since the implementation of the California Integrated Waste Management Act, which is also referred to as AB 939 back in 1989, the act mandated that local jurisdictions meet solid waste diversion goals of 25% by 1995 and 50% by the year 2000. Since then, the city has consistently met and exceeded these mandated requirements. This has been accomplished through a variety of programs that are offered by the city at Co-Acenae Cycling Service and the Salana Center. As new regulations and technologies have been introduced, programs have been expanded to accommodate the recycling and proper disposal of a variety of items, including electronic and universal waste, plastics, green waste, and construction waste. The Public Works Department recently updated the City Events Needless Environmental Services Guide, which we originally produced in 2007, and the guide is now available online as well as at City Facilities and show you real quickly. On the web, from the main page, you can get it from going to I want to. And where is it? Find environmental services. And first item here is the guide. And you click on there and you can download that. It takes a second. And part of the guide too, that we did, we produced some standalone posters that are kind of like a matrix with a variety of recycling services that are offered and options. We've, I think you all have copy up there that you could take a look at. And so that's, we're pretty proud of that. And being able to have it online now we can update it and keep everything as current as possible which the old version we couldn't do. So tonight to expand a little bit on some of the programs that we're offering some of the newer services that are available. We have Jeff Richie who's vice president of Ed Co-Waste and recycling and Bill Dean who is the managing director of the Salana Center and they're going to give an overview of some of the new programs. Good evening, I'm Jeff Richey, my assistant's Bill Dean. I have to operate himself. He's technically savvy. Slide one, Bill, could you? Sure. How about that one? Can you burn that one? Okay. This is a picture, obviously, of automated recycling truck. 12 years ago, we automated recycling from the stackable container program to a single stream automated cart to make it more convenient to recycle and add more materials over the years. The first year of that program, NCS Resets began recycling 20% more volume in the first year and we continue to ramp up as we add more materials to this program. As Bill indicated, the City of S&D continues to exceed the state mandate goals for diversion programs as required by state law. As an edco is also committed going forward as more materials as markets develop worldwide to adding more materials to the to the program and it will give you a couple examples of that. And next okay this is a picture of bailed rigid plastic. This is plastic one through seven in the bottom every container. There's a number with a triangle on it. We expanded, we originally would take only CRV items, one through seven that we expanded into rigid plastics of all types, including flora pots, agricultural items, toys, et cetera. And we expanded that once we found worldwide markets hydrology, hydrology, hydrology, hydrology, hydrology, hydrology, hydrology, hydrology, hydrology, hydrology, hydrology, hydrology, hydrology, hydrology, hydrology, hydrology, hydrology, hydrology, hydrology, hydrology, hydrology, hydrology, hydrology, hydrology, hydrology, hydrology, in our recycling programs by weight. Let's go to slide three. We also recently had about six months ago Styrofoam to our recycling program. And we are targeting, or polystyrene, common known as Styrofoam, we're targeting packing material that you will find in computer components, appliances, etc. that big block material. We are not recovering Styruphone cups or packing peanuts at this point. See the, we recover this material, we densify it and we return it back to manufacturers to produce items such as picture frames, baseball, crown molding and other building materials that you'll find commonly in new construction and reconstruction. We also accept foam at our buyback centers in addition to batteries, needles and syringes, all types of electronic waste, appliances, and we've added fat, oil, and grease during Thanksgiving when people want to deep fry their turkeys. Our facilities are, you can find our facilities on our website echodisposal.com. Bill, next slide please. This is a January 1st this year, a new commercial recycling law when you know fact known as AB 341 that requires commercial and multi-family dwelling units to participate in recycling programs. Currently the City of Estonia already has a pretty aggressive recycling program for multi-family complexes and esonetus, I would say build profit 95% are currently compliant with that. We also currently have 50% of all commercial establishments in esonetus are recycling and involved in recycling programs and we continue to add new program new accounts every month in it and in the target are compliance with this new state law. The state law does not really have any enforcement provisions in it at this point in time, but the long term goal is to meet a 75% diversion number by 2020. So in addition to the focus on commercial recycling, supplements are already existing construction and demolition recycling program in Ancenditas. As new construction projects develop in the city, we recycle wood waste steel concrete, asphalt brick, dirt, drywall, and other materials at our Sarmarcus recycling facility. So the city has an ordinance that requires that new material be diverted from the landfills. Last, green waste. We collect green waste every week from residential units in the city of Vensinitas. For many years we're taking that material to the Palomar transfer station where in turn it was being transported to the Otai landfill, ground up shredded and used as alternative daily cover for the in landfill operations. For the past two years, we're taking this material from Ascendedis and Oliver Northcanger's Tictions to the Esquedido Transfer Station where we take it from their transfer trucks to East of Tomecula, which grow up and used as compost material on a farm. East of Tomecula, again uh... again as we could move forward is more uh... markets open will expand our programs and is more composting capacity in in the county of sanitary becomes available we plan to add commercial food waste and other items to our commercial green waste program um... in an effort to continue to meet the same five percent goal uh... one thing on the ad we, we have a single flyer here. It's in your packet that shows very simply everything that recycles in our single stream program. We've left some over here in the corner for the public if you'd like to take that. Without that, thank you and I'm just building. Thank you. So Jeff has told you about all the mechanisms and so forth that help you achieve some pretty dramatic reduction in diversion. But we here at Salana Center provide a service of educating individuals so that they can take personal responsibility for diverting material. And we do that through a number of programs. The first program is we offer a soil saver, a compost bin, backyard compost bin that individuals can receive at a almost half price that is available at Salana Center, that is allows them to compost their green waste, food waste and materials at their own home and in their own backyard, using that compost as a mulch material to add into their garden. We also do vermicomposting. And vermicomposting is essentially composting food waste using worms. These bins that we have are built, a bed is built of paper. Worms are added to it and then homeowners can feed their food scraps, vegetables, and fruits to these worms. And the worms, the kids love this at the grade schools. Poop. And it is the castings which are then used in the garden and are a great source of both nitrogen as well as can be utilized as a spray that to reduce pests on garden plants. To help individuals and incinitists, we provide workshops, compost workshops to our workshops where we explain the full process and educate them how to use their compost bins and the ways that they can take personal responsibility to achieve diversions. This one is the one that we do them at San Diego Botanic Garden. We also do garden education where we help educate people to grow their own organic vegetables which reduces the amount of water that's needed in their garden, also the need for chemical and pesticides, which also is a benefit to the water runoff here in the city of Encinitas. We are involved in the Encinitas Union School District with a scrap cart program. This is a, these are carts that we built that are at each one of the Encinitas school districts, where the students divert their food waste which is used in worm compost and bins. They divert CRV containers which they then sell to generate revenue for their school, as well as additional hard plastic material which Jeff so graciously accepts, and then the material that goes to the landfill. They have achieved close to an 80% diversion in the Ensenia School District, which directly is a dramatic reduction in their expenses, which can then be used in the education of students here in Encinitas. We do school education programs, and so we go into the classrooms, we go into full assemblies and help educate students to become more responsible in how they live, and more important to go home and indoctrinate their parents in how they should be responsible individuals living here on the planet. We are involved in the community as well in giving new opportunities. We are on September 29th this month. We have our first project called Scrub the Scrub. And this is where we have invited community members to come to Indian Head Canyon, where we will go out and clean the canyon. But we've also invited individuals who are experts in both the habitat in that particular area, and also the impact that these canyons have on our water bodies as watershed for the Batuitos lagoon. We think this is kind of an interesting way to not only help achieve a positive result and clean the canyons, but also to connect people to have a better understanding. And so with that, I would like to thank you. And I would be done at this point, except for one last item. I have been very involved in these community events where we look to achieve a zero waste. And we have done that at the Incentives Wine Festival. And most recently we had a zero waste event at Miracosta College where the Rotary Conference, 534, had a district-wide conference, and it was very successful. And we had some dramatic and wonderful presenters. And one of the presenters seemed to forget that there was a zero-waste event and rushed off and left some material. So I just so happens that I happen to have that material that is unfortunately not recyclable. So, Kristen, here you go. I had a feeling you were going to do that. I just had a feeling. So you can't recycle tiaras. Reuse. Reuse. Yes. Absolutely. Reuse. And actually, my son used to bring home a half-eaten apple in his lunch box. And it happened every day. And I started asking him this year, well, where is your apple that you used to bring home? And he said, oh, we have a new recycling cart. It all goes to the worms. So the kids know what's going on. That educational component is really working with them. And in conjunction with curious George, who also does the composting videos. So anyway, thank you for all that you did. Do we have other comments? Yeah, I actually did have a couple of questions. It's great to know that the green waste is now actually being composted, so because I know a lot of people have asked for that, so thank you very much for that. You do mention about not accepting the light bulbs. How do we dispose of the light bulbs? The incandescent as well as the ones I call curly, cute ones. How do we dispose of those safely? Those are called universal waste and they're really, you go to Hazard's Waste Facility, or if you have materially in your garage, as part of the C-Series program, has this waste, you just combine that with paint or other materially having your garage, you want a dispose of and contact the company and they'll come by and do a dordid or pick up. But that's universal, that is classified as universal waste and hazardous. So they will pick it up with the pain and the pests, whatever, fertilizer thing. Great. Thank you very much. E-Waste and the writers like that. And appliances. Is that everything from the Mr. Coffee Pot to the refrigerator when you Different places that would take appliances anything with a plug for like chronic waste the larger appliances have to be That we take and do it The suppose of a different way we pick all that material up in a special pickup We just don't touch hazardous waste part of that's a different contractor. Okay. Thank you very much While you're here, Jeff, I just had a question about the cardboard plates, cups, that sort of thing. So even the recyclable plates, those cannot go in the recycle bin. Anything with a wax content on it is not recyclable. But the other, the paper ones that are... Paper ones, we typically don't take those because they are soiled, but that content of paper we do get them through the system. They are recycled but we don't encourage it because of the contamination of the paper. And right now with the markets as they are in China, contamination is a big problem. They're a very picky about contamination. So you have to be very careful to make sure we get all that material as clean as possible. Okay. And then Bill, just one question for you. You mentioned a half price on the composting bins about how much does that cost to? Those are $40. $40, excellent. And then I just wanted to add that every, the third Saturday of every month, at Salana Center of El Camino Rial, we have a e-waste collection event and we will also collect the light bulbs as well. Yep, okay, thanks. Council Member Meere. Yeah, thank you. My son doesn't enjoy the recycle bins at the school district. He told me he'd like to have more of them because the lines are so long. It reduces his recess time. I told the past on to his mom. But I have a question for you Bill. This is a really good document. How do you make this available to people that stack them in the back to you? Is there any discussion about mailing the matter and anything like that? We, several years ago, we actually did a citywide mailing this year to keep costs down. We produced a limited amount about 2,000 hard copies. So we have them available at Library Community Center here at Civic Center, Public Works offices. So they are available at those facilities. And we have them. We've provided some to Solana Center so they distribute it to, you know, street fairs and public events like that. But we don't at the moment we don't have plans to do a mailing is pretty costly to do that. Any further discussion? Okay, well thanks to all of our presenters this evening. We're going to move along to oral communications. Do we have any speakers? We have six. Six, okay. Well we have a maximum 15 minutes donated for this portion of the meeting. So anyone who we do not get to can present after our regular agenda. The first three speakers on our oral communications, Jonathan Holtz, followed by Thia Scott Garner, followed by Rudy Manica. Hello Deputy Mayor, City Council members, it's a pleasure to be here tonight. I'm going to present a slideshow first. Welcome you to my neighborhood and might be a little surprising. My neighborhood really is about my neighbor, 703 Passaflore Avenue. This is the vehicle that helps create my own private garbage dump next door for the past five or six years. This is one of the four or five vehicles in the driveway, packed to the gills with garbage. This is the front of the yard. This is on a good day. One of giant dumpster, I've seen four or five packed with garbage, but the truck really just uses the dumpster as a refilling device. This is again close-ups of the garbage. This is the front porch. This is the front door. This is the front yard. And this is the backyard, my view from the backyard now. What's this about? 2008 I made a complaint to the city of the city Government it was the code enforcement They were great about looking to the garbage trash the fire danger the environmental and health danger that occurred here We've been terrified since 2008. The result, Watt infestation, Mice infestation, Crow infestation, the environment has significantly changed. It's a different neighborhood. Watt's dying in front of guests, Patio, just kind of like a comedy routine from hell. File odors, we've had dead animals, property values we believe have been lowered. Now this is a letter 2008 sent to me acknowledging this issue. Four years almost to the date. Co-enforcement has worked hard and diligently to try to do something. At least 30 complaints by me and my neighbors since then, four years have passed. Many attempts, no solutions. This remains a significant health, fire, danger to our neighborhood. This has been wasting thousands of city government dollars taxpayer dollars, hundreds, if not thousands, of hours by the ordinance enforcement people. And we're frightened. And let me say in all due respect, City Attorney's Office has not seen fit to protect citizens, but rather protect the privacy and property of the person living next door. Who, by the way, is doing this? I have, I know for sure, on many other properties in Incinitas. The city is putting their attention on this. The bottom line is this. Even if this gets cleaned up, we believe it's going to happen again. Next door, for reasons I can't go into. So unless the city gets serious about putting teeth into this ordinance, we're going to be having this conversation again. We ask you to protect us, the entire block, the neighborhood, and stop worrying about the details about how to do this gently and carefully over four years. It's enough. Thank you. Theas Scott Garner followed by Rudy Monica followed by Jim Miller. Yes, hi deputy mayor city council members. I live next door to Jonathan Hull so two houses away from 703 pass oflora. And in the last four years ever since this garbage has become a huge problem, we've had countless rats that we've caught. I have some little storage cabinets in my side yard as far away from that property is possible, but rats are constantly getting in there, even though I, you know, tried to do everything I can to close up all openings. I find rat feces in there, even though I tried to do everything I can to close up all openings. I find rat feces in there. I don't know how many rats we've killed. I've just found a mouse in my house the other day, but the rats are a major problem, and it's also a huge fire hazard. I mean, if any of God knows what's inside the house, but just judging by what's outside the house, we can only guess. And if any of that catches fire, the whole neighborhood would go down. So it's a tremendous health problem and a tremendous safety problem. Fire hazard. And we just want the city to do something about it that actually has teeth and works. Because four years, I know Jonathan's put a huge amount of time into this and so far it just keeps coming back. So I'm really asking all of you to do whatever you can to get a permanent solution to this. Thank you. Good evening. My name is Rudy Monica and I live at 714 Passiflar on the same street as Jonathan and Thia and everything they're saying is absolutely true. Not only is this property unsightly, it's really a health and fire hazard. They're not exaggerating when they talk about rats all over the neighborhood. I had to call the county of San Diego, Vector Control, who came to my house and they gave us bait and mouse all, a rat traps to put up and they're telling us, hey look what you got across the street that's what's causing this. And not to mention it's a fire hazard. We have crows all over the place flying around with trash that are picking up and dropping it on our property. It's really unsightly. It's been going on long enough and really it's time to do something about this. Thank you very much Jim Miller followed by Lynn Moore Good evening my name is Jim Miller and I'm co-chairman of the WaveCrest event It'll be um The Saturday This is our 33rd event and over 23 years right here in insinitas. So we hope that everybody will come and enjoy it. We think we have a pretty good event this year. And we really want to thank working with Crystal Roth with the city of the construction down in the beach. She was very good at adapting and helping us with this year's event. So thank you very much. And I have posters. I think Councilman Bonn has had a collection of all of them or pretty narrow of them. I had them for the last 20 years, but you didn't have them the first year I was here. You're right. That's your last one, Jim. last 20 years, but you didn't have them the first year I was here. That's your last one, Jim. That's sad. Thank you so very much. You should sign his last poster, you know. Thank you very much and please come to the event. That's Saturday, 6-3 down at Moonlight Beach. Lynn Marr, and then we'll have one other public speaker haven't exceeded the 15 minutes. So we'll hear both speakers. So I'll be Lynn Marr followed by Julie Graboi. Thank you, Lynn Marr. I'm glad you did do that because part of the new written policy is that at any time, if there's a question, I'm glad you did. I'm glad you did. I do that because part of the new written policy is that at any time, if there's just one or two extra, you can always agree to let them speak at the beginning. Some people can't wait to the end and have to go home. So I appreciate all the work you're doing on sustainable growth or solar energy. But I do want to point out that there are some issues that people have had with Pacific Station, like the underground parking garages, the dirt was excavated from that and was dumped on the Lucadia beaches and called sand. And there was some kind of little award given for sand replenishment kind of through the sand lobbyists on that one. But later the good thing about it was when there was another big project with underground excavation of soil, they only let like I think one or two truck loads of that dirt because they said it didn't have good enough quality. And so at least it's I think the result was there was more careful control. It does cloud the waters and it smothers some of the natural flora and fauna and it's not always good. You know some sand replen not always good. Some sand replenish when it's good. It doesn't always mean that more is better, especially but it's not sand but it's dirt. So I think also on the Pacific Station Project, which I know has been sold. So it's not, it's Mr. DeWalb sold that but There has been some concern about if all the condos which he said are all now sold We're occupied. I'm not sure you know, I wish we could ask questions on during the annual council can but I wish the public could ask questions about items. Just maybe take one or two minutes to ask a question from a special presenter. Because then we could ask some of these questions and not have to take up oral communications doing it since we're limited to only five or so. But there was questions about parking because like the low income units and I don't know how many there were I think maybe only two or three at the most. But they're only allowed one parking spot in the underground parking. And if all the restaurants, you know, and all the offices and all the retail shops and all the condos are occupied, there won't be enough parking with the underground parking and seven parking spaces were taken off the street. So there were some concerns about Pacific Station and when you talk about getting awards and stuff, I think you should, I don't want to rain on anyone's prey, but we need to look at the aspects that affect our community like lack of parking and increase traffic and see how that was dealt with too. Thank you. Julie Gervoy and then we did receive one additional oral communication. Do you want to hold that to the end? We have until 46 so Good evening Julie Gervoy. Last week marks an important anniversary. One year ago, last week, the General Plan update draft was released to the public. And I'm very concerned because Council has directed the staff to provide the red line version on two occasions. And as I mentioned before, the draft general plan is 800 pages long. And because they have created what's known as a crosswalk, which is a sort of an index that causes people to use both the current general plan and the updated draft and then the third which is the index, you have to flip between three different documents to check each policy. And so that's really close to, probably close to about 1,200 pages and people have to negotiate these three documents. The reason that I'm mentioning this is that I have observed a lot of the meetings. We have a tremendous group of volunteers who have worked on G-PAC, Iraq, on the different commissions. And as you can imagine, it's a big job for them to review the plan, but I really feel that a red line version is very important, particularly at this time, because the volunteers have been working hard. And I think that to make them