you you you you you you you you Recording in progress you I would like to call this meeting to order. I'm welcome everyone to the East Palazos regular city council meeting today is February 4th, 2025 and the time is 6.30. I would like to call this meeting to order and have our city clerk do the roll call please of the council member that are present. Mayor Baraghan. Here. Vice Mayor Dynan. Here. Council Member Abrica. Here. Councilmember Lincoln and Councilmember Romero Vicente you have a quorum Mayor. Thank you. Can you please provide us with the instruction for our translation and services Before we move we move forward Absolutely So if you would like to listen to the Spanish portions of this meeting, usually around public comment, please use the interpretation feature located at the bottom of your screen by clicking on the globe icon and selecting English as your preferred language. If you would like to hear this story in Spanish, please use the interpretation localized under your screen, pressing the icon of the globe and choosing Spanish as its favorite language will be available to you in this meeting. Thank you. Thank you James. So we will be moving forward now to item two, approval of the agenda. Would anyone like to make a motion? I make a motion and we approve the agenda. Would anyone like to make a motion? I make a motion that we approve the agenda. Thank you. Looks like the item has passed. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Moving on to item number three, which is the approval of the consent calendar. The little colleagues do we have any items that we'd like to pull from the consent calendar? I'd like to pull 3.5 please. Okay. Anyone else? Okay. I'd also like to pull 3.3 the proclamation of Black History Month. Okay. I think we're going to move forward and pull 3.3. Yeah, I move a move of the consent calendar absent those two items 3.3 and 3.5. Thank you. All in very rare.3 and 3.5. Thank you. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Was there a motion in a second? Yeah, we needed a second. A second. Mayor second did it. I got it. So sorry, it was a Council member of Merrow motion and Council member Lincoln second. Yeah, OK. Thank you. OK, thank you. So I would like to go ahead and start with 3.3, which is the proclamation of the City of East Polaltto commemorating February, 2025 as Black History Month, whereas the celebration of Black History Month, and more importantly, the study of Black History is owed to Dr. Carter G. Woodson, son of former slaves who spent his childhood working in coal mines in Kentucky and didn't enroll in high school until he was 20 years old and whereas Mr. Woodson went on to earn a PhD from Harvard and while attending college was greatly perpetrated by history, books ignoring persons of African-American descent, and that whenever they were featured, it was generally reflecting the inferior social position that they were signed at that time. And whereas in 1915, Dr. Woodson founded the association of the study of Negro Life and History and called to the Association of the Study of African American Life and History. And in 1926, Launch Negro History Week, as an initiative to bring national attention to the history of African Americans. And whereas Dr. Woodson chased, sorry, chose the second week of February for Negro History Week because it marked the birthdays of two men who greatly influenced the history of African American, Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln. And whereas February also has some other important dates in black history, February 3rd, 1870, the 15th Amendment was passed granting African Americans the right to vote. February 12th, 1909, the National Association of the Advancement of Colored People, NAACP was founded by a group of concerned citizens in New York City, February 1, 1960, in what was to become a civil rights movement milestone, a group of African-American, Greensboro, NC College students began a sit in at Woolworth's Segregated Lunch Counter, February 24, 2009, the first African-American president, Barack Obama, addressed a joint session of Congressional Congress. Now therefore, may it be resolved that the city council hereby proclaim the month of February 2025, as Black History Month in the city of East Palo Alto, and call upon all residents to support the efforts and re-dedicate themselves to creating a world where the rights and the contributions of African-Americans, people of color, indigenous peoples, and other groups be remembered, respected, and acknowledged. Thank you. Moving on to item 3.5. Madam, I move approval of the... Sorry. No, no. May I? I move approval of the pro no, no, may I, I move approval of the proclamation. Sorry guys, I usually don't read caffeine and today I had a lot of caffeine, so I'm a little bit like, moving along things. Second. Yes. Okay. I second. Okay. Thank you. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. I believe now we would go on to session item 3.5. Through the through the chair apologies. Mayor, you didn't ask if there were any public comment and no apologies. Yes. Public comment. There was one speaker said for item 3.3 from Mr. Leland, Francois. OK. Honorable Mayor Council Member, Staff, and Members of the Public Leland, Francois. About 1994, I joined the East Pelotal Historic and Agricultural Society. Myself and Trevor Burroughs and four other, well, it's just say four African-American colleagues and one Jamaican-American colleague. And we survey almost 200 structures here within the community. Moving forward to the year 2000, I held the first meeting of Mipinetsal historians at the address of 2415, I'm sorry, not 2415, 1955 University Avenue over in the whiskey goch. Moving forward, as EPA has dissolved itself, I picked up the baton and carried it under the name of Ravenswood History Survey. Now, I've got my reasons for wanting to call this