compare different elements without a policy-by-policy format is a lot of work. I personally wouldn't want to do it. And it's not only for the people who are in the commissions, but I think that for the council to consider this, you also need to have good information. And certainly there are a lot of stakeholders. Many citizens are interested in this plan too. So I would really ask, I know that this is going also Mr. Bond. So I think everyone voted on it unanimously, although I didn't check it. But I just feel really, I feel a little bit upset because I know that all of you are up here because you want to make a difference in this community. And I think that you have provided clear direction on this and this is taking many many hundreds of hours more work for people to evaluate it so thank you very much. Final speaker either has to reduce to two minutes or it can wait and hold comments. Excellent. Thank you very much. We'll move on. Do we have any changes to the agenda this evening? Yes, item number five has been pulled from the agenda by the city manager. And then we do have a request to speak from the public on item number three. Item number three. Okay. Item number three Okay, do we have a motion to approve Consent calendar items one two four and six Some move I'll second that I can get to the screen The motion in a second please cast your votes. The motion passes unanimously. Okay, with that we'll go to agenda title number three which was pulled by the public, the adoption of ordinance 2012-10, entitled the ordinance of the City Council of the City of Incinitas California, amending the Incinitasities municipal code chapter 2.28, section 2.28.010. Heads of departments and officers, section 2.28.070, director of public works, eliminating section 2.28.080, director of engineering services, and adding sections 2.28.097, 2.28.098, and 2.28.099. Patrick Murphy, are you up on this one? No, Tom. Hey, Tom. This is a, I think, a routine or a ministerial process of the second reading, the final reading of an ordinance to bring the municipal code into alignment with the reorganization that you all approved through the last budget process of combining the public works department and the engineering department with one director. And this, this municipal code is intended to document that. With the council like to hear the public speaker first. Okay. Lynn Mar. Hi, Lynn Marlucadia. Yeah, I'm all for consolidating the apartment. I just had a... When this was brought up on the first reading and I didn't really get my question answered, but on the last part, appointing authority to the department managers of the City Manager's Office. Well, when I read the staff report on this, I got a brief explanation from our City Manager, Gustavina, but I didn't understand. It just seems like you're putting a lot more discretion into the city manager's office for hiring and firing. So I wasn't sure. It seemed like it was leaning towards more of a strong mayor-style government because it seems that what's happened in the past is the city manager, the mayor has been appointed by the majority of council. So then therefore the city manager kind of takes directions from the mayor more than any other single council person. So it's kind of leaning towards a strong mayor issue for me and I didn't understand that change why and Mr. Venus had something about actually he had blessed discretion and I didn't understand his explanation at all and that's part of the problem when we you know we don't get to speak before we hear the discussion because we can ask questions after you have discussed it or made a motion. You know, it's like our part of contributing is over. That's why one time I did ask that you could make the motion, you know, for discussion and then discuss it a little so then we could ask questions before it was over for us. I mean, for you and for us. But anyway, I just think that if we're going to have a new ordinance, which carries a lot of weight, it's part of the Internet's municipal code that included in that ordinance, that does relate to hiring and firing authority. I wish that you could say as far as hiring, it could be part of the ordinance that it would be open process so that it would be publicized openly and not just like inter-departmental or something. I know that that's one of your goals. I think I heard that was one of your goals to have a more open hiring process, but I think it would be really good to have that part of the code. So we all know that it's not cronyism or pain, pain favorites or, you know, that's not just who you know, but it's what you know and, you know, what kind of integrity you have. So I wish it could be part of the code, the actual hiring process being open, an open process. Thank you. Councillor Member Bond. Yes, thank you, Mayor. I think I'm going to move approval of item number three, but I just wanted to comment that there are two people that these five council members hire, fire, pay, and whatever. And that's the city attorney and the city manager. You don't really want us involved in the process of hiring department heads and under, nor do you really want the public involved in that process. It's open with respect to who is hired, when they're hired and that is made very public in a very public way. But if we had the whole city involved in everything we did, we'd be here forever and I'm not sure that it would be something that everyone would really like. Council Member Barth. Thank you and I would be happy to second that. I just had a question if the city manager could kind of answer, let us know exactly what the conversation was and those questions that you answered for Lynn Mar. Thank you. What I had mentioned at the council meeting in Tom correct me here if I go off track. But what this amendment does it puts the hiring authority on the IT manager, the HR manager, RIS manager, instead of the city manager, that's why I made the point that actually keeps me away from that, let's them run their departments and hire their people. So it wasn't I was trying to take more control of that, that's more decentralized, if you will. And our hiring processes are, in fact, very public, as you know, we're involved in many recruitment as we speak and feeling the majority positions so far have been filled outside the organization. Any other council discussion? Okay, we have a motion and a second. Would you please cast your votes. The motion passes unanimously with Mayor Stocks absent. Okay, thank you. That concludes our consent calendar items. We're going to move now to our regular agenda items. The first agenda item number seven, the adoption of City Council Resolution 2012-72, upholding an appeal for the removal of engineering department conditions related to required dedications, right-of-way improvements and trail improvements with the exception of storm water cleansing improvements associated with the construction of a single family residence with a detached accessory unit and detached barn for the property located at 1794 Crest Drive and provide direction on whether this action sets a precedent for other development on Crest Drive south of Melba and portions of Birmingham Drive. Easy. Honorable Deputy Mayor and City Council. On August 15th, the council upheld an appeal that overturned the department's decision to require road improvements and a trail along Crest Drive and Portions Birmingham Drive. The council upheld that appeal with the requirement that they would still look at water cleansing for the property along the street. Attaches the resolution, and we've also provided two replacement pages to that resolution to more reflect council's action. Condition SCA4 is modified because it does make preference to a certain street standard and curb standard to just simply say the applicant shall remove and replace the existing private driveway to provide adequate distance from the intersection as approved by engineering department in the field. And then also page 15 of your agenda condition, SES3 is no longer needed. That's a standard condition to require dedication, but the council deleted the five foot dedication on Birmingham. So that condition is deleted. The first issue is simply coming back to Reflect Council action, hopefully on their appeal and upholding that appeal. And that's why you see the notice of decision with the cross out. The second part of the resolution, which was not on the agenda for council at the last meeting because you focused just on the Cres property is to get council's direction and guidance on whether or not this is president setting. Through the public roads standards and through the modification process, this allows any modifications to road standards to be president setting for a street or a segment of a street. So you don't have to do it each time you come in with a certain lot in a development that council can establish that for a segment of the roadway. So in the resolution we do identify two segments for council's consideration as to whether or not this is president setting. And that would be for Crest Drive from Melda Road, which is to the north, where your curb gutter starts out to the north and on Crest and extending to the south to the existing curb gutter, which is just north of a state vista court. So it's basically all of the existing unimproved no curb gutter improvements along Crest Drive. The second segment the staff is recommending is Birmingham Drive for the portion of those properties that are located on the corner of Crest Drive and Birmingham. The same did receive a request to extend those two segments in certain areas. One of the requests wanted to extend the no road improvements requirement on crest to include the existing curb gutter sidewalk to the south. Staff's response to that is that this area is fully improved. Any changes to the fully improved street such as a median items or whatever this individual is suggesting really needs to go through a traffic calming process, not a establishment of no road improvement process. We don't even know how we would implement that if a new home came in in that area or was demolished and rebuilt and we'd have to require no road improvements. So it really needs to go through a different process to do any modifications to the existing road standards in that area. The second request is to extend the no road improvement, and when I say no road improvement, no road improvement, no trail, with the exception of storm water cleansing, from Birmingham, from Crest Drive all the way to Lake. Staff has noted in our responses that there are some larger pieces of property on Birmingham, closer to Lake Drive. And that gets us a little nervous about just extending it without any evaluation of that segment of the road because it is a downhill road through his drainage and we feel we need to look at more evaluation of that segment before we just simply establish this is the road improvements. So there are a couple options that Council could do in this area is one, they could wait for future development and require the future development to go through a process to modify those road improvements to reflect the character of the community. So we can see what that development is actually requiring or imposing on that street. Or the other option is simply at this time, the council could ask the engineering staff to go through the public roads, modification standards. And in your attachment to, I believe, is that process, which goes to the traffic commission, the planning commission that comes up to the council. So you could do that now or at a future time. We just feel that a little uncomfortable of trying to impose that now because we do have some larger properties that may dictate or need or warrant some level of improvements. Attached is the council's resolution, 2012, dash 72 for your consideration. It would include the two correction pages in it and any council direction on what that president's setting really means for these streets if you agree with staff or if you want to extend them or retract them. So what happens are any questions that you may have. Councilmember Bonn. Thank you Mayor Councillor Mimber-Bahn. Thank you, Mayor. Pat, just so I'm clear on this and we understand it. The code requirements are just that. There are requirements to do. And if we have as we have done here, we've said, okay, on certain sections of this street, these requirements will no longer be required. Doesn't mean that, oh boy, you go back out now and tear out your sidewalks and gutters and whatever that are in place in that area. Am I misunderstanding that or is that accurate? Most of the area on the segment of, correct, you're correct. But most of the segment on, crust drive that we call out from the South Point to the North Point on their aren't any improvements. There are a couple improvements that were installed pursuant to engineering standards, but we don't go and remove those. So this would apply to any new project coming in. So any new project would not be required to hold to those rigorous for the exception of drainage and circulation would not be required to handle meet the requirements that we have acquiesced to giving up. With correct, wherever Councillor decides that segment of road is. We have made a recommendation of where that would apply to. Okay, thank you very much. Okay, we do have four speakers, preliminary questions, or would you like to wait for the speakers? I can leave. Okay, let's go to the public speakers please. So the first three speakers, Brian Schaefer, followed by Heather Schaefer, followed by Kevin Farrell with a time donation by Anna Crohn's. Anna, are you here? Greetings, Deputy Mayor and Council Members. My name is Brian Schaefer. I live at 1077 Crest Drive. I want to applaud you first and foremost for your decision on August 15th on the Crest Project. I'd like to leave here tonight if at all possible with some kind of direction from you folks on the requirements that are required for roadside improvements on my property. To give you a little bit of history two years ago due to the extent of structural damage to my property we made we came to the decision to rebuild instead of remodel and so we went through the process we had numerous revisions with the city with engineering staff etc et cetera, et cetera. And earlier this year around June, we finally got everything approved. And we started construction in July. Part of those requirements were extensive drainage requirements throughout the yard, the backyard, the side yards, bioretension basins, all kinds of stuff. And the roadside improvements were the previous Pavre 7 feet along the whole frontage of our property as well as a five-foot DG pedestrian path. Well the status of that property right now is we're in the middle of construction and I've got a call on August the 16th from the insinita staff saying whoa stop you may not have to do the road improvements. Well we have a ditch out there okay have to do the road improvements. Well, we have a ditch out there, okay? Part of the improvements have been done, part of them have not been done. And so what happened was we went ahead and we met the very, let's see, a couple days later with the staff Greg Shield, Pat Murphy and others and asked to get some direction from them. What do we do? How do we finish off our project here? And they said, well, we really don't know because the City Council wasn't clear at their last meeting. So please, write a letter to the City Council members. Have it presented at this meeting and get some more direction from you folks. So really, all I'm hoping is that we can abandon the requirement to put in the previous payvers and the DG path and sort of return the front of our yard back to where it was a pre-construction process. You guys have any questions from me? Thank you. Heather Saper, followed by Kevin Farrell and Deputy Mayor. I'm pleased to be back after a wonderful meeting we had one month ago. Part of that meeting was the Birmingham corridor and what was going to happen on the Birmingham corridor as well as Crest Drive. And when I did the petition to the general public, I also had all of the residents on Birmingham sign those petitions as well. And because Birmingham changes in zoning as you go past Lake Drive to our one zoning, that's why we tried to include that because that's essentially the entry to Crest Drive. That's as we go from our more dense portions of the city to our more rural portion. So my request is just that the City Council review this and possibly consider that portion, which was always on all of my recommendations and everything that I tried during this process, and I've worked over nine months on this process. And so I just would like you to consider that. All the other items that you may have received in that letter to Pat Murphy from yesterday, I think we pretty much resolved everything. And they are going to look at all of the issues. The one thing that Pat that you had mentioned was that staff is currently respecting the 40 foot right of way on Birmingham. But if staff indeed was honoring that, they wouldn't have asked us for the IOD on our property. So I believe it's still at 50 feet, but we're not looking at making it 40 feet. And they've never really done that. But across the street on the Dent property, that has been dedicated as well. That has an IOD. The Stonebreaker property has an IOD. The Hayward property has an IOD, the Hayward property has an IOD. So if indeed we are going to keep everything as a 40 foot right of way, my request would be that we abandon those IODs that are on all of those portions all the way down the street. And I did bring, you know, some photographs of that. And to address the corner, which is at Lake, and then this is as the street continues and goes through the rural residential properties. But the corner does already have curb wrapping around the corner at lake on both sides. And so even if we did start at lake and then go henceforth up the street, this already does have all the corner and the new radius and the new requirements that's required on larger carrier streets. And so my request is just that if we could, I have another project coming up on Birmingham and if we don't include it, I'm going to be at the same position I was over the last nine months going through this whole process all over again and I'd like to avoid that. Thank you for your time. You did say you were happy to be back. I'm so happy. Oh, I'm always happy. Jim, I think George Heter-Cobb, when you leave, I'm going to leave you too. Again, to Ophidus. A little history of Crest Drive. I mean, you talk about a, I mean, the only person in this community has anything bad to say about it, but here it goes. If you go back to Before Incorporation, it's a sacred cow street. If you go to the south end of Crest Drive, before incorporation, somehow they're well organized up there. They were able to get the county, the close off the south end of Crest Drive, when point-city of Heights development was about to go up. They did not want that traffic coming down their sacred street. And they put up what we used to call the volleyball court, about a 30 foot wide sand trap. Today it's overgrown. Then before, after the city was incorporated, the Crest Dry people were able to get the certain city council members for a favor once in. Well it took the lake drive people to realize that all the traffic from all of crest from commuter to whatever was going to go down on their street. They held it up for about a year and a half and two weeks before the first council meeting two council members were going to get reelected. The city Council voted to close off Crest Drive on the north end. So no commuter traffic could go south. When the election was held, one council member did not choose to get reelected and the other one didn't get reelected. But they could care less whether all that traffic was going down the late drive. So now here we see years later that, you know, they've organized again. They obviously have got another people in the city to go along with them. But once again, they could care less. They've got the speed bumps for, they've got the stop signs three. They have a secret. I only want to go there. It's really a through traffic street. I don't care how curved how nice the trees are. But the lake tribe people have suffered for all that traffic for years. Now as all those greenhouses are going down, there's going to be more houses on lake drive. Are you going to put stop signs and speed bumps on lake drive? Or you know, caress dry people, they got their way. I feel sorry for those on the way. Thank you. Boots public speakers. Okay, we'll go back to council discussion. It's got to council member Mir. Thank you. Patrick, as it relates to special case streets, how would this process change if it was a special case street? You've already given direction for the special case streets, so the engineering department will come back with a resolution to designate Birmingham as a 40 foot special case street. That does, no, that's not our resolution, that's a separate resolution. There's a separate resolution that have to come back to the council for you to approve a special case street Special case street doesn't change the type of road improvements. It only simply Identifies the width of the right away. So it's going to change it from a 50 to 40 So even though that's not officially adopted we are not requiring the five foot dedication any longer on either of those properties That are up there at Crest that Kevin talked about. There may be someone Crest that have already given an IOD to the city, so that dedication may already be there. I think you mentioned that too. Councilmember Barth? Thank you. That's on. The section of crest at the very south end that is already improved. You know, it does seem sort of out of character with the rest of it, but it is also completely in character with itself and it's a dead end. So I can't see changing that in any way. I mean, it's the way it is and I don't want us to try to change that at this late date. I mean, I concur with the staff on that section of the development. It is the end of crest. There is, it's a dead end, it's almost a coldest sack, I suppose. So you're talking about giving them potentially traffic calming situations that they feel it's necessary, not quite sure how a dead end street needs traffic calming. That's usually the, that usually does the trick. But that is exactly what you're referring to correct is is that um where my hand is that's the old volleyball court that's now just a vegetation sidewalks are on both sides of that they connect it to the community to the south and sidewalks curb start where the redline ends and sidewalk is on one side with red line and hence. So now there is that one property just passed the red line. Right. That it's not one of those like developed projects. It's a curb gutter. It just does not have sidewalk. So if they wanted to do something different we could consider that leaving it the way it is that they came forward to us, we would have an internal process to do that. Is that correct? Correct. You could in this resolution say for that one property, no sidewalk. Okay. And just finish it today, tonight. Yeah. But curb got to go all the way to the edge. Right. I don't know why we would require sidewalk for without one property because it's not going anywhere. Right. It would be an isolated section sidewalk. All right. Well, I support the staff's position on this with that little modification that we exclude that piece of property. That's kind of my take on that one. And you want to say something? No, I was just going to second that for discussion here. OK. I'm not sure if that's the question. I'm just going to second that for discussion. Okay. So that's a motion that we on the first request that we accept the staff's position with the addition of that one currently unimproved parcel on the east side. And we'll modify the resolution to include the APN for that parcel to say no side block. Okay, all right. Existing curb gutter is there. All right, that's well that's one question about that parcel. Let's say a new property owner came in and wanted to make that property consistent with the surrounding. Is that going to be allowed or not? That would then, he would have to go through a modification, but he'd have to rip up the curb gutter and probably portions of the asphalt because the curb to curb street is quite wider than crest. So it would be a process to do that. A process. Well, I mean, I don't, I mean, a process that I don't know why he would. Right, I'm well, you know, we see strange things here. All right. Okay, we have a current motion. We have a second. Is there any further council discussion on this item? Seeing none, please cast your vote. Motion passes unanimously with Mayor Stocks absent. Thank you Okay, we're gonna go to agenda item number eight the adoption of ordinance 2012. Did I skip? Oh, yes, I just voted on press right right that's minor. Sorry about that Did I skip? We still have to do the second part. Second part. Oh yes. I just voted on Crest, right? Right. That's minor second. Sorry about that. And then after re-perming him, then we need to vote on the resolution as a whole. Okay. On Birmingham against staff is suggesting that because we feel there might be things that we need to evaluate based on future development that we can either go through the modification process, the outline of the public road standards when the development comes in, or if Kevin said it was important to him, we can actually let's go through the public road modification process now, engage that community with the traffic commission then up the planning commission and up to the council and get her to establish so that we can properly evaluate this street. Excellent. Council discussion? Seeing none? Wow, this is quite a night. Well, I would move approval of the latter that we begin that process. So council initiate that process and the policy set that council can initiate it. Okay. That would be my motion. Second. Look at all this discussion. I do have one quick question about that. And the issue of the IOD will also be coming back as well. The special case street as a separate item to us in the very near future. Correct. It will be a separate resolution at that time of the council wants and during to look at if there's any medications that have been to 50 in the area. If you want us to look at going back and vacating those we can talk about that at that time too. All right. Thank you. It sounds like the city manager can curse over here. Okay, we have a motion. We have a second. Please cast your votes. Motion carries unanimously. We have Mayor Stocks absent. Okay, thank you. And then one motion for the resolution. One motion for the resolution. We'll need modifications. Okay. Do we have a motion? So motion. Okay. I'll second that motion. There we go. We have a motion. We have a second. Any further discussion? Would you please cast your votes. Motion passes unanimously with Mayor Stocks absent. All right. With this, that concludes agenda item number seven. We'll move along to agenda item number eight. The adoption of ordinance 2012-11 entitled an ordinance of the city council of the city of Encinitas authorizing an amendment to the contract between the city council of the city of Encinitas and the board of administration of the California Public Employees Retirement System. And for this, we will go to Tom Becker. Good evening, Tom Becker again. This is another one of those ministerial routine processing actions that at your August 22nd meeting, you determined to impose certain terms and conditions of employment on represented group of employees and a similar change in retirement benefits for unrepresented employees. Going to a second tier retirement benefit, a 2% at 60 retirement formula with the high three years for calculating retirement benefits. This is an ordinance that accomplishes that and satisfies per's requirements as far as what we send to them. Council Member Bond. Thank you, Mayor. Do we have any speakers on this? No, we do not. I move approval. Second. If motion is second, any further discussion? Would you please cast your votes? We're ahead of the technology. Motion passes unanimously with Mayor Stocks absent. Excellent. Moving right along to agenda item number nine, presentation of the 2012 citizen satisfaction survey. And for this we will go to our deputy city manager, Richard Phillips. Thank you, Deputy Mayor and Council. I'm Richard Phillips. I work in the city manager Richard Phillips. Thank you, Deputy Mayor and Council. Richard Phillips, I work in the city manager's office. I'm just gonna do a brief introduction. And so a part of the fiscal year, 12 through 17 approved capital improvement work project that the city's adopted was conducting a 2012 citizen satisfaction survey. Now the survey has been completed. We're here this evening to present a presentation on the results. So I'd like to introduce the president of the firm that conducted it for true North research. As Dr. Timothy McAlarney and he'll be providing the presentation this evening, after which both of us will be available for questions. And I'm sure. Good evening Deputy Mayor and members of Council, Mr. City Manager. As Richard said, I'm Dr. Tim McLearny, I'm the President of Trinorth Research. And we're a firm that specializes in working with California cities as well as other public agencies around the state in developing a statistically reliable understanding of the communities that they serve through the use of survey research. A little back on us, we've to date conducted over 800 studies for public agencies. And more than 200 of these were for similar residents satisfaction studies for California cities. And the reason I mentioned that is, as I go through tonight's presentation, I may make reference to how the results we're seeing here in the city events thatiditas compared to what we see in other cities or what we will typically see. So I wanted you to have a sense for the context from which I'll be speaking. Tonight's PowerPoint presentation covers the highlights of the survey. There's a lot more detail in the full report. So if you're interested in digging into the details beyond what you see here tonight, that full report is available. And as I go through this presentation, I welcome questions from Council as I go or at the end, whichever is your preference. Okay, you have that? Thank you. Before I talk about the results, it's probably helpful to review both the purpose of the study as well as the methodology, so the why of the survey as well as the how. This is what we call in the field, what we call resident satisfaction survey, and it's really designed to do two overarching things. The first is to understand or use it as a community needs assessment tool. So understanding what are the community's needs and priorities and preferences as they relate to the services and facilities that are provided by the city. Once you understand what the needs are, the flip side of that is really a performance measurement tool. How well is the city performing in meeting residents needs overall as well as in a variety of specific areas? In what areas is exceeding residents' expectations and what area might it be meeting? These expectations and what areas might there be room for improvement. On to the methodology. We use what's known as a mixed method study here. This was a survey that was primarily telephone based, but we also allowed individuals who were selected for inclusion in the sample the opportunity to participate online if they so chose. And we gave them a unique password to do this. The reason why we use a mixed method is we found that particularly in today's day and age it has the effect of increasing participation rates by just making it more convenient, giving people multiple ways in which they can share their opinions. And we also selected individuals through what we call random digit dial with a cell phone supplement. So we're calling both land lines as well as cell phones. We're choosing those numbers at random and then we use screening criteria to make sure that as we're collecting this data we're monitoring the demographics of who's taking the interviews and comparing that to what we know about the city's adult population so that we're helping to ensure a representative sample of adults. Now we spoke with 400 adults who were selected at random throughout the city. The interviews were conducted in early July through mid July. And now because this was a sample of 400 and not a census of all residents, it's has what's known as a margin of error due to sampling. That's plus or minus roughly 4.9%. What that means is that we can be 95% confident that the results we'll talk about today are within that plus or minus 4.9% of what we would have found had we spoken with all adult residents in the city. Okay, onto the results. One of the first questions in the survey, we ask individuals simply to rate the overall quality of life in incinitas. Would they say it's excellent, good, fair, poor, or very poor? And as you can see here on this slide, residents clearly enjoy the quality of life in the city. We had 98% who used either excellent or good to describe the quality of life in incinitas with fully 71% of them using excellent. Again, I mentioned I've done this for lots of cities around the state and this is among the best score that I've seen. Hard to do better than 98% excellent or good in particular the fact that excellent accounts for more than two thirds of those responses. Go ahead. Following up that question, we ask in an open-ended manner, if the city government could change one thing to make Encinitas a better place to live, what change would you like to see? And by open-ended, what I mean is we ask that statement and then we're quiet. And we listen to what they tell us. We record it verbatim. And then we later go back and review the verbatim and we've grouped them into the categories that you see here on this slide. And there's a few things I want to pop out or want to comment on. The first is the thing that stands out to me having done this a lot is that nothing stands out, meaning usually when we ask this question there's at least one issue for which 25% of residents will hit on the same thing. In Southern California, that's often traffic, right? We'll pop to the top of that list real quick. I've even worked in one city at one time where 60% of the people we interviewed said the exact same thing when we asked this question. And what that tells you is you've got a burning issue in your city that needs to be addressed and it's on top of mind for all your residents. Here there isn't a single issue that tests above about 13%. And so that's a little unusual again. Usually there's one issue that sort of dominates. The other thing that stands out to me is if you combine the percentage you say no changes are needed about 12% with those who a little further down say not sure can't think of anything, you have 22%. So nearly a quarter of the residents we spoke with, when we asked them this question, those who a little further down say not sure can't think of anything, you have 22% so nearly a quarter of the residents we spoke with. When we asked them this question, what could the city do to improve the quality of life in incinitas? They were sort of stuck for an answer. They either said nothing needs to be changed or they couldn't think of anything. That's actually a good response. And the reason being is think about this question, you're really handing somebody a soapbox and saying, stand up, tell us one thing we can do to improve the city, anything as a city, and people are saying, nothing comes to mind or there are no changes. Among the specific suggested improvements that were here, the top was limiting growth and development at about 12%. You also had streets and roads at about 12%. You had about 9% who mentioned something to do with council, improving transparency of government. You had about 6% who mentioned reducing traffic congestion, and another 6% who made mention of improving parks and recreation. Okay. This is arguably the most important slide that I'll talk about tonight. And it's the results to the question, generally speaking, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the job the city of insinitas is doing to provide city services? In this question, we're not asking about a specific service or specific facility and we are asking them to comment on the city's performance in general and because of that it can be considered an overall performance rating for the city. And what you find is that 87% of the folks we spoke with said that they were satisfied. You had less than 10% who said they were dissatisfied in about 5% who were either not sure or refused. This overall satisfaction score of 87% is quite strong. I have seen scores in other cities as high as 96%, 97%, I have seen them as low as in the 40s. So there's quite a bit of variation that can happen. So to be up near 90% or above 90% is a really strong place to be. I will say that if you look at these results broken down across various subgroups of incident as residents. So by age, by gender, by how long they've lived in the city, et cetera. What you find is that there's not a single subgroup that is less than 80% satisfied. So it's the satisfaction score overall is fairly widespread. Now up to this point in the survey we've been talking about things in general on purpose, meaning overall satisfaction, overall quality of life. At this point, we begin to be much more detailed in the interview and we asked about a series of 28 specific services, the top tier you see here and we're asking two related questions for each of these service areas. The first is how important is the service to you as a resident and we ask them to rate them on a scale of extremely important, very important, somewhat important or not at all important. And the bars here you see are both the extremely important score or the very important score. The negative space to the right represents the other two options which are somewhat important or not at all important. And we've simply ranked them accorded from high to low based on how important residents feel they are. And this is the top tier which ranges from, at the top of there, 91% saying that providing fire protection, prevention services is at least very important, for example. And at the bottom of this top tier you have 71% saying library services is important. Not surprisingly, what you see at the top of this list are public safety issues. So fire, emergency medical, law enforcement, as well as what I would call sort of essential utilities like water, sewer, and trash and recycling. So those really represent the top of your top tier in terms of perceived importance. And on the second slide is the other roughly 14 of the 28 in terms of perceived importance. And as you can see down this list towards the bottom, you're finding services like animal control services or holding special community events or providing local art and cultural opportunities. One thing we found in doing this research around the state, and I've been doing this for about 14 years, is before the recession, you tended to see a little less variation in the results when you'd ask this question, why? Because things are good, everyone has money. We don't, in some ways, need to prioritize. We can have it all, right? And so they would say everything is important. Since the recession, we're starting to see a lot, residents are quicker to differentiate. And they recognize that it is an unlimited pot of money and I'm going to have to set some priorities. And so we've seen the results to this question in particular, where you're seeing more variation in from the high to the low. And that's what we're seeing here today. Okay. Same list of services we then went on and asked individuals after we'd rated how important they are to them. How satisfied are you with the city's efforts to provide this service to you? Are you very satisfied, somewhat satisfied, somewhat dissatisfied or very dissatisfied? And what you see here on this first slide, this is at the top tier. There's a lot of green. Green is good. At the top of this list, you had 98% of residents, for example, say that they are satisfied with the city's efforts to provide library services. Similarly, high in marks for providing fire protection, prevention services, lifeguard and marine safety services on down. Everything on this top tier has a satisfaction score of at least 92%. It goes as high as 98%. The rest of the services are shown here. At the top, you have 92% saying that they're satisfied with holding special community events and it sort of trickles on down. And towards the bottom, there's really sort of three or four services that, compared to the rest, have lower satisfaction scores, but still have clear majorities and in most cases, super majorities that say they're satisfied. When compared to the other services we're testing, the lowest satisfaction scores were expressed for managing growth and development in the city. Providing building, planning, and permanent inspection services, I want to make a comment on that in a second. Managing traffic congestion in the city as well as repairing and maintaining local streets and roads. That issue of providing building, planning, and permanent inspections. The reason I said I want to make a point on that and sort of asterisk it is. In our experience in most cities, the fact of the matter is very few residents will have recent experience pulling a permit or dealing directly with planning and development right typically it's less than 10% in a given year the customers of that department tend to be businesses so contractors developers architects etc and those businesses aren't represented in this survey. What I think is going on here is a less a comment on the performance of that particular department. And more that it's really a comment on this issue or the concern about growth and development. That is, planning and building and permits kind of go together with growth and development. And if you're concerned about growth and development, then you're a little more likely to provide a lower score for things associated with that like building impermits. The bottom line is to get a good handle on customer satisfaction for that department. You would want to actually survey the businesses and the residents who have in fact pulled a permit within a particular amount of time and to get that type of study done. We've done that for other cities like San Diego and Irvine and Laguna Nagel and Mission B.A.O. and San Jose. But it's a very different study than this. So I just wanted to ask for us that since it came in toward the bottom of that list. Okay, digging deeper on some other topic areas. One of the questions we asked in the area of public safety was for each of the scenarios you see at the bottom of each of those columns we asked individuals how safe they feel. For example how safe they feel walking alone in commercial and retail areas during the day. Their neighborhood after dark as well as commercial and retail areas after dark. And what you find is that during the day 99% of the residents we spoke was said that they feel reasonably safe or very safe walking along alone in commercial and retail areas of the city. After dark, the perceptions of safety fall a little bit, but they're still high in their neighborhood. It was 90% felt safe and in commercial and retail areas after dark, it was still 88%. These are very good scores. When we ask this type of question in other cities it's not uncommon to have scores quite a bit lower. In fact, I was working with a city giving a presentation about a week ago and their scores for after dark were more like in the 60s. And so even after the sun goes down residents feel pretty safe walking around the city. Sometimes related to perceptions of public safety as well, but also just general quality of life is how residents feel about city's code enforcement efforts. And so we prefaced this question by explaining that the city has a code enforcement division to address a variety of issues that can affect the neighborhood, such as abandoned vehicles, and complaints about non-permanent structures and signs, safety and health issues and private properties graffiti as well as properties that aren't being properly maintained and we asked them overall are they satisfied or dissatisfied with the city's code enforcement efforts. And what you can see here is that about 28% weren't sure. They didn't really have an opinion about the city's code enforcement efforts one way or the other, but among those with an opinion he had 57% who said they were satisfied versus 14% who said they were dissatisfied. So it's about a four to one satisfied to dissatisfied ratio. We've also seen the answers to this question change a little bit over time. It used to be a lot of issues around parking in some communities and now since the housing bubble has popped. What we're finding is that sometimes you're seeing less satisfaction with coded enforcement when you dig into it. It's really about foreclosed homes not being properly maintained, burned up lawns, things like that. And so we did follow up and ask people who in Anceneedis said they were dissatisfied with the city's code enforcement efforts to ask them what was it? What's the issue? And 28% of those who were dissatisfied said it was neglected or poorly maintained properties, about 20% mentioned graffiti, and just 15% mentioned parking. So a little different than it was in the past before the housing bubble. Okay. little different than it was in the past before the housing bubble. Okay, on to parks and recreation. We asked individuals how they'd rate the overall quality, the appearance and the safety of parks, beaches, trails and recreation facilities in the city. Would they say they're excellent, good, fair, poor, very poor? And as you can see here on the slide, very high marks. You had 95% who rated the overall quality of these things as being excellent or good. 94% for appearance as well as 92% rating safety as excellent or good. Not shown here on the slide, but another question that I think is important to point out is we had asked individuals how often they visit parks or beaches or trails or recreation facilities in the city of incinitas 69% said they visit them at least once a week. Followed and then you had another 14% who were two to three times a month, seven percent once a month and just six percent said they visit these less often than once per month. This is by far the highest visitation rate for parks and recreation facilities and beaches and things like that that I've ever seen. Typically on the once per week you're seeing scores more like 20% in most cities so residents are making a huge huge use of these facilities and amenities in the city. Ignore who is that park director? Now we asked about the quality of services, but we also want to get a sense for what's the experience that residents have when they interact with staff, right? So not so much about what's the radar streets and radar parking facilities, but when you interact with staff here at the city, do you feel that they're professional, they're helpful or accessible? And as you can see here on this slide, you had better than 90% in each one of these categories say that staffs at least somewhat or very professional, somewhat are very helpful or somewhat are very accessible. So high marks across the board. It's also worth noting that a little over a third of residents indicated that they had interacted with city staff in the past year. On to communication. And this is interesting because having done this work for a lot of cities, this is an area where otherwise high performing cities occasionally stumble. So they'll do a really excellent job in providing services to residents, but when it comes time to actually communicating with residents, I've seen some cities that just get straight a across the board and everything else will stumble a little bit on communication. What we found here in the city of Insanese, you had 82% of residents who said that they were satisfied with the city's efforts to communicate with them through newsletters, direct mail, recreation guide, city website, and other means. That's a solid score. There are a few cities I've seen that have managed to get that score into the 90s. I've also seen again cities that have scores that are in the low 70s. And so, you know, it's an area that we always like to pay attention to as well because I've also had some cities that will score really well on this and then they'll do something with their communication plan. And also next year it's 10 or 11 points lower or 16 points lower. I've seen that. And I'll have some comments about that when we get to the a few slides in. What we tend to find with cities is that there's a strong correlation in terms of what your overall satisfaction score is with city resident communication and the types of sources that residents are relying on for their information about the city. And so the more residents rely on city sponsored sources, the more likely they are to have a high satisfaction score with the city and so the more residents rely on city sponsored sources the more likely they are to have a high satisfaction score with the city's communication efforts and here what we found was the number one source when he asked individuals you know what information sources do you use to find out about city of incident news events and programs 31% said the city's website was was that rolled off top of their tongue I will say that actually when you ask people if they visited the site, 57% said they had visited the site in the past year. But when you ask them just what's the most, you know, what sources do you rely on most often? 