place Ravenswood, and I've kept it to myself for so many years, but after doing a lot of historic research, going back 150 years, I kind of think we should look a little bit more in detail about how we're going to name our future. East Palo Alto is nice, but you gotta understand that East Palo Alto has no, the name or acronym has no historic roots itself. I could go, I could continue to talk and continue to place an emphasis on that. Being that this is 2025, the year 2025, we've got to wake up. We've got to wake up on a direction that this globe is going in. We've got 193 countries that we've got to wake up on a direction that this globe is going in. We've got 193 countries that we've got to neutralize and maintain some sort of direction. And African-American people, at this point, I find it to be one of the worst social safety mishaps that is recording a black history here. And that's my opinion. Leal and Francois. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Francois. I'm not sure if you're working with blackhead here. And that's my opinion. Leela Franco. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Franco. Those are only speaker. Okay. I guess we'll be moving then to item 3.5. Thank you, Madam Mayor. This is a perhaps a little cleanup piece. I just want to understand. So you're allowing for different, I guess it's additional staff folks to have access to our tax, sales tax information, which I understand is confidential but under section two of the resolution. I believe this is resolution. The resolution. You list the assistant to the city manager. However, I believe you have two assistants. Is that correct? So I think you would need that, I mean, you would either have to say assistance or you'd have to designate that person. Because I think the state's pretty clear, right? Is the people have to be, we have to know who the people are. So is there a reason why we just want to support? Because you're asking the person? Yes. That's a good question. We're designating people by position. So even if there are two assistants to the city manager or if for example in the future there were two assistant city managers or whatever. eligible. And the reason as you point out that we're adding these is because of the economic development plan. We want to be able to have those deep conversations with our advisors and these are all the folks that are going to be involved in those conversations. So, I understood, if you all have soon not running a foul, but certainly when I have had conversations with previous directors of finance, they made it real clear that there are only certain people that were allowed by name to access these things. This could mean that there could be several people, you know, as one assistant city manager. So I guess this is fine, but again, you do run into the situation where you could have multiple people with a title of assistant to the city manager accessing documentation that, I mean, it's clearly seen as proprietary and confidential because of the business nature of it. So I'll just leave it at that if you all are fine with that more broad designation. With your permission council member and and all of the council we will double check this item one more time and if we do need to designate that we have we send it to the state. Well, with that, I'll move approval, but I don't know if there's any public comment. No public comment. Did you want to add something, Melbourne, to this before we move on? No, thank you. Sherry took care of it. Perfect. Thank you. the other . I don't know if we have anyone to second the approval of this item. Okay. All right. So then all in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Moving on to item number four, close session. We don't have anyone or any today. I don't know if we should open up again to public comments anybody. In yeah item number five public comment. I don't know if you have anyone online that would like to comment or here in person. Yeah, so I did receive two speaker slips from Gail Walker and followed by Michael Meshak. Have Miss Gail Walker's and can come up. I'll let you guys know gonna close session. Happy Black History, man. Woo-woo-woo, we still here. I wanted to say this, I guess after you guys, I don't know if you're going away or not, but a black history month means a lot to people who ancestors who work for free. My ancestors built this nation and I want respect. I want reparation. I want I want certain people to stop trying to remove us and forces out. We were here when there were hardly any sidewalks. We struggled. We were under a regime of San Mateo County. This building should be part of East Palo Alto and not just rent it for what $1. In fact, they should tear it down and build one for us. We glass. I was set all I'd to say is that this is 20, 25 and look at me. This is my presence. I'm Gail Wilkerson-Dixon. Wilkerson's my mate name. I grew up in Millow Park when East Palo Alto and East Millow Park was won. And I intend to see that again. There's a lot of laws. I went back to school and studied the law. There's a lot of laws that are going to be a here to. And I want you guys to stop talking about the code of ethics because that's a Donald Trump move also because I'm going to say what I want to say when I want to see it. I'm a citizen. I was here before either one of you or even except for him. He's old, dirt. So this is my city. Happy black history, man. Thank you, Leeland. Thank you. Next speaker, Michael Maysack. Good evening mayor, vice mayor, council members, Michael Maysack, I'm 48 Mandela Quartic, stand before you representing organization called Bay Area Urban Eagles. We are an organization that empowers young people to expand their dreams in the world of aviation. I am, I've got one purpose here. I've got this, I wanna come before you another time, but right now I wanna make sure that I have time