31% said the website. Another 25% said the internet in general. North County Times netted about 14% city newsletters, about 14% and on down. When we get to the next slide and I'll have some recommendations about the communication, the one thing I will note is there's been a tendency in recent years, particularly in response to tight budgets for cities to abandon their direct mail, newsletters in favor of e-blast and other things. Generally, not a good idea. What we have found for cities where we've tracked, I have some cities that have tracked for 10 years, that they did that and all sudden readership plummets, overall satisfaction plummets, etc. I mean even though there's, we're in an age where a lot of people have access to email, they have access to the internet and they're reasonably savvy in using these. Direct mail is still often the number one vehicle for getting your message out there and getting it read. And so if you do nothing else in the area of communication, you ought to look at that and make sure, and that direct mail is part of one of the channels you're using. Go ahead. And on that note, we, there we go. On that note, whereas the last slide looked at what sources residents turn to for their information currently, we also want we're looking forward and said, you know, for each of the services that you see or each of the channels that you see here on this slide, tell us how effective it would be as a means for the city to communicate with you. Would it be very effective, somewhat effective or not at all effective? And what you find as I mentioned, direct mail, postcards, letters, and newsletters, mail to the home was the number one ranked communication method 82% so that that would be at least somewhat effective, followed by the city's website, electronic news letter and email and e-blast. And as you might have mentioned, if you dig into this by, say, age groups, you see a more a split here where the younger cohorts tend to be a lot more comfortable with the digital side and less relying on direct mail. The older cohorts are much more relying on direct mail or prefer it, but overall direct mail is still your best vehicle. Okay, final thoughts you can go ahead and pull in. I think there's maybe a couple more here. So what does all this mean? I go into more detail in the full report and so I'll just summarize here tonight and certainly welcome questions from council. I think the first clear takeaway is that, despite this being a tough economy and a sort of a tough climate in general, resident satisfaction in the city of Incident, is still quite high. You had, across the board, in quality of life, you had 98% who said, the quality of life is excellent or good. City's overall performance, 87% of residents who gave the city, you know, and mentioned that they were satisfied with the city's overall performance. And we also saw high performance scores or high satisfaction scores with all, but I think three of the 28 services that we tested there had had 80 plus, 85% plus satisfaction scores. Staff's performance for those who had interacted with staff, they received high marks and you also had a very solid score on communication. And so, to the extent that you can look at these types of residents, satisfaction studies as a report card on the city's performance and you can, I mean, this is all lays in a few b's for the most part. These are the type of results that most cities, when they do this, would like to get not all of them do. And I think it's also important to point out that earned. I can tell you having worked with cities that do this type of work over time. If you slack off, if you don't do the things you should do as a city, it shows up in these surveys. Residents take notice of it and they aren't shy about telling you. And so when you get strong scores like this, they aren't earned, but they also need to be earned on an ongoing basis. Now, like any customer satisfaction study, it's not just how are we doing today, but also let's look to the future and what can we be doing to improve. And with that in mind, I want to make a couple comments. The first, though, is that I have this recommendation about staying the course. You have good scores here. So if you do nothing else as a city, just continue to do what you're already doing. Because residents have come to appreciate that and certainly have those expectations. Occasionally, I've seen a few cities that overreact or overcorrect in response to results like this, like they'll say, here's three areas we can focus on and we start really dumping resources into that area at the expense of the others, and all they've done is push the bubble, right? So now they get, the next time they come do this, they get great scores over here, and now there's scores in these areas aren't so hot. And so it's important to recognize that, you know, this is a really good report code, says you're doing well in a lot of areas. And if you do nothing else, just continue to perform well in those areas. To the extent that you do have discretionary resources or to look at some areas more closely and make some changes, the, according to the results of this survey, the best opportunities for that are in terms of areas of managing growth and development, traffic congestion as well as improving local streets and roads. So with that, I, and my presentation, I welcome questions from council. Sure, we have public speakers on this. Yes, we do. We have three. Any preliminary questions or should we go to the speakers? Okay, let's hear from the public, please. Okay, three public speakers are Kevin Forster, followed by Lynn Marr, followed by Julie Gruboy. Good evening, Deputy Mayor, Council, and staff. Really, all I'd really like to say, no, my name is Kevin Forrester. I'm a 31-year member of the City of Incident of the City of Incident and I should also disclose I'm a candidate for Council, but all I can say about this report is you should be very proud of yourselves, all of you. What this, the results of this report indicate that the city of Incinitas residents are receiving the level of service to which they are entitled and they've gotten accustomed to it over the years and it shows up in this report. So keep up the good work. The one thing, the one further thing I would like to say and the gentleman whose name is Dr. McClarity mentioned it as well is in footnote two. Footnote two indicates it should be noted that providing building and planning permits inspections was also identified as a top priority for improvement in this survey. However, it's likely that this reflects residence concerns about development in general and is not a commentary on the city's permitting process per se as the gentleman indicated. Most residents have not had direct experience applying for building permits. Customers in this area tend to be businesses and are not represented in this survey. My only point is I'd like to see that survey. I'd like to see the survey of the businesses in the city. I think it is important to what the council does going forward. But all in all, you should be very proud and congratulations. Thank you. Lynn Marlott, Katia. I think it was a foregone conclusion that council was going to be proud because, you know, let's face it, people like the quality of life here. It's beautiful. We live by the ocean. And so when you're asking a question about quality of life, it doesn't necessarily mean that the people, it's true of a lot of the different questions. People, when they say they don't want any change, that's I think really because the Lucadian neighbors and Inc. neighbors have done some surveys and independent surveys where they didn't design the questions. I was wanting to ask to, did the city actually design the questions and then the company administered the conductive survey, but were the questions actually designed by the city or by the people who conducted the survey. So, but anyway, most people actually would like to be left alone, I know, in Lucadia. And so when they say they don't want any change, you know, when you, I think people recognize that there is going to be change, but they don't want the city. They kind of don't want to deal with the city, most people. The some of us do, we kind of might feel like we're pounding our head against the brick wall sometimes. But some of us are especially maybe retired people or people who have more time, they don't have young kids, get more into, get pulled in because we do want a sense of neighborhood self-determination. That's why I thought it was good with the Crest Drive issue that they got to exercise some self-determination there and that council understood that need. And now I think most of these questions, the answers could have been kind of foregone conclusions. But I have some issues because also I've heard from a couple people that they were asking for the youngest person in the household male. They weren't wanting, I don't know if they, for their demographics, they needed that, but it seems like it gender bias first of all. And second of all, young people are a lot less likely to have any experience with the city. So I wish there could have been questions. Maybe it wasn't a true need assessment, in my opinion, because the questions were kind of designed to get these positive answers. And then when you got a big group of people that didn't have an opinion like on the one that was in gray, then they were, you say, of the people who did have an opinion, then you lumped it all together, you know, and say like 80% of the people that did have an opinion. But it's kind of tweaking the input there because so many people aren't aware of what's going on if they haven't had experience So I'd like to see that Additional survey of people who have had experience with staff Thank you Dr. McLearny just pause momentarily here. Can you address the two questions? Did the city design the questions and And also the question posed about asking for a certain demographic in the household. Certainly. The way we develop a question air is we'll sit down and talk about the topics of interest to the city. So what surveys can cover a lot of different topics. So we'll talk and we have 15 minutes to do it in. So we'll talk about what topics we're going to cover. But I write the questions, and then I bring it back and I explain this is why the method, this is why we're writing it this way, this is the methodology we're using, and this is why this scale is appropriate, and that scale would not be appropriate. So I take the lead in designing the questions, and they're also, In part based on approaches that have been proven in past studies. So we're not just hand crafting questions each time uniquely for each city. We do this for a lot of cities and so we're using proven methods that have proven in the past to be effective ways of correctly measuring certain attitudes or certain constructs in other settings. To the issue of the youngest male, you're right. Occasionally we call in last to have, speak to youngest male, and there's a good reason for that. It sounds like we're biasing the data in favor of young males. In reality, it's one way that we counteract behavioral biases in the home. And even if we choose phone numbers at random, what happens when the phone rings is not random? Men are lazy, and they sit on the couch. Women get up and answer the phone rings is not random. Men are lazy and they sit on the couch. Women get up and answer the phone. And in particular, young males are very hard to find. And so what we found over time is the best way to get a representative sample is not to take the first person to come to the phone because then you have a sample of 75% women, typically older women. So we have to ask these screening questions to try and counteract that behavioral bias. Then on top of that we do some selective screening to make sure that the end of this process are sample demographics match what we know about the adult population that's needed. So it seems like we're biasing it. We're actually trying to counteract a bias. Thank you for answering those questions. We'll go back to our public speakers. Yes, hi, Julie, Gervoy, a live in high. And I was going to address this, the very questions that were brought up because, have they called my home, my 18-year-old son would have answered the questions. And I don't know whether he's as informed as me or my husband or as interested in this topic. So, but he loves incinitas. I'll say that. I noticed, I apologize to Dr. Mick Lourney that I wasn't able to really read the whole report. Because I'm very interested and I will go back. But one thing that I noticed is that he stated that his selection of the subjects was for reliability. And I didn't locate anything about validity. And I was wondering if he could address that. Because one thing that came out from the mid contract was that they promised reliable data but in terms of having it valid or a good match for our city, I don't think in that case it worked as well. And the other point I wanted to make was that with 400 subjects, if two thirds of them had not had any direct experience with city staff in the past year, I'm really concerned about that because it seems like they're answering either historically or perhaps they have only had very surface level interactions. One thing that stuck out to me is that people were very happy with the staff members. And I agree I think that our city staff are all very, very nice people. I like everyone who works here. But I think that a concern I have is there's a difference between asking where the council chambers are and asking for professional advice and getting a certain level of performance that we expect from experts. So I'm very concerned that the issue of how well our staff are responding on very, very important concrete issues is not being addressed in this survey when everyone who works here is very socially gifted. I think that they're doing a wonderful job in responding to people overall. I think everyone is a very, very friendly and tries to help, but in terms of some of the more in-depth technical knowledge, sometimes that's where we have some problems. And I don't think that that was captured in this survey. And the final comment I wanted to make is that I think there is a tendency to create a false cause and effect conclusion from this. Everyone loves Anson Edas. Everyone wants to live here. Thank you. That concludes public speakers. Thank you. Did you want to trust the reliability versus validity comment please? I will. It's a little involved and I'll try and give you the brief version. The problem is reliability is in statistics when it comes to surveys, it's used in two different settings. When I was talking about reliability with respect to a sample and how reliable it is and representative is of a community, in here you're talking about, with a sample of 400, we have a certain degree of reliability that the results that are in this survey are what we would have found, how do we actually spoken with all adult residents. So reliability in the sample arena means that. When you talk about validity, validity isn't a sample issue. It's a questionnaire issue. And reliability is also used in the questionnaire as well. And the best example I can do is the questions need to be both valid and reliable measures of what it is you're trying to measure. So validity, the best example I've heard of validity is are you measuring the construct you're trying to measure? And an example of a question with poor validity was if you ask people if there was a study where they ask people if they own stock, a nationwide study. And when I got the results, they looked at it and they said, I can't. Wow, there's a lot of people in the middle of the country in the Midwest who own stock. So they started digging into that and what they realized is although they met financial stock, the folks in the Midwest said livestock, right? And so that's a classic validity problem. You thought you were measuring one thing you were actually measuring something else. So that's what validity is in a questionnaire. And then reliability is assuming you're measuring what you're supposed to be measuring. It's a valid measure. How reliable is your measure of that? So, a class example of that is if you step on a scale and go to K-Mart, step on a scale and you step on it, it says you're 150 pounds. You step off, you step back on it, it says you're 142 pounds. You didn't just lose eight pounds, right? It's just an inaccurate measure. It's an unreliable measure of what it is it's measuring. And so that's a reliability issue with a questionnaire. And so we dealt with when I was speaking about reliability, in this case, I was talking about the sample side. I wasn't talking about the questionnaire sign piece. Sure. And also I think it's important to note that there was a question about overall quality of life. And there's a second question about overall satisfaction with level of service. And so I hear the speakers saying that we have no impact on the quality of life here in its Anita's, which I do not believe to be the case and perhaps you can weigh in on that. But also, I mean, the question that you brought attention to that was probably the most important question on there was specifically the overall satisfaction with service. A couple things. Number one, in my experience, their overall quality of life in the city and the city's overall performance are two separate things, but one does feed into the other. Right? And so as a city, how well the city performs and providing these services and amenities to residents impacts the overall quality of life in the city. But just because people like ins and edis and it's a beautiful place to live doesn't mean they're necessarily going to give you a good score as a city for if you're under performing right and so they are two separate things the one feeds into the other but that question about overall how well is a city performing in providing city services you're going to get a very accurate answer to that from residents they're not going to say oh I love the beaches and therefore the city's doing a good job they're going to comment on your performance. Yeah, it sounds a lot of shy people around town. No. That's good. Councilmember Muir, please. Thank you. A very good report. I'm looking at the March and Bears 4.9. What's the standard deviation of that? Well, the way it works is you think about the curve on this. And what we're saying is that we can be 95% confident, right? That the actual result, had we interviewed, had we spoken with every adult resident, is within 4.9% of that answer that we had in our survey either way. So plus or minus 4.9% of that answer that we had in our survey either way. So plus or minus 4.9%. How much if you wanted to relax your confidence interval, right, and say I just want to be 90% and set a 95% confident, it would be smaller than that. It would be 3.0 something, right? So the higher confidence level you want to have, the wider that gap is, 95% having a margin of error for a poll like this of under 5% at the 95% confidence interval is really the standard academic level for doing surveys like this. And that's why when you look around the state of your reading the paper, you tend to see samples of 400 being used not only in cities of this size, but cities of larger size or smaller sizes because it's not so much driven by the size of the population as it is that sample size. Thanks. And I compliment the people that are here because I didn't see council meeting as a good source of information on your study. The other question I had has to do with the comment you said about the overall satisfaction rating of 98% and if you take the margin very you can even, you know, it's good no matter what even if you take, go down the negative. How do we compare with other cities? I know there's different questions that you ask but that's a typical question, pretty standard question to ask other cities. How do we compare to other cities? On the overall quality of life, as I mentioned, I think in the presentation, it's among the best I've seen, and in particular, you tend to find cities that will get a good combined excellent good score. So they might, they'll be in the 90s for excellent or good, but when you break that down and say, well, what percentage of those said excellent versus good? Excellent tends to be more like 50%, right, or 40%. Here, we had 70% plus say that the quality of life in the city is excellent. So that is among the best I've seen. And we've done this type of work not just for obviously incinitas, but our clients have ranged from cities like Beverly Hills and Indian Wells and West Lake Village to, you know, I've even done East Palo Alto and Oakland. So, I mean, we've done a whole range here, but this is among the best we've seen. If I could interrupt, I don't have the screen up. It won't come back so I can't press my to speak button. I know that was planned well. Go right ahead. Please, Councillor Member Berth. Okay. Thank you. A couple of questions on a few slides back that you had where you know you did say if there was anything we could change, what would it be? There were some there though that were very, very similar that you didn't group together. There were roads and streets and bike lanes and transit, which I would think fell under the definition of circulation. And then if you sort of put those all together, it all of a sudden rose up to over 20%. So I'm just curious as to why you chose what you chose, you know, why you broke out some of those and why you didn't combine some of those. We tend to try and disaggregate as much as we can because it provides more information. So if I combine say buses and coasts and bike lanes together, it sort of raises a question, well, how much of that is bike lane versus how much of that is coast or bus? And so for the purposes of relaying the information in a report, we tend to break, disaggregate them into the category that we think best captures the comments that were in there. You're right. As separately, you could come back in and say, OK, well, there's a comment here about attracting new businesses. There might be another comment about economic development together, right? And those could sort of go together. And it's, you know, it's as a reader, you're certainly welcome to go in and do that. But we just from a conveying the information standpoint, try to give you at the most disaggregated level we can. Okay. And I concur with what everyone has said here about us needing to do a survey with our business community. And I know that is something that our city managers actually sort of put before us earlier on and we had some preliminary budget talks. So I hope that we will also encourage that in the near future so that we have a good understanding as to what experiences they have frequently. They don't live here in our community or they weren't one of the people who received the call. You know, and this is great. We know it's wonderful. I wish I could take credit for the sunshine, the beaches, and the lagoons. But I know that, you know, that's stretching it even for an elected official. But in the other thing too, with customer service and enjoyment of the parks and everything, I'll go to a park and I might pick up a little stray water bottle left and put it in the recycle bin. But really, this is all about what our staff does here. Our sheriffs, our marine services, our lifeguards, our park maintenance staff. These are the people that the community interacts with. Even more than the people at our planning department or the receptionist here at the front door. And so I mean, for me, I'd love to take credit for this. This is what us politicians love to do. But the reality is it's the people that work for us in this community that deserve all the credit for the successes or the vast majority of credit for the successes that we see here. And so I just want to take that opportunity to thank our sheriffs, our lifeguards, our parks and rec department, our maintenance crew, the guys at public works, you know, when you turn on the water, I had nothing to do with that. They are the ones that are seen that that's happening all the time, so this is really a reflection to them and I look forward to us digging into the business component. And the firefighters. Oh, I forgot the firefighters. Quickly reminded, Councilmember Bond. Thank you, Mayor, and thank you very much for the report, Tim. It was almost glowing, which makes it a little suspicious. But nevertheless, a very good report. And I noticed a number of the folks were saying how, you know, the quality of life and how they like things, data, data, and all. And then it was also mentioned by some of us here. We can't take credit for all that. We've got to live a lovely beach community. And the oceans just happens to be here. But I want to take a little credit for that. I want the city to take a little credit for that. Having worked for 20 years to try to get our sand with Plenty ofona beaches and it'll be here in October, the second plush of that. And little things like Moonlight Beach, Cardiff State Beach, they're all state beaches. State beaches make one think like a state park, they would maintain them. State does not maintain those beaches. They do not provide the life cards. They don't provide the trash. They don't provide the restrooms. They don't provide the little snack shack there. None of that. You, the city's events, events need us to are paying for that to make that a little bit better for yourselves and for the community. So if you ever want to figure out that you need it a little bit better for yourselves and for the community. So if you ever want to figure out that you needed a little more than a million dollars a year to spend somewhere else, you can either ask the state to step up to their responsibility which they will not do, or decide to take a lower level of quality service that you're now enjoying. And I just have to get that off my chest. Thank you. Well, a couple things to add to me that may not have been covered in the presentation. And it really has to do with the decision making that's happened here. And we should be confident that we've made some good decisions that have gone in the right direction. One you mentioned the satisfaction with the public safety services scoring 92% extremely are very important to our residents and our decision with Levenheim to expand service in that area can only help improve that score. So I'm proud about that. Also, our decision making on the ins and news community park and the moonlight beach improvements, seeing that 90% of the ins and it is residents indicated that they visit a park beach or trail or recreational facility in ins and it is, that's very important as well. And the continuous improvement piece with the customer service, I'm very proud of our staff too. And I know that it's been the goal of our city manager to get even better. And talks of having liaison working on our projects will only improve that score. So I think we have some good ideas in the works there. And lastly, I think it's important to point out in the report. It talked about now moving forward and using this as an informational tool, choosing the appropriate balance of actual service improvements and efforts to raise public awareness and how important that is. You know, we saw our recycling guide over here earlier today and asked the question about, you know, did we send this out to the residents and, you know, maybe sometimes it's important to recognize that paper mail is really important information for our residents. But, you know, as we move forward, I think the takeaway piece is striking that balance and using this as an informational tool to continue to get better and always working on the same continuous improvement piece that our city manager works off of. Councilmember Barth. You reminded me on the issue about direct mail and I wished we could figure that out because when we did all of the millions of postcards it seemed like for the general plan update we somehow didn't connect with our community. So I suppose what it looks like is got as much to do with how often we send it or what we send I would imagine. And that's not something that you're going to get out of the survey but it was interesting for me because we hear constantly that I didn't get anything in the mail and yet direct mail seems to have come to the top through this through this survey as how they get their information. Is that correct? It's the way that they would prefer to get their information. It's not the way they are getting it now, but it's their preferred method. The one thing I will also say and you made a point about it's not just that something arise, but it's what that something looks like. The other distinction between that we've seen in some cities is some cities like to essentially piggyback their city newsletter in with a recreation guide, which sounds great and it's a thud on the table and it's intimidating and many people aren't going to open it up. They're going to see that's a that's a dense book and it's a recreation guide and I'm not going to peek at it. If it shows up as a separate newsletter and it's a two-page fold, the tendency to pick it out and sending it as a separate mailer and their scores will go up 5, 8, 10%. Well, thank you. Appreciate that. Interesting. Seeing no further council discussion, I think we will receive the information. Thank you very much for your work. And we'll move on to agenda item number 10. And that is the recommendation to award a three-year contract for Urban forestry maintenance services to West Coast, Arborist, Inc. and the contact person here is Haasford. Good evening, Deputy Mayor. City Council, we're bringing forward the contract on urban forestry maintenance services, this is contracting that the city has been doing since its inception in 1986. Regarding the tree trimming and other tree lay related work, back in 2000 the city determined that increased benefits could be obtained by utilizing a cooperative purchasing agreement. Specifications were sent out to several tree maintenance service providers and on March 27th 2004 companies provided bids. West Coast Arborist, Inc. provided the lowest responsive price and was subsequently awarded the contract. Ten years later, in 2010, the city again determined the cooperative purchasing agreement would benefit the city the most. And we utilized a piggyback with another agency and awarded the contractor. This was a contract that the city of Rosemeade had led and competitively bid and there were 11 companies that provided bids on that. West Coast Arborist was found to be the best qualified in order to contract in the city of Incinitas piggybacked on the city of Rosemead's contract and hired West Coast Arborist to perform a citywide tree maintenance service for two years. June 30th of this year, the current contract expired and the city provided a public notice that would accept proposals again for the urban forestry maintenance services via request for proposals. Nine companies obtained copies of the RFP and on August 13th the deadline for submitting the proposals to the companies provided their proposals back to the city. In evaluation of those proposals, showed West Coast Arborist provided the most complete proposal meeting public works and park and wreck department needs in providing the lowest overall price. This request to award tonight is for a new three-year contract to West Coast Arborist for the urban forestry maintenance services with an option to renew for two years, not to exceed a five-year total after satisfactorily meeting the contract requirements. Public Works Department and the Park and Rec Department hire a contract to provide this service. And the work includes pruning, planning, watering, removing trees, tree limbs, debris, emergency response, root barrier installation, sidewalk repair, service requested pruning and report preparation. July 20th, the city provided a public notice on the RFPs were going to be accepted to perform the urban forest remaining in services. And the proposals were received by the city and reviewed by an evaluation that was made up, an evaluation staff that was made up of a combination of city staff and an outside agency staff member. The proposals were set against a set of criteria that is in your report that includes community partnership, corporate capability, cost proposals, facility evaluation, information management, quality completeness of proposal, reference evaluation and services. These are the things that each company, we're both companies in this case were evaluated against. It's not just the bottom line dollar, it's also the responsiveness of the company to the city. During the analysis of the proposal staff check the references, perform facilities inspections, discuss the proposals with each contractor to obtain further clarification of their proposals. And determine if the quality of the proposed services met the city's needs. Following the completion of the analysis, the evaluation committee reviewed the rankings and determined west coast arborist met the required qualifications to provide high quality urban forestry maintenance services to the city. It's important to note that the proper and timely urban forest remaining services are essential to public safety and health of the trees as important city assets. Regularly scheduled services reduces, that completely eliminate, but reduces the likelihood of tree limbs dropping tree disease and pest infestation. A systematic urban forestry maintenance service also reduced, reduces the need for emergencies, for the need for emergency or service requested pruning. It reduces the tree mortality and liability problems and improves the health of the urban forest. The amount appropriated for the urban forestry maintenance services in fiscal year 2012-13 budget was $200,000 no additional funding is requested at this time a similar amount for urban forestry maintenance services will be requested in the next two year budget cycle for council consideration there are no staff impacts and We're recommending tonight that City Council authorize the purchasing authority to enter into the three-year contract with west coast Arborist for urban forestry maintenance services with an option to renew for two additional years not to exceed a five-year total upon satisfactorily meeting the contract requirements. And just as additional information, the President, Patrick Mahoney of West Coast Arborist, and there's Area Manager, Mike Paletter here tonight, to answer any specific questions regarding the services they provide. Thank you. I did have a couple preliminary questions. You said that nine firms did come forward originally and obtain the documents. Why do you believe only two firms submitted? Did you receive any feedback? In other words, from the firms you did not submit the proposal? I'm going to pass this to Mark. Did you feed? Yeah, thank you. Mayor and council members. Yes, we, you know, the feeling is that we created an RFP, a request for proposals that focused in on local businesses. And many of the businesses that provide this level of services, high level of service, are outside this county. There are a number of three services in this county that provide the service, but not to the level of our urban forest program. Okay, and lastly, can you tell me a little bit about the interview panel, how many people sit on that panel and who was the outside agency member on that panel? I sure can. There was two staff members from, Anthony, this was both myself and John Franken, the parkernick superintendent. And the director of public works from the city of Vista, the three of us evaluated both proposals and Our evaluation is noted in the staff report Councilmember Barth Thank you. I had a follow-up question about the number of people that picked up You know bid packets did you have a pre bid meeting which is frequently what the city does do on some of these more complicated bid packages? Sit down and answer any of their questions or was this they just picked it up and off they went? Yeah, in this particular case we did not have a pre-bid meeting. However, it was clear that we were open for any questions. In the advertisement. It was stated that if you need any information, additional information, it's not included in that packet. Please call us and we'll be happy to help you with that. In addition, I think it's important to note that the program itself is well established. So it's not as if we're building a high rise building or a bridge where there's a lot of complicated pieces to it. It's a comprehensive program but it's not complicated. Just to follow up on that two years ago when we approved this, the staff report was a lot larger than this one and it went into a lot more detail about the contract and a few other things. Did you change this process because I don't recall from two years ago this rating, this ranking situation with the numbers. That was two years ago, I could have easily forgotten, but I don't recall it being this way. Yeah, again, the last contract two years ago, we piggybacked. And so we didn't do the evaluation process because that had been done on the contract that we piggybacked and so we didn't do the evaluation process because that had been done on the on the contract that we piggybacked on. So yes, this is a different process where we did evaluate the proposals provided. Thank you. Council member Mierer. The first question I have is the going from a two year contract to a five year contract. And that's is that based because of the piggybacking that we did. Why are we now going to five years versus a five year contract. And that's, is that based because of the piggybacking that we did? Why are we now going to a five year versus a two year? Captain Bumbermure, it's pretty standard for a maintenance service to have between five and six year contracts. Okay, and the other question I had is, as relates to the criteria, how do you develop your criteria? Is this common criteria that's used in selecting services like this? Yeah, this particular criteria, we actually did a lot of research, a lot of benchmarking, and pulled together some other cities that were successful in doing this and using their evaluation process. And leaned on some of the cities that have, excuse me, very good comprehensive urban forest programs. And leaned on those cities to create this evaluation. Okay, that concludes preliminary comments. Public speakers please. So we have five. The first is Brian Bishop. The second is Doug Pearson with a time donation from Nick Regenno. Thank you. Follow by Tony Cranes. Hi, Brian Bishop. Bishop's Tree Service. But I live here in Incinitas. I've kind of watched West Coast Arborist work in the area for the last 10 years. First, I always want to start just seeing them work. I just, my impressions as far as in the city, they set up their traffic control, right? Which I don't know if it seems like an off thing, but there's other vendors that sometimes are working for the cities. And they create hazardous situations because traffic control isn't right. I've been doing trees for 34 years, so I can criticize anybody's work. And there's really what you're looking for on a lot of tree work, because do they make the cuts properly? Because a lot of stuff outside of that is specifications, and that I'm not privy to. And overall, I'm just pretty impressed with how West Coast Arborist has handled incinitas. And yes, I know about some ups, so. And as far as I know, those were resolved pretty well. Because they do happen. We're in a business where there's some major impacts sometimes. And so I just kind of wanted to give my feedback on what I've seen is always been pretty positive. I'm not here to say anything negative about any other companies because I'm friends with a lot of people in the industry. But how I've seen West Coast Arborist handle what's going on in insinitas has been really good. And as a side note, I'm familiar with their culture as a company and they give back a lot to the industry to the public at large as far as education, which is something that seems to be going in the opposite direction more because people are just busier and busier. But I'm really impressed, especially with Mike Palette, because he gives a lot of personal time to just educating and not just educating to get business, but for people to be educated about trees. That's a cool thing. My name is Doug Pearson, I'm with California Tree Service. I'm here to talk to you about this bidding process that we went through. There's two companies, California Tree and West Coast Arborist. West Coast Arborist has a relationship with your city for umpteen years, however. I'm not here to bring that up or go against them in any way. What I want us to bring to your attention is the bid opening process. Okay, we went to the bid opening process. We had two bids California Tree Service West Coast Arborist. We presented them to your city official at which time he opened them. Okay. to your city official at which time he opened them. Okay? Bit openings are for one thing. And one thing only, they're to show that your competitors the prices before it goes to, before it goes to any kind of, of, you know, anything else. Before it goes any further, it's to show your company and the other companies, the prices that are on the table. So they know where they're bidding, okay? At that time of the bid opening, I'm a little nervous, so bear with me. At that time of the bid opening, I requested at the table that said, Mike Palette, myself, you're city officials, you your city official, your city officials, person that types or whatever they call that. Okay, I was there, they were all there, we were all there, the two companies. They opened the bid package. I asked your city official at that time, I said, can I see, can you show me the other, can I request to see the other prices? Which is the federal acquisition regulation system. Can I see, can we, can you show me the other, can I request to see the other prices, which is a federal acquisition regulation system, that's a federal system that's put in place, okay? So that we could see, it's for the bidding process, so that bids are fair and equal. There's no bias to other companies. Okay? Your company official at that time denied us access to those prices, which is not here or there. I can't believe it. I've been to 30, maybe 50 bid openings in the last 25 years and at every one of those the prices were put on the table at time of bid opening. This one's not. Okay. We were denied that. First thing, in your page five of your RFP, okay, that's your guy's RFP, not mine. It says on page five that the proposal shall be submitted and the representative from your state shall, a city clerk shall read, shall read the proposals. So it's fair. We both know, both companies know what's going on. We didn't get that opportunity because you're city officials, and I could say this because I just can. Your city officials are favoring West Coast Arborist. That might sound blunt, but it's the Dodge truth. I'm a humble man. I work for a good company, the most innovative tree company in San Diego County. Okay? We stand up. We do big things. You've seen us on the news with hill topters. You've seen us on the news with horses. We're the most innovative tree care company that there is. And we work for Botanical Gardens every year. Dave Erlinger. We'll be up there on the 3rd of October. We've spent time there. We work with them. The point system here, I got six minutes, right? I'm at three minutes for five minutes, where am I at? Huh? Clock right in front of me. I got plenty of time, this will be fun. Oh, this is great. Okay, so listen, I'm gonna get into your point system, which comes out of left field from anyone in the tree industry. I can't, I don't understand where your city officials are coming up with this point system. I don't even have it with me. Where's my point system? Sorry, excuse me. I don't mean to take time. Anyways, I'm not going to get into all that because we don't have time. Your point system. Thank you. Thank you so much. Figure point system, let's get into a couple things since I found it here. Your city official here says, services, the lowest one, the service, the bottom one, you've got 15 points that you guys that your city is going to give us, 15 available points, okay? Which we scored six. We've never worked for your city we've never contracted with your city nor has your city official been ever been to one of our jobs ever okay never been to a job never saw our work never saw our crews in the field never even took the time to go to one of our jobs, which three weeks ago, when I started calling your city official, which you never return my calls, only three weeks ago, did he return my call. And that was to talk about something. I could talk about this point system, and how we failed to, how we failed this point system. California trees the most innovative tree service there is in this, in the county. Okay, we do, like I said, hillocks, there's big stuff. Okay, we're coming up, you might not have heard from us personally, but you will in next month because we're working at Botanical Gardens, it's gonna be all over the news. We're working at this lady who was here this morning, or this morning, two hours ago, Mim Mitch loves, she's with healthy parents. Okay? She talked to me out here, she says, hey, we got a lot of stuff that we need done and we don't have the money to do it. Okay? I said, well, what is it? 5,000 trees or what? You know, what do you want done? She says, well, we need some work done for this school in your city that needs some help. I said give me your card. I'll be there. It's done. No more talking about it. Send me an email. It's done. Okay. Just for an example. Okay. I got, oh, I got 10 seconds left. Anyways, it's a, it's a, it's a federal acquisition regulation system put together by the federal government. Your city official violated it by not giving us our competitors prices at time of bit opening. That's not my fault. That's not the other company's fault. That's his, their fault. Okay. It was done fair. You guys, what you published on your, on your website, can I get a couple minutes here? What you published on your website. Wrap that up. Okay. You published this on your website. Can I get a couple minutes here? What you published on your website. Wrap that up. Okay, you published this on your website. I don't know who sees this. Maybe half of your city, maybe half of the state, maybe half of whoever. But these numbers are horrible representation of our company and I'm very disturbed and angry at this. Thank you for your time. I appreciate it. Sorry. Yes, questions. Oh, you're Thank you sir Thank you following three speakers Tony Cran's followed by Michael full followed by Russell Levan Good evening Tony Crancensanitas. And a little over two years ago, I was here speaking about the piggybacking aspects of the contract for West Coast Arbors. I know that the most important job the city has is to manage contracts. And I don't think that it's appropriate for a service like this to be piggybacking. So fortunately you made a commitment to put this out for RFP this time and it was done. I did get a copy of the RFP and when I read it I was a little surprised at the extent to which the RFP was written to exclude small businesses. And I was disappointed in that. But in the process a couple of years ago when I met with Mark Haasford and Larry Watts, I did come to realize that the relationship between Mr. Haasford and West Coast Arborist is long. And they are obviously very comfortable working together. I don't know how much of a role that played in the specifications that were required here. Obviously, California Tree met the requirements. And when I went to the staff report for this I was a little surprised that nowhere in our staff report was the price mentioned. There was this table of scores and I was shocked at how loftside these scores were. So I did reach out to California tree to find out if they were aware and actually they had not even heard that they hadn't been selected for the contract and when they got into the report themselves they were quite disappointed. I did find out that in fact they bid for the Carlsbad contract and scored very close to West Coast Arborist for that contract and actually beat them price wise. So it was, I decided to go to the City of Carlsbad website just to kind of get a comparison between how we did our staff report and how Carlsbad did theirs and what information that they put in theirs. Of course, the scoring wasn't in Carlsbeds but they did have a table with all the pricing and California tree was first. They scored best on pricing. Ultimately, Carl's bed decided to give the contract to West Coast Arbours because there are some areas they called it on their ability to provide service previous performance. Previous performance was important and I'm sure it would have scored well here as also. But in addition to that, the staff report for tonight, excuse me, the agenda talks about how they're supposed to be, you're supposed to approve a contract. Carl's bet actually attaches the whole contract to the staff report and I think that's a good practice and I don't know how you could approve a contract that you haven't read yourselves. And then finally real quick, their contract is five years with a reconsideration by the city manager every year. And I would encourage you to put that kind of language in our contract so that you can revisit this every year. Thank you. Thank you. Michael Fould, followed by Russell of Ann Hi, I'm a resident on the now infamous or famous crest drive and For the last 35 years. I've been a developer and we develop property in Oakland and in Birmingham and deal with commercial properties so we're familiar with tree services and tree services that you know require two four six hundred people working for them to take on a project in nature of this. I was kind of stunned in my own neighborhood. I had talked to Howard Whitlock, actually a big Howard Whitlock for about three years to come and take care of our canary palms. And when these fellows showed up, I was stunned at the amount of work they were able to do at something like $57 to tree I just was unheard of. And impressed with some of the things they did, the fact that they were changing blades, the fact that they were doing this by hand. These were unique things. Usually people are out there with power saws, you know, whipping through the trees as fast as they can. I also noticed that in front of our particular property, which is right at the peak of Birmingham and Crest, they debris that they cleaned up that had nothing to do with their trays, just, you know, in the pickle weed picking things out. Just some things that you notice as a citizen. Normally like everybody else, I'm looking for something to criticize and whine about, but I was really impressed with these guys. They did a great job. They cleaned things up. They came with a rather than using blowers. They literally by hand picked stuff out. So I was impressed with what they did. I'm overwhelmed at the people skills that Howard has. I've never met him face to face, but just really a sweet, gentle guy on the phone and great at placating the table pounding and making you wait in extra two years to have the trees done. I don't know a great deal about West Coast, but I do know that they were very thorough. And I thought pretty honorable. I went out with a six pack of beer and tried to get a little more of this and that done on some trees. And they just said, hey, sorry, we can't do that. That kind of impressed me in an odd way. And the only perception that I have is that they seem to know what they're doing. They seem to be conscious about the diseases that can be transmitted using different blades. And beyond that, I can't speak to the issue, but at least with respect to what they've already accomplished, they're very competent and seem to know the ropes. That's it. Thank you. Final speaker is Russell Levan. Good evening, Councillors. I am mostly here, oh, Russell Levan, sorry, forgot about that. Mostly here this evening to talk about the community partnership aspect of the proposal and mostly a couple of requests over the years and I'm going to go through a couple of slides just to show you know what can happen, bummer, and where our trees are going and the opportunities that we can take with those trees when they're being cut down. And I've been working on this for a couple of years and we've been trying to get to use the existing material in the city rather than mulching it up and shipping it off to a landfill or alternative daily cover or whatever. So there's a couple of trees. This was on Coast Highway. It's a Monterey Cypress, probably about 90 years old. It really did need to be cut down. It was, I had all my slides and they disappeared so I had to redo the show. And we got a couple of these trees through the help of public works and it was a monumental effort at first but it is getting much easier to do. And I wanted to make sure that we kind of address that and put it in the contract, that we have access for the community to get these trees and take them. This is on Coast Highway. We cut down a lot of eucalyptus trees in the last year or so. As you can see, that was all trees, and now there are no more. But the good news is I want to show you that sometimes it's really necessary. This is all right in the tree. So educationally, I think we should go back and do a little after the fact we cut down the tree. The company can learn something, the city can learn something, and we can see which trees were legitimately cut down. This one scared me. And then we took some of these trees and we made them into benches in the park. All the benches had been previously stolen from the park, and I don't really want to challenge anyone out there to go steal these but be really difficult to do. So this was a great effort. It took a year, but people use it and they're still there. Another Monterey Cypress was cut down in coast highway. After the fact we had to lift these things onto a truck. They weigh about 5,000 pounds, so it was not so easy to do. Brought these over to a school. So this is the bottom of one tree and that is about four feet of rot in the center of that tree at the base. So I always, I told Larry what I would show this picture someday. It was necessary to cut this tree down. But by reusing it at a local school what's it going to be? I'll show you. By reusing it at a local school, what's it going to be? I'll show you. So they made a really cool 12-foot-long lizard for the kids to play on. So my point is I really want to encourage the community partnership and the education, these trees are an asset, even after they're cut down. I'm not advocating we cut them all down to make lizards, if we do let's use them wisely. Thank you. Excellent. On that positive note we will see you back here in seven minutes. We'll give you and the Council an opportunity to stand up and walk around and take a restroom break. With our discussion, we're going to start with Council Member Meer. First of all, one of the speakers talked about Carl's bed's methodology and their criteria of selection process. It seems to me that they based it on quality not cost because the cost is higher they picked West Coast Arborist We've done the same thing but we've based it on quality and cost because our cost is lower Can you tell me what the cost because it wasn't in the report and I think it should be in the report as it relates to the cost comparison That's the first question Yes, Council Member Murrer. I think it's important to note that this is a proposal and the proposal has a number of line items for particular tasks. Depending on the type of work, the amount of work that you have throughout the year would determine the total cost of the actual contract. So there's not a specific bottom line dollar to each one of those proposals. If we have 10 trees fall down this year rather than five, we're going to pay a little bit more. But the cost for that service is spelled out in the cost proposal. So you don't have a specific dollar amount for each of the proposals. So how do you rate them as it relates to the cost component of the criteria? Well what we did was we took the typical services that we've had over the last three years from our contractor. So the amount of trees that we've trimmed, the amount of trees that we've removed, the amount of trees that we've planted, we took those typical items in that contract and calculated the cost for each one of those companies to perform a similar service. Okay, and my last question has to do, can you address the RFP fairness issue that was brought up? Yes, of that you or Jay's for whoever? I think I can touch a bit on it. I'm familiar with the process. I think the confusion lies in, this is not a bid opening. And I think that was clear that the gentleman was confused. It's not a bid opening, it's a proposal. Proposals do not have to be open or read out loud. Companies provide proposals, staff reviews the proposals and determines based on what the companies are able to provide us. The best services to the city and then we recommend to you the best company based on a proposal not on a bid price. Thank you. And on that same note, where are actions consistent with other RFPs that the city receives? Yes, it was. Okay. And then I also concur with Council Member Meer that whatever the breakdown was, the schedule, that sort of thing, I really would like to see that in the staff reports in the future. I think it's a helpful tool for the Council. Of course, the price isn't everything with the RFPs, but it's important. And so whatever the matrix is that you're using to come up with the rating on the price, I would prefer to see it in there. And in the contract as well, I'd enjoy seeing that in the staff report. We'll go to council member Barth. Thank you. Well, I actually was contacted by two of the interested parties that didn't bid. They had contacted, looked over the RFP, and I don't know if all my colleagues were because it came to me by email. And one was a Mr. Gus Franklin, and this was August the 8th, so we were on Council recess and I just happened to kind of check up on my emails. And he was with United Pacific Services and the other gentleman, he didn't ask me any specific questions. He just expressed concern that this RFP was written for four West Coast Arborists at the disadvantage of small local companies. That's what he wrote in his comment. But Mr. Franklin had a number of questions that I certainly couldn't answer and explained to him that it wasn't really in my purview to get involved in this request proposal at this time. But I kept them so that I could ask those questions tonight. And so he, one of it was, why would the city require a new contractor to do a tree inventory of 15,000 trees within 90 days when the city already has a tree inventory? That would put any new contractor at an automatic disadvantage since West Coast Arborist apparently did the tree inventory for us originally. So that was one question that he had. Another one was the contractor requires the contractor to respond to any emergency situation within 30 minutes when the majority of contracts call for response time of two hours. And he does list the number of municipalities that his company is a Southern California company. I think he said he has 23 different contracts. So he's using his prior experience to ask that question. And that he questioned the cost proposal at 10%, which is something that I would, while quality is more important in my mind than necessarily cost, 10 points on this proposal scores less than corporate capability and information management. I don't understand what you mean by either one of those and I think that costs should probably be in the 20-25% at the absolute minimum because particularly of the way you talk about how we really don't know how much contract is going to end up costing us at the end of the year because it does you know how many trees fall down, how many things have to be trimmed. So I think cost comparisons between companies is really is an important part of looking at this contract. So if you could just answer those questions for me, Iming Add appreciated. Council Member Bartholshur try. As it relates to the inventory, we felt it was a great opportunity to require whomever was selected to come in and do another tree inventory. Although we had a tree inventory completed in 2006, things changed and the parameters that were given in 2006, we've learned a bit more since then. We understand the process a little bit better as it relates to what trees are, what trees aren't are. And so what a great opportunity for us to have that done again and get it better and more accurate inventory. And I don't think it's a disadvantage, I think it's actually a very, for the city anyway, it's a very great way to get another inventory done as part of a new contract and no additional cost. And do you think 90 days is a reasonable amount of time to ask somebody to inventory our entire city? I have no idea whether that's reasonable or not. Yes it is. I've done some benchmarking and the 90 days is very typical. There's there's I probably have six or eight copies of contracts that show the similar approach. 90 days is reasonable. As it relates to the issue of the 30 minute emergency response, the 30 minute emergency response is four, there's actually two types of emergency response and I think the gentleman missed that. One is for normal business hours. So somebody's here, somebody's in town, somebody's working somewhere, they can get to us within 30 minutes. That's something that we want. That's something that we've had over the last 12 years with this contractor. There's no reason for us to give that up. In addition, the two hours is typically for non-working hours, holidays, weekends, those types of things. As it relates to the cost proposal, again, the benchmarking showed us that this 10% is an acceptable way to evaluate the cost proposal. We found proposals from not providing any point value at all to providing the cost proposal at 50%, 20%, 15%, 10%, it's all over the board. In our minds, it was a way to allow the small business not to be overrun by the large corporation who can by virtue of size provide us a lower cost because there are big companies that can make it up somewhere else. So it was our opinion that that was an acceptable amount. In addition, if I might add, as it relates to the small business comment that was made, our research show that California Tree Service was determined to be a small business enterprise by the city of San Diego during their tree process, their tree proposal and contract process, which I think vets the issue as to whether or not we built this for this large company. No, we had a small business, provided proposal. That tells us that the proposal was built for everybody. Council member Mir. Yeah, one question I forgot to ask. It's a three year contract, potentially five year contract. What kind of, is there any kind of termination clause in the contract year-to-year? Yes, there typically is in service contracts. If the service is not performed, there's a clause that allows us to terminate that contract. 30 days typically. Okay. Council Member Barr. Thank you. I did want to follow up on that. One other sort of part of the question I had is to what is corporate capability and then information management referred to in this analysis? Well, the corporate capability is an evaluation of the company's financial health. Can they actually perform the work? Do they have the actual staffing and resources necessary to provide the services? I'm sorry, the second part of that. The information management, a very important part of this proposal, this contract. The tree software databases managed by the contractor. That's the information management that we're talking about. That's the evaluation part. The contractors required to provide a software program that required to maintain that software program, they're required to maintain the information, update the database, that's the information management. Okay, and then just one more thing. On the community partnerships, what Mr. Levan brought up is this something that we're going to be kind of weaving into that community partnerships where we know a certain tree has to come down. We're going to be able to hopefully reuse it. There's some beautiful benches at public works that I believe were made by West Coast Arborist from trees that were cut down here in the city. Is that something that, as he says, we're going to get better at? Is that? Well, thank you for asking. I actually have had some conversations with Mr. Levan. And what I'm happy to report is we've listened to the community over the last few years as it relates to the improvement of this program. I would remind you that this program started. We were trimming trees. It was a tree trimming program. We are now in urban forest management program. We have council policies, tree ordinances, procedural manuals. We're a tree city USA. We've come a long way in four years. As part of that, we're also hearing the community say, we need more partnership with you. We included that in the request for proposal. The contractor is now required to partner with these community groups and actually take this wood to their sites within reason. So we've included that we've heard the community. So to follow up on that, I see that California Tree Service, for example, scored a three in that area. Did you not feel that they had the capability to fulfill that service? And on that same note, some of the other areas, such as the facility evaluation I see they received about half of the available points there. So in some of those categories where they've scored lower, can you explain what the panel saw in their proposal that led to that scoring? Yes, I can. It's unfortunate that California Tree Service didn't provide a number of items that were required as part of the RFP. So we weren't able to fully understand their capability. They were not responsive in a number of areas. As it relates to the facility, we didn't inspect and two member team didn't evaluation of the facility and the facility was not up to our standards. Okay, thank you. All right, let me get back on the right screen here. Okay. I see no further council discussion on this. I would entertain a motion at this point. I'll move to support staff recommendation. Okay, I'll second that motion. We have discussion. We have exhausted our discussion. We will move forward to vote on the motion. Motion passes unanimously with Mayor Stocks absent. With that, we'll move on to agenda item number 11. That's the consideration of a report pursuant to Elections Code Section 9212 regarding an initiative entitled to following. An initiative amending the Incinitas Municipal Code to authorize and regulate medical marijuana dispensaries in Incinitas. And direction to staff regarding placement of the initiative on the 2014 ballot. And we will go to our city attorney. Thank you. There's a couple of different ways that we can approach this report, at least with me presenting it. I can give you the long version which is to read the 11th page report with all its citations. I can give you. That's a no. Okay. I can give you a summary version that's pretty direct towards the conclusions or I could entertain questions. Whichever one you choose, I definitely want to talk about the PAC decision at some point and I think it's probably best to do that right away. Okay. Why don't we do this? You want to take option two? We'll take the abbreviated version option two. Okay. Atrogyz 15th meeting you directed staff to return with report pursuant elections code section 9212. The report materials response to that direction. The focus of the report concerns the legality of the initiative, which the council comments and public comments were directed to at the August 15th meeting. First of all, what I want to do is highlight the council's options at this point with respect to the initiative. The first option is to adopt the initiative. So the council would actually adopt the initiative and it would become law. The details of how you would do that are contained in the report. The second option is to submit the initiative to the voters for the 2014 election. I want to really emphasize the point that if the council believes the initiative contains no procedural defects, which the city clerk tells me that it doesn't, the council is under a ministerial duty to direct the clerk to place the initiative on the ballot. And that ballot would be the 2014 ballot. Also too, there is one other alternative that the council can consider aside from the two that I mentioned, which is taking an action to place a competing measure on the ballot. And that's something that the city of Lemon Grove did for their various reasons. And of course, whichever ballot measure obtained the most votes would prevail and become the law if upheld in the city in 2014. Because the obvious and settled nature of the law regarding medical marijuana, and I don't think that's a surprise to anyone, medical marijuana dispensaries as far as my office is concerned, we don't recommend that you adopt the initiative as is. And really we direct staff to bring and do not recommend that you direct staff to bring back a competing ordinance. Instead we recommend a wait and see approach considering the unsettled nature with respect to medical marijuana. And the fact that there are other initiatives that are on the ballot in neighboring cities in 2012. I want to emphasize that we do recommend that if you find that there's some procedural defects in the initiative that you do direct the clerk to place it on the ballot. As discussed in the report, at the consulate, some point in the future decided to challenge the initiative. That is to invalidate it for some kind of legal reasons as presented in the report. There are a couple of legal mechanisms to do that, and that would be both pre-election and post-election. If it's post-election, the courts are a little bit more liberal towards the challenge and if it's pre-election and that summarizes in the report. Right now I'd like to give you a quick summary of the initiative just very quickly. Medical marijuana dispensaries currently in the city are prohibited. The report talks about the fact that if they're not expressly permitted by the zoning, then they're not expressly permitted by the zoning then they're expressly prohibited The initiative would permit medical marijuana is in the city in non residential zones With a thousand foot separation requirement among them and a six hundred foot buffer from a school or playground City officials would be required to issue an operating permit and a business registration to any city, to any applicant that complies with the location requirements and presents a plan for compliance with the operational requirements that's contained in the initiative. Also, if there are no directors that were convicted of a serious felony in the past seven years, that would also go into serious felony in the past seven years, that would also go into the qualifications for the issue and to the permit. In insinitus we have a business registration. It's not a business license. I want to make that very clear. In some cities there's a business license that's regulatory in nature. Our business registration, which is a nominal fee here, is just to provide staff with information about the operation for fire issues, zoning awareness as to what's going on, but it's really not a regulatory mechanism. The initiative would also prohibit law enforcement from arresting or seizing marijuana from qualified patients, which is a term of art for purposes of the initiative and the compassionate use act in California, for caregivers and dispensary personnel. The operational requirements include security personnel, security cameras and alarm, safety lighting, secured storage of marijuana, restricted hours from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., no consumption or dispensing of alcohol on the site of the dispensaries. No marijuana visible from the exterior, products containing marijuana would be labeled as such and no provision of minors generally, unless they're a qualified patient. So I can't seem being caregivers, but qualified patients. No on-site evaluations for medical marijuana. The initiative also reports to impose a 2.5% excise tax on dispensary sales. And then finally, the initiative contained a severability provision that states that if any provision in the initiative is invalidated for any reason, the remaining provisions would be in full force in effect. California law, Compassionate Use Act, we know it is Prop 215 adopted in 1996. It generally provides state law criminal provisions relating to possession and cultivation of marijuana does not apply to patient as that terms define or a patient's primary caregiver. Patient is defined as a person receiving medical marijuana via written or oral approval of a physician. Primary caregiver is defined as an individual designated by a patient who has consistently assumed responsibility for housing health or safety of that person. The companion act in California, a lot of companion to the Compassionate Use Act is known as a Medical Marijuana Program Act, the MMPA, the acronym. Generally, it clarifies the scope of the Compassionate Usak, promotes uniform and consistent application of the Compassionate Usak, and importantly, it enhances the access of patients and caregivers to medical marijuana through collective cooperative cultivation projects. You should also note that the MMPA as part of it required the attorney general to promulgate guidelines to enforce and assist in the enforcement of both the Compassionate Use Act and the Medical Marijuana Program Act. And attorney general did so in 2008. And there's a footnote to a website where you can actually call up the guidelines. They're interesting. Now let me address the legalities. I know there's a lot of complexity involving this whole medical marijuana issue, as you well know, with respect to different legal opinions and different opinions through the courts. But the report concludes that it appears that the Compassionate Use Act and the Medical Marijuana Program Act wouldn't preempt any operating print and business license requirements of the initiative if adopted. So the California law and of itself would not take the place of local regulations if they're put in place in the city. The report also concludes that a strong argument, and I want to emphasize strong argument because a Zalabat argument can be made that the initiative is inconsistent with the requirements of the Compassionate Use Act. And it's because it requires a city to issue, it would require the city to issue permits for dispensaries without any qualification as to whether they are primary caregivers. Now I know there's a definition in the actual initiative that refers to primary caregivers and cross referencesreferences of compassionate use act. But the initiative doesn't specifically describe what a dispensary must do to demonstrate. And I'm gonna emphasize that to demonstrate that it has assumed consistently the responsibility for the housing, health, and safety of a patient as a compassionate use act requires. And when I think about this, I think about the nuisance abatement ordinances in cities. They prohibit keeping properties in nuisance condition and specifically define what a property owner must do to maintain that property free from nuisance conditions. That's not quite the case with the initiatives. Although it cross-references a compassionate usac, it really doesn't say what a dispensary must do to qualify as a primary caregiver. Also, it appears that cooperatives of less than 10 may be unregulated to dispense medical marijuana, irrespective of the caregiver status. The federal law, the federal law is quite simple. The controlled substances substances act and it presents the biggest legal impediment to the initiative. In that simply stated, under the law it's a legal to manufacture, distribute a process marijuana without exception unless it's for research purposes only. Obviously a strong argument can be made that under the federal law, the Control Substances Act, dispensaries in the proposed form under the initiative or any form for that matter would be prohibited. And this forms the basis of the correspondence from the U.S. Attorney Duffy that was in your materials when the Collert brought the staff report forward. And there's also a quote in the report straight from that document. or concludes that the taxing component of the initiative is invalid because it would create an illegal excise tax on a particular product and that's in light of state law. And state law specifically authorizes excise taxes and in the report it talks about to back one alcohol. We all know that and realize that. It doesn't give any additional authority for local agency cities to pick and choose where it might impose an excise tax. And also to the tax exceeds the 1% limit that local agencies may levy under the state law. And that's very important. As reference in the report, such a tax could jeopardize the collection of all sales tax in the city by the state board of equalization. Other observations in the report without going into detail. Under the initiative, felons may obtain operating permits, provided that their convictions were more than seven years ago. There's a lack of enforcement tools identified. City employees administering the initiative may be subject to criminal actions or civil actions by the US Attorney General, as I referenced earlier. Because in her letter, there's a statement that there's no immunities conferred on officials that might administer the initiative. And then finally, there's no provisions exists to revoke the permits when necessary because of violations. The permits just seem to go on forever under the initiative. I'm not sure if the intention was that it would run with the land, like a conditional use permit runs with the land, or if there was something else intended, we just don't know. A few closing comments under the existing law that don't guaranteees, and it's sort of a patchwork quilt of opinions and arguments that exist. The only guarantee is that individuals are going to disagree regarding legal conclusions, regarding permitting and regulating medical marijuana. I guess the appropriate forum for that is the arguments for and arguments against in the initiative process when it comes forward for your action. Hopefully there's going to be some clarification from the higher courts that will put an end to the confusion. And finally, the PAC decision, that's important. That's a reference in the report. And of course, the report has no page numbers, but it's reference under subsection F which is entitled to implications regarding inconsistency with the controlled substances act. I received a correspondence from the law of the subgesticum C. McElfresh and I want to thank her for writing to me. It's entitled dismissal of PAC versus Long Beach by the California Supreme Court. I want to demystify this because some folks out there think that this means something more than what it really does. First, let me give you a little bit of background. And the PAC versus City of Long Beach decision, the State Court appeals ruled that no city or county in California could regulate medical marijuana dispensaries since medical marijuana is illegal under the federal law. The CSA, the controlled substances act. The California Supreme Court agreed to review the decision with a decision that was supposed to come this fall that everyone's been waiting for because there were a number of other cases that had a contrary ruling and there's confusion out there. In the interim, Long Beach ban dispensaries outright. And in response, the California Supreme Court determined that the issue was then moved and dismissed the case. Technically, under the legal rules, when that happens, unless the Supreme Court states otherwise, that lower appellate decision is depublished, dismissed. What that means is that, although it may be persuasive and me telling you about it, it could not be cited as authoritative in the courts, but it's just important to realize what happened there. It wasn't as if the Supreme Court reviewed that appellate decision and said, let's dismiss it, no merit. It was really more of a mootness issue, which under the law means that the issue just went away. And it went away because Long Beach dispensed with its ban. What I would like to do is add an addendum to the report that just clarifies this. And also states that it doesn't really change the conclusions in the report. And I don't know if I was smart or reading minds or whatever the case may be. I was in and out of the office on vacation So I didn't get this letter actually Got this communication from about eight different people and and the report was already in writing and going but In that section and I'm just reading from the report it says and if the pack decision is upheld By the California Supreme Court and the initiative adopted by the voters, to great likelihood it would be invalidated. Because that case was really on all fours as to whether the federal law, the controlled substance, substance act is preempts of local regulation. But then the next paragraph says, nevertheless, whether a higher court addresses the controlled substance itself since his act preemption or not. Under existing law, it's a legal manufacturer distributor possess marijuana. And that's pretty clear. So I want to clear that up and I'll be happy to include an addendum that will attach to this and put it on file with the city clerk so there's no confusion. And also too I want to thank the folks that contacted me. They spent a lot of time providing their opinions and their insight and there were some angles that I really hadn't thought about. Not necessarily, I agree with them, but it was good information, including from a college professor, I think at the University of San Diego. So with that, that's the report. Wow. Can you imagine the long version? Okay. Good account, number bond. Thank you for that. Yeah, thank you. I was just going to say the same thing. Thanks for giving us a short version. Do we have how many? Hey, we have 14. Well, I think that's all I need to say that I'll wait. Let's take the public speakers. All right, I'm going to call you three at a time. If the first speaker would come to the podium and then the following two, please come up and sit in the front just so we can move through quicker. The first three are Nancy Logan, Kathy Lipett followed by James, I'm sorry James, Bob Timberger. Good evening, I'm Nancy Logan, 25 year insanitas resident and I just need to tell you after listening to about the trees, I took advantage of the trees at no cost being planted in my front yard. Love the trees, love the tree service at Planetum. So now back to marijuana. We know it's very clear that marijuana is not a welcome addition to our beautiful city of insinitas. Just listen to what the city attorney said, his report. We don't need them. Drugs that are beneficial to us. Drugs that aid in our illnesses are dispensed in a pharmacy, not in a marijuana dispensary. Studies show that teens that are in drug treatment centers indicated that diverted marijuana from pot shops is their primary source of getting it. So, and also my kids are grown. I do have young grandchildren though. Council member Muir, it sounds like you have young children because you talked about recess, deputy mayor Gaspard, I know you have young children. I hope the day never comes that you're driving down the street or walking by a store front. And your kids say, Mommy or daddy, what's that? What's in there? And you have to say, oh, that's where you buy your marijuana wouldn't that be a sad day thank you very much Hi my name is Kathy Lipit and although you don't currently live in Encinitas now I'm resident of Rancho Santa Fe but as a public health practitioner I want to speak to you. If you want to get accurate, reliable, and valid information to guide your decisions regarding the advantages or disadvantages, wisdom or folly of adopting ordinances that would allow marijuana storefront sales, then look to those who have expertise and knowledge, but no conflict of interest, those who do not use marijuana or profit from it or stand to profit from it. I'm a public health practitioner and our dependence on science-based evidence guides the information that we share with public officials and community members, not self-report politics or ideology. The environments and communities, the children grow up and influence the decisions that they make about a multitude of things including and not limited to drug abuse. Allowing or facilitating marijuana storefronts will most certainly influence those decisions to use marijuana. 90% of drug use begins in adolescents. Experimentation matters. With each year the initiation of drug use is postponed. The use or abuse of drugs will be reduced by 14 percent. Initiation matters. Those who do not engage in using or abusing drugs till 21 have been found to be remain free of drug-related dependency or addiction for the remainder of their lives. The efforts to provide an opportunity for a marijuana industry to establish and grow via political processes, tantamount to ignoring the history that we have with two previous predatory industries, alcohol and tobacco. We have allowed them to become legal and thereby become commercialized. We allowed them, why not marijuana? Because we know far more today about marijuana than we ever did about alcohol and tobacco. About the human brain development, physiological, psychological, social, academic, criminal behaviors that follow dependency and addiction. Tobacco and alcohol industries need children to assure their continued viability. Without them, they'd be out of business in 25 years. And a marijuana industry will be at least as predatory as any alcohol or marijuana or tobacco industry. Storefronts won't bring anything positive to incinitas. But as the city of San Diego learned, and the census tracts were dependent, where dispensaries located property and violent crimes doubled. 30-day use of marijuana went up by 11th graders in the San Diego Unified School District by 77%. While their perception of risk went down, marijuana doubles the risk of serious or fatal car crashes. Degrade's academic performance and increases the risk of other drug use. Your city attorney appears to have provided a well-research and documented analysis that should provide a solid foundation for your decision. Thank you. Next speaker is James. I'm just going to say James. Following by Lance Rogers and then Judy String. My name is James Mockenberger. I'm a eight year resident of the city of Ensenitas. I'm also the proponent of this initiative, as well as the president of the Patient Care Association. I actually want to speak to something that Miss Lipett said, which was that when we're looking at issues of health, we should try to get our information from unbiased sources that neither use it, have any vested interests one way or another. Last year I produced a documentary on the medical effects of cannabis. And in that process, I chose to take a very conservative approach and only interview researchers and doctors who had been funded by the federal government, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, to do their research studies. And one of the major people on that was a man named Dr. Donald Tashkin, who works out of UCLA. And he's been funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse for over 30 years, doing repeated studies. Each one with the intent of finding harm in marijuana use, looking at causing cancer, immune depression, all number of different things. And in each of the studies, what has consistently happened was that what was initially supposed to be thought of as harmful was found to either be neutral or actually beneficial. Cannabis has been found instead to actually have benefit in helping to reduce and sometimes even care cancer works to boost immune function, all these things. This is the most unbiased person and setup that could possibly exist. And this is very consistent. When you look at every single study that's been done by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, they consistently find that there's no issues of chemical dependency, there's no notable significant health detriment, and yet there's consistently indications of marijuana being effective in treating all kinds of different things. Additionally, what keeps being brought up is the concerns about how this will affect children. What you'll notice when you look at the initiative is that it regulates the distribution of marijuana specifically to adults only and the only opportunity for a minor to have access to medicine is when they have a serious illness and it's being prescribed by a doctor and supported by their parent. They have no access to it directly. And what we find in different parts of the state and the country as well as around the world is that the amount of use of young people goes down as you increase regulation. What we're trying to do here is to increase regulation. A drug dealer on the street does not care how old a person is. They just care if they have money. In this situation, the intent is very clearly medical to support people who have a medical need and to make sure that it does not get diverted for other purposes. There's a lot more head left to say, but I know my time's up, and thank you. My name is Lance Rogers. I'm a Civil Rights Attorney and a resident of Incinida since 1996, which interestingly enough was when the Compassionate Us Act was passed in California. I've been 16 years, and so I would respectfully disagree with a weight-in-sea approach. I think it's important to think about who's waiting for access to marijuana to use for pain relief. This is what we're talking about. We're talking about medical marijuana. Marijuana as medicine, not recreational use medicine. And I would submit to you that the will of Californian voters have spoken on that as well as the will of insinitans. I've watched a survey and I'm honored. I'm very proud that I have such an intelligent, high-achieving city. I'm very proud of that. And I'm hopeful that you all can figure this out, which is very complicated, but very, very important for people living in insinitas who suffer daily from very serious illnesses and pain, that benefit from the use of marijuana, that the California Medical Association has decided as medicine, that the American Medical Association has decided as medicine. Sixteen years ago, we decided it in California. Since then, seventeen states in the District of Columbia have medical marijuana laws. In November, either Arkansas or Massachusetts will as well. I disagree with your city attorney with regard to that this is an obvious, unsettled legal area. I agree that it's changing, but this is why it's important for you to decide it. In a simply bill 1300 that was passed last year, I would agree with Council member Bond about the California and its infinite wisdom many times to vote responsibility to you guys. They did that in with Assembly Bill 1300. They say it's up to cities to regulate this, to regulate that's the law. With regard to the U.S. Attorney's letter that she has so generously sent to our city, my city, I wanted to request if the council had also been provided with a letter that the ACLU wrote to Ms. Duffy with regard to offering her opinion as to your job, which is to enforce the laws of the state of California for the benefit of the people of insinitas, one of whom is me. I would ask that you ask your city attorney some follow up questions with regard to his opinions. Strong arguments that dispensaries be designated as primary caregivers. I was disagree, I don't think a pharmacy must be designated as a nurse in order to dispense medicine under California law with regard to medical marijuana. Strong argument about federal law, review the ACLU, review the great opinion that was offered to you from Professor Alex Crate who was a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and the head of the medical marijuana task force for the city of San Diego where he disagrees under the 21 U.S. 885 subsection D with regard to whether your public officials can be charged for violating federal law. Thank you. Thank you. Pauline Speakers, Judy Strang, followed by Kathleen Mackie, followed by Barbara Gordon. And if you guys could adjust the microphone when you're up there to be a little closer Pauline Speakers, Judy Strang, followed by Kathleen Mackie, followed by Barbara Gordon. And if you guys could adjust the microphone when you're up there to be a little closer to you, that would help us out. Okay. Good evening, Mayor, or Deputy Mayor and City Council. I'm having some difficulty with this subject since I've been working on this for over 12 years and have watched this progression from a very compassionate state of California that wanted patients, if their doctor recommended it, to have marijuana for caregivers to provide it to a full-flung industry who now advertises and aggressively seeks people and wants to set up shop in a starfront situation in our malls It angers me that our very compassionate nature has been abused this way and even the patient care association when you go to their website They're a group of pot shop owners. They have there They've got a horse in this race. There is money to be earned here And that's what it's about. And it's really disheartening to me to see those of us who care about people, see this abuse this way. We also were involved in some of the very first assessments sort of accidentally, and one of your residents probably did one of the first assessments of pot shops back in 2005 Candace Porter, who was passed away. She and another colleague wanted to go see what they look like when they first started opening in San Diego. She called me on the phone and said, Judy, this is your worst nightmare. There are young men going in there one after another coming out five minutes, layers with brown bags. Since then many of us have had the opportunity to see pot shops and that's exactly what they look like. It's very discouraging to all of us who work in the community and have been long time preventionists, who want to protect our children and our families and our society. This is a very misguided initiative. I don't think it's the least bit about compassion. I do think it's about profits. I do want to's about profits. I do want to say, and I mentioned it before, in the San Diego Union High School District, our marijuana uses among our teenagers are increasing. And I know that's because the normalization of marijuana, and I think pot shops have contributed significantly to that, along with the advertisement of this very aggressive predatory industry that we have among us. I'm pleased that you have dodged this bullet for a year or two. I am so sorry for our families in Salonabeech and Delmar and I'm surely hoping they'll vote against this initiative in November. My name is Kathleen McCay. I'm a resident of Salonabeech. I work in Suronno Valley where we had a pot shop or marijuana dispensary. One floor above me. I wanted to give you an idea of what that looked like. We, once the dispensary was in place, we had to be careful about what we left at the front desk as far as laptops or purses or any valuables because there was so much daytime office hour theft going on because once they were in place. Many, many times I was on the second floor, they were on the third floor. People would come in wandering into our office, meaning to go there, but they came into mind. My door was plainly labeled, excuse me, with the name of our company. And so the reason for their confusion was kind of a mystery to me. But four or five times a week, this would happen that they would just kind of wander into my office. The parking lot from about mid-morning until after I left was always filled with people sitting in cars chatting, talking, just kind of loitering and staying in the parking lot. The dispensary has since left. I no longer have people wandering into my office, not meaning to be there. I don't. We don't have the parking lot people, you know, sitting in the parking lot, talking and discussing any longer either. So it was all dispensary traffic. It was all younger, a younger generation. It wasn't, there wasn't a variance. It was, you know, pretty much a 25-year-old kind of range of people. I don't want it in my city, I don't want it in my sister's city, so I'm here to encourage you to try and thwart this effort. for it. Hello, my name is Barbara Gordon and I think the debate on whether marijuana is medicine really has nothing to do with medicine or compassion for the term. It has everything to do with the safety and healthy of this great community. I don't think we can be confused to about people that want to medicalize marijuana. I think if we expect our kids to reject drugs, we must stop sending messages having a dispensary and a strict mal definitely sends the message that is harmless. There is no doubt why they want to open up a pot shop, these pot shops make a lot of money each month. I think the state legislation provided patients access to marijuana, but only through collectives or cooperatives not sold out of a storefront. It is illegal to sell marijuana at the state and federal level as you've heard tonight. The federal law contains no exception for medical use. I feel the community has really failed to recognize the pro marijuana influence as at work in their community by allowing this initiative to be put on the ballot. And again, I believe in the end it's going to be decided in the courts. Thank you. Following three speakers, Dean Scott, followed by Marie Hogan, followed by Nancy Sheridan. Good evening, thank you for your time tonight. I reside in the city just north of here. I ride my bike to insinues almost every Saturday. I usually get a VG donut or I go to the Katie donut shop and with regards to the roads I am all for fixing the road from La Costa Avenue all the way to Badge Street. I've been clipped on my bike about three times on that stretch of road but I'm not here to talk about the roads. I'm here to talk about marijuana. With regards to marijuana, I've been following a lot in the local media. And as we know, the media is not always accurate in its description. And as the police see this city's attorneys impact study, when it was posted, and with regards to his address tonight, he's spot on. The group that collected and paid for the signature gatherers on a ballot initiative known as the Patient Care Association, according to the website, is basically a group of pot shop owners. In other words, they're selling pot and want to do so with incinitas and elsewhere and the beach cities up and down the coast. This is in direct violation to the intent of California's law to allow patients and caregivers to exchange marijuana when recommended by a doctor. So if we know from reports from Delmaw that the ballot measure there could mean up to six pot shops and from Solana Beach up to 16 pot shops, I could only guess how many could operate in the city of Incinitas. As a businessman, I know that the business environment thrives when the surrounding businesses attract appropriate clientele. And the pot shop website show scensely clad women and other young guys blowing smoke and pardering. Pardering, pardering, how good grief. Having a good time, let's just say that. So that it's clear that the cell pot tries to appeal to the lowest common denominator, certainly not patients or people that need medical services. I appreciate law and forment efforts with the one pot shop that actually opened in Incinitas, because I know that surrounding businesses did not appreciate having it around them. I've been angered at Del Mons, the Lawnabeech have been forced to use their precious resources to put the pot shop ordinance on the November ballot this 2012, when we know it is illegal and will be litigated. I am pleased that incinitas has escaped that fate this year. Thank you for your time. Good evening. My name is Evelyn Hogan. I'm here again also to I'm very grateful that you have also dodged this bullet and not been put in this position to put this on the ballot and be caught in in the the middle and I think that I'm thankful for the very thorough report and pointing out all of the errors and discrepancies that will be litigated in the future if something like this is passed. A lot of these pot shops want to say, well this is not getting to our young people, it's not getting to our youth. I can tell you as the parent of a teenager, you know, what a driver's license is to a 16-year-old? A license, a medical marijuana card has become to an 18-year-old. It's now becoming a right of passage for 18-year-olds. They, you know, go out and they get their card immediately when they turn 18. And then that's how this marijuana is getting back into our schools. As, you know, the parent of a teenager, I see this and I watch, you know, some of my kids' friends that have fallen off of the path as soon as they turn 18, their senior year, their out getting their card. These dispensaries, you know, should not be allowed in our communities. They are changing that social norm that we're trying to teach our young people about marijuana. So I'm grateful for that very thorough report. And I do think that the wait and see approach is the best approach because I do believe when we wait and see what we will see is that dispensaries will not be allowed. Thank you. Following three speakers Nancy Sheridan followed by Jessica McElfresh followed by Dr. Bob Blake. Good evening. My name is Nancy Sheridan. I'm an Ensenitas resident of 25 years and a parent of two offspring 18 and 21. And this evening I invited a friend who's an Ancenae resident to the meeting to speak to this agenda item. However, she was too upset and heartbroken because she's in the midst of dealing with her 19 year old son whose life's plans were way laid due to his marijuana use. He's trying to earn the parents trust again. He's trying to earn his GED, trying to get a job, and trying to get on with life. But here's what she told me, emphatically. She said marijuana is a terrible drug. Pot shops are a big sham. It's morally wrong to consider having pot shops in Ancinitas. The residents had a fit a few years ago when there were adult and nude dancers outfit opening in Ancinitas. And what makes it acceptable to think that it's OK for pot shops to be an insanitas? It's only going to lead to more problems in families, in neighborhoods, and in the general community. And she said it's a disgrace to consider having this as a future ballot initiative. And I happen to agree with her. Thank you very much. Good evening, my name is Jessica McAfresh, and I'm an attorney representing the Patient Care Association. I want to thank the city attorney for reading my letter. I don't always get that lucky. And for amending his report in that way, he's right, it was dismissed by the California Supreme Court. And when that happens, it seems overly complicated when you try and explain it to normal people. But meaning people haven't been perverted by the legal process. But what's basically happened is the lower court ruling is deep published. It's no longer binding law. We don't have a crystal clear ruling decision on the issue that we might have wanted and hoped for, but it is true that there's no longer that ruling out there and you can't sign it in court and you can't rely on it here. Another issue that I know has probably been on your minds is what this means as far as for your employees. I do encourage you to review the materials from Alchskrite, from Thomas Jefferson Law School, and also from the ACLU, and they've said it far more eloquently than I can. I can merely agree. The other matter, though, that comes up all the time is sort of this federal law versus state law. And the Control Substances Act, it's true. Marijuana remains a Schedule I substance, which is a legal under federal law. And the Control Substances Act, it's true. Marijuana remains a Schedule I substance, which is a legal under federal law. However, the Control Substances Act, the federal one, is very clear that it does not intend to be the supreme law of the land on controlled substances. Rather, it contains an express provision that states it's not trying to preempt everything. That states are allowed to under their own systems of law and act their own rules on how to deal with controlled substances. And that's what California's done here. It's decided to allocate its resources and focus on, say, going after other controlled substances, after recreational use of marijuana, not after legitimate medical users. And that's what then California courts have interpreted as allowing states to regulate collectives and cooperatives. Another thing I want to clear out, there's often a perception that storefront dispensaries are just literally stores. They're not. To be legal under California, they have to be collectives or cooperatives or informal associations of qualified patients and primary caregivers. Further, such a collective cooperative does not have to be a primary caregiver. It doesn't have to provide those sorts of services. Rather, what it needs to be is a group of patients and primary caregivers collectively associating, exchanging, distributing, medical marijuana amongst themselves in exchange for reasonable reimbursement and just to keep the doors open and to keep the medicine in there for people who need it. This is a protective and legal use of land. There are several cases that the report did not mention that say that such as People V. Colvin, alternative medical cannabis collective versus the county of LA, and then Empire versus Riverside. Most of the cases out there are relatively consistent that a storefront collective is a lawful use of land. The major issue is whether or not cities and counties have to have them if that's required by state law. But whether it's simply allowed, that's the courts have become more and more consistent on that. Thank you. Thank you. The next speaker is Bob Blake with a time donation by Arlene Horton Bay. Arlene? Before we do that, I do need a motion to extend the meeting to 1030 if required. So moved. I'll second that. Deputy Mayor and Council members, I'm Dr. Blake. I have been a long time Sandy Egan born here and have lived in Lucadia since 1976. My background is an emergency medicine. I practiced for 28 years at Palomar Medical Center in Palomarado Hospital as a full-time emergency physician. During my tenure there, I also served as chief of staff at the hospital for Palomarado and chairman of the emergency department at Palmar, at Palmarado for another 10 years. Marijuana's history as medicine goes back 5,000 years to China and India where it was used to try to treat a wide variety of conditions in prior to 1937 when Congress passed the Marijuana Tax Act against the wishes of the American Medical Association at that time. Marijuana was used by American physicians, but all that changed in 1937 during the Congressional hearings, a man by the name of Harry Anselinger, stood up before Congress and said, Marijuana is an addictive drug which produces in its users insanity, criminality, and death. The American Medical Association also sent a representative to those committee meetings that took place in Congress. Dr. Woodward, Dr. Woodward was both a physician and an attorney and stood up and said, quote, the American Medical Association knows of no evidence that marijuana is a dangerous drug. Two members on that committee stood up in response and said, doctor, if you don't know, if that's all you have to say about what we're doing here today, why don't you just leave? Well, the bill passed the committee, went through the House and Senate, was signed by Roosevelt, and 75 years later, guess what, the American Medical Association still knows of no evidence that marijuana is a dangerous drug. The DEA is continued to misclassify a marijuana as a schedule one drug, meaning it has no medical use and is highly addictive and dangerous, none of which is true. But yet, physicians are now restricted from prescribing it due to its schedule one status. For your information, other schedule one drugs, we have heroin and LSD. I cannot write a prescription for either of those, but I can write a prescription for methamphetamine. It makes no sense to me. Marijuana is illegal, methamphetamine is legal. Despite the fact that the DEA has repeatedly rejected attempts by the American Medical Association to change the scheduling of marijuana so that it can be prescribed by physicians. Well, in my 28 years in emergency medicine, I've treated people with every sort of medical emergency you can imagine and I've treated overdoses of every subject, every substance I can think of with the exception of one. I never treated a marijuana overdose. That is unachievable. You can't not achieve. It's impossible to take in enough marijuana to kill yourself. So DEA administrative law judge at one point said, in his natural form marijuana is one of the safest drugs known to man. So why the Schedule One status? It beats me and it beats the AML, the AMA as well. In contrary to public opinion, chronic marijuana use is not associated as proven by Dr. Donald Taskin with whom I worked back in the early 70s with an increased risk of lung cancer, emphysema, malignant tumors of the head neck and marijuana causes absolutely no damage to your brain, heart, liver, or kidneys. The law in 1996, we voted the marijuana and the Compassionate Use Act, by a 56 to 44 percent majority. That's a virtual landslide in this sort of election. It gave the rights to use marijuana for conditions such as cancer, loss of appetite or anorexia, AIDS, chronic pain, spasticity, glaucoma, arthritis, migraines, or any other illness for which marijuana provides relief. But nor if for patients to be able to use medical marijuana, they need more than just a law like Proc 215 that states they may use it. They need a convenient safe place to get their medicine without having to drive 30 minutes or an hour or wait for their connection to show up in some dark alley. Marijuana reduces medical marijuana reduces the symptoms of hundreds, if not thousands of conditions, with only a fraction of the side effects of other drugs. If you're concerned about what's killing your children in schools, that would be, let's see, Vikadin, which is probably the most dangerous drug that children abuse, alcohol, cannabis, I personally don't see it. So by the way way I'm a traditional physician. I was educated at University of San Diego, did medical school at University of California, Irvine. I practiced traditional medicine for 30 years for lots of conditions. It doesn't work. Chronic, painful conditions, people are incapacitated by the side effects of the drugs we give them. When I add medical marijuana to someone's pain regimen, I decrease the amount of vikin that they're using or the amount of narcotics that are impairing their life in so many ways and they ultimately experience an increase or an improvement in their overall lifestyle. So I strongly urge you to do the right thing, which is to provide a safe place for our patients to obtain their marijuana right here in Edson Edas. Thank you. The final speaker is Sonora Velasquez with Time Donation by Benjamin Doyle. Benjamin? All right. I started. Do you want to pass something out? I have a question. My name is Sonoma Velasquez. I am here representing the Citizens for Patient Rights campaign. We also received an advance copy of this impact report and I have to say we were very, very disappointed with it. To go briefly through some of the reasons we were disappointed with this report. The first reason was in the definition it says that a dispensary as defined in this document may not be legal because it does not meet the definition of primary caregiver as we've already responded to the city attorney and the city manager, never is the claim made that the dispenser is the primary caregiver. And a dispenser is a collection of qualified patients. This is consistent with the CUA. So the idea that the initiative is unlawful for that reason is inappropriate and incorrect. We also took issue with the frequent siding of PAC regardless of the reason for which a case is moot correct. We also took issue with the, with the frequent sighting of PAC, regardless of the reason for, for which a case is moot and a law is unsightable, the case is moot and the law is unsightable. Therefore, why do we have an entire page dedicated to a case which is no longer relevant for whatever reason it is indeed moot? So, you know, and this is a particularly disappointing because as the city attorney pointed out, he was made aware of the fact that this case was made on August 23rd in a letter from Jessica McElfresh in an email communication from me on September 4th with an attached copy of the letter from Jessica McElfresh. And yet it still takes up an entire page of this document. He cannot claim this document was written prior to September 4th because in the document it sitesites the closure of Mother Earth Collective which happened on September 5th. So this document was still being developed on September 5th. Why is PACs still being cited if it is unsightable law and it is moot? Then this letter goes on to make statements from Laura Duffy's office which we'll get to in a minute. Regarding the taxes, the impact report fails to examine all the options available to City if a sales tax is found to be non-conforming. When faced by a nearly identical tax and nearly identical initiatives, Solana Beach and Lemme Growth concluded that the best option for their City if the tax was found to be non-conforming was not to collect it. It was not to make invalid all sales taxes in their city. It seems like that option should have at least been presented to the Council on this report as the favorable option. Last but not least, in the conclusions, once again, it states that city employees may be subject to criminal actions by the U.S. city attorney. I'm gonna read right now why that is not the case. I may be noted that in the August 16th meeting I wrote that read this exact same law. Federal law. 21 U.S.C. 85D provides that, listen closely, no civil or criminal liability shall be imposed upon any duly authorized officer of any state territory, political subdivision thereof, the District of Columbia, of any possession of the United States, who shall be lawfully engaged in the enforcement of any law or municipal ordinance related to a controlled substance. It's pretty clear, you cannot be prosecuted for regulation of municipal ordinance related to controlled substance. The controlled substance is in medical marijuana. The ordinance is the ordinance in front of you. Therefore, municipal employee cannot be prosecuted. This was brought the attention to the entire council on record. This was later reiterated in a letter to the entire council, the city attorney and the city manager attached with was a copy of the ACLU letter pointing this out. A copy of the analysis of the ACLU letter by Alex Crite, constitutional law professor at Thomas Jefferson University, and the press release from the ACLU. In all three of these, it was pointed out that Laura Duffy said in her letter, very important, that if any local employee was to commit a drug crime, they would not be granted federal immunity. But an employee would only need immunity if they were violating a drug law. By enforcing this ordinance, you are not violating a drug law, as may clear, by federal law. By enforcing this ordinance, you are not violating a drug law, as may clear by federal law. That letter was, unfortunately, what appears to be a politically motivated document that could not claim, could not make the serious claim of any actual threat, but could only make it much more ambiguous, non-threat as pointed out by the ACLU, who then asked Laura Duffy to specify where any law would be violated and she was unable to do so because the cases that none would be. So, you know, we were very disappointed in this. There were plenty of case law that was pointed out that was to the counter-pack that is still relevant. The city attorney himself pointed this out and yet he stated none of it in his report. No, there was pack and there's a few other scouted cases where cases could theoretically be made against dispensaries an Impact report is supposed to deal with the actual issues relevant to the voters safety how this affects the city code You know, we've seen some very good impact reports and we've seen some very poor ones, and unfortunately, we were less than impressed by the contents of this report. Considering that ample notice of the city attorney and this entire council received on many of these issues, that these claims will continue to be made really as a shame. I've included summary of our response to these claims as well as an annotated version of the impact report. It is also available to any of the member of the public who would like it. One last thought on addiction. Abuse and addiction of any medication is a problem. Abuse and prescription medications is the leading cause of accidental death in the county of San Diego. And the most abused drugs are Ambien, Vicodin, and Oxicon, which are prescribed to treat sleeping disorders and depression. Marijuana, on the other hand, is not considered to have a high potential for abuse and has never caused a single death due to overdose. Marijuana is an effective treatment as proven by the UCSD Medical Canada's Research Center against the effects of cancer radiation therapy, AIDS-wasting disease, and multiple sclerosis. Why should these patients be denied their medicine over the potential for abuse when other patients are allowed there? Thank you very much. Thank you. Second, I'll please public speakers. Okay, we'll move to Council Member Barth. Thank you. I just want the city attorney to clarify something, two things that he said. One is that if I understood you correctly, because this initiative does not have any defects to it as proposed, we are obligated to put this on a future ballot. Is that correct? Yes. Okay, the next question is you also said take a wait and see approach. What does that mean? That means with respect to what you might do pre-election or post-election. You know in terms of an invalidation action if you intend to go that route. There are several other initiatives in neighboring cities right now there on the ballot for 2012. At least my humble opinion, I think we're going to see another court case that parallels the issues that were raised in the PAC decision. It was an interesting set of circumstances there, as I said, that mooted that. But I think that's coming down the road because I do not believe the issue is resolved. I mean, you know, reasonable minds are differing on this. That's undeniable. And that's why it's in the courts. And that's why the Supreme Court grant a review at least in this person's opinion. Okay, just one follow up on that. Do we have to buy a specified period of time, say that we're going to put this on the 2014 ballot? Is there a clock ticking on us on that? Or can we wait until after the 2012 election and see what went down in Nsenius and Slonne Beach? Or do we have to make that decision right now tonight? Yeah, you have to make that decision. Right now tonight. Thank you. And on that same line of thinking, a competing measure cannot be decided at a later date. That can. Okay. Thank you. We'll go to council member bond. Yeah, thank you very much. Just a couple of points. I've not seen many cities who have had a lot of these establishments put in. Be very happy with the new state of their city and received a lot of compliments from the neighbors and neighborhood and citizens that boy I really like what you're doing for my city. Being a little facetious there, but I've got a little bit of an issue with this. Some of you in the council may have met Jerry Mello, who was a mayor council member from Fort Bragg, California. Very intelligent guy. I had a military career and he worked in the, I think it was a forest ranger and went up in the hills to investigate something and was gunned down by someone protecting their girl. Well, if it was that wonderful, you wouldn't have someone out there with our high powered rifle with a scope, gunning people down several hundred yards away. So, you know, I'm not, if you're looking for me to be very objective on this, I can't be and I don't feel a bit bad about it, I would move that, although I'm not above the voters, the voters need to make the case. I think I would move that alternative number three, we submit the initiative to the voters and on the 2014 ballot. And in the meantime, we watch how much fun Delmar and Slano Beach will be having for the next two years with their initiatives that have gone to the public and maybe we'll learn something from that. Second the motion. Did something second that or? I did. Yes. I do not see any further discussion at this time so if that the case, we will move to a vote. Motion passes unanimously with Mayor Stocks absent. Okay, thank you. Lastly tonight we will look for future agenda items added by council members. Happy New Mayor Gaspar, we do have one remaining oral communication. Oh, I am so sorry. Please call the speaker. Speaker is Peter Douglas. I'm so sorry. All right. Well, I think the wrong night to turn this in late. It would give you the option. You could have done two minutes. No, no, no. Well, actually, I probably would have accepted that but some thank you for having me here. I got to give you guys an A-plus for stamina. That's on the survey next time. That's got to be up there. But some, yeah, I just wanted to come in tonight and let you know formally you got an email from me and I just wanted to express it again that we've, I'm Peter Douglas here with Turnkey Operations and the proposed California 1020 event. We're refocusing our efforts for 2014. We still would absolutely love to be here in North County. We're still working with Del Mar, Sloan to be a chance to need us to make that happen on a staff level and a council level as well. I did want to report that we had a City Council meeting in Delmar on Monday where the issue was a full agenda item and the Delmar City Council elected to recommend giving us a permit under the conditions that we meet the conditions as spelled out in the Delmar staff report. There were six conditions there. And to also meet conditions in the future as they pop up, such as community relations issues dealing with businesses, mitigating traffic issues as much as possible, noise abatement issues, involving ban sites and sensitive areas, etc. All of which, you know, much of our, although we have a pretty detailed proposal, a lot of those pieces are works in progress. Now that we have a year and a half to work on this, I think we can really do it right. I believe the benefits of this event to all three cities are incredible. You know, we can bring lots of tax revenue to the cities. I think the citizens are really going to like it. There's going to be that 1% out there that hate it. But I believe that we can deal with those folks and solve their problems and create a situation that's a win-win for just about everybody. I do want to address briefly the restaurant row issue, which we've already done a preliminary survey out there with the help of our nonprofit partner, the Cardiff 101 group. Task Radnell heads up that group and she went out and visited all the restaurants and the restaurant row, explained to them the event that we're working on, the event that we want to have. Unfortunately, the response was undetermined really this time. Really, what folks mainly said was that, hey, that sounds pretty neat. Can you come back and talk to me when it's relevant? Basically, they all said that, hey, you need a year and a half on this thing. We got things to deal with. I got staff to schedule tomorrow. I've got lunch coming up in two hours. There are a lot of just immediate issues that these folks were focused on and they couldn't really focus on our event, which was a year and a half away. So we're gonna continue to work on that and deal with that issue. There are restaurants down there that are gonna be impacted by our road closures, but they're also gonna be impacted by our visitors and our runners and I'm sure the benefits are going to outweigh the negatives and I would just hope that we can get some clarity on this issue soon. I mean, DelMars definitely give us some clarity. I was in Salonabeech earlier tonight with three minutes about four hours ago and essentially expressing the same thing I'm telling you is that DelM Mars is pretty much given us the green light I'm hoping that salonabee to density is can follow suit either thumbs up or thumbs down Sometimes soon, so we just kind of know at least which way we're going. Thank you very much Thank you Okay back to future agenda items added by council members and I just have One request and that is that the City Manager gives special attention to the pass of Laura Avenue. I matter that was presented by members of the public and that you move forward in an expedited fashion, how you see fit and communicate back to the council on that matter. Are there other requests from council members? I have one more and that is, this is a really nice document. I hate to just have it stacked and deal with it later on. Is there any interest on the council to bring this back and see if there's some opportunity to partnership or send this out? The mail. The mail-in. Sure. I would support us discussing that. I certainly would like to know the cost and distribution and stuff, but I certainly would support us discussing that. Along with that, is the opportunity for partnership with Ed Coer, those other. OK. Looking for more? OK, save your notes. We have quite a lot of building, but I think we are skipping reports this evening. Looking for more? Okay, save your notes. We have quite a lot of building, but I think we are skipping reports this evening, and I will check in with the City Manager City Attorney. Do you have anything to report before we go? Just very quick, because it's aging a bit, so I want to report out to council that you had requested a report back on the downtown bar neighborhood issue. I just want to assure you that while we're not ready to bring you a report or a presentation that's being worked on and there's a number of committees within DEMA that have been set up to deal with the issue. The neighbors and restaurant owners and bar owners are all working actively. So we probably need another 30, 45 days before we can come back to council with the report Thank you. Did you journey? I have none. Okay, with that we will adjourn this meeting