to invite you all to an event that we have, this Saturday at the center. It's called Meet the Pros. This flyer was intended to be posted last Wednesday in the city's newsletter. Somehow it got missed. Oh, you can see it. Thank you. If you got you, I actually have a flyer that I want to share with you. I would love for you to also and I'll try to get it to you guys again today or tomorrow. But I would love we've got other other dignitaries of city mayor of Palo Alto and a couple of their council people are going to be there representatives from the state. Our state legislature and Senate as well as our county, of course. We've got members from the corporations, United Airlines, we've got a NASA astronaut. So this is a full panel. This is a panel event, women of color talking to our community and surrounding the communities about opportunities and aviation. Now that I do have a couple of seconds, I want to let you know that I do most of my work here in East Palo Alto. I'll repeat that I'll do most of my work here in the city of East Palo Alto. The majority of the young people that I work with are from the city of East Palo Alto. We have a hanger that we operate out of at the airport. It just makes sense to have an environment for the kids when we need to go there for them to have a place to go. Thank you for your time. I told you I wouldn't be before you long, but I appreciate if you would please join us to Saturn. Thank you. Next speaker, Michael Francois, followed by Elizabeth Jackson and Bernie's turner. Mike Francois, 224 Gardino, where you spell out to as you know, 2025 brought in a new law. Mr. Webster knows about it. We're going to have to start cars have to be 20 feet from the intersections, the crosswalks, not five feet and two feet. I used to come up here and preach four feet. You guys didn't listen to me. Now the state is requiring 20 feet. I understand it's raining, you can't do anything right now. You need to take care of that. The only thing you have to have is one kid get hit and then you're gonna be defending yourself. Why didn't you put up a sign or why didn't you try to paint it or something? It's cheaper to put out. Let me just guess $10,000 worth of paint instead of $500,000 and a lawsuit that you would lose because you haven't done one street like that yet. You haven't gotten one, but a lot of cities are starting to do it. San Francisco's starting to do it. And also the crosswalks, they need reflectors on them. Just put reflectors on them. If you guys, when I'm running at night, when you guys all sleep, because that's when I run at night, that's the best time for me. I see the cars flying through. I see them going through in the daytime. They don't slow down. They roll through the stop signs. And some of our crosswalks around here, we don't have dorms, school times, we don't have guards or other kids. There's nobody there to protect them. And if one get hurt, the city gets hurt. And it's going to be shudder, we could have. You can avoid all that just by taking some precautions to protect the people. And that's for everybody. Everybody that runs, walks, and so forth. And we have a lot of children around here. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, Elizabeth Jackson, followed by Bernie's turner. Good evening, City Council members and Mayor. Elizabeth Jackson, 480 is a Keith. I came to invite you all to my speech contest put on by the Rotary Club. It's going to be March the 21st and we had it here last year and I really thank you guys for doing that and I put in a request to have it again this year and hopefully all of you will agree to let's have that speech contest. It's for the youth. This is one of the flyers that we be coming out and so far I got three members. Youth from high school, they are willing to participate and I'd like to invite the mayor. I'd like to invite you to be a judge and Lincoln Webster to be a judge. I want to give you staff a package so you can look over what it means to be a judge. You don't have to be it but I just want to invite you publicly. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, Bernice Turner, followed by Tiambe on Zoom. My name is Bernie's Turner. Thank you Elizabeth. I'll be working with you. But my purpose of standing here is to let you all know I've been a citizen of East Palo Alto for many many years. My dad used to bring us to the city council meetings when I was about 10 years old. And we all fought for sidewalks along with Pete Evans, Van Zatz, Halitans. We've been here for a very long time. My reason for coming up is to let you know that my house is in jeopardy. I need the city's help. My house is being taken by the predatory lenders that are going around of the house. My house is being taken by the predatory lenders that are going around in the city. I just need your help. EPA can do is working with me. But I still need help. They're taking money. They're trying to take my home. I cannot fight this alone. Again, I've been in the city of East Powell. I'm sure while 60s, 50s my dad moved out here, but I want to say that home. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, Tiambev on Zoom. Hi, am I unmuted? Yes. OK, OK, wonderful. Okay. My name is Tianbei-Jama. And the send that of shadow slavery, also called African-American and all other kind of things. So today, I want to speak with you for a couple things, but I want to try to speak really quickly. Regarding the new president policies, it requires every single one of us to fight every day. Every single day to keep and improve our physicians, simple as that. I pretty annoyed that when he first came on stage, I'm coming down at that on elevator, when he said all Mexicans are rapists and murders, it, oh gosh, I hope you can, guys can hear me. Can you hear me? Yes. OK. When he said all rape bomb, from South Mexicans, our rapists and murderers, that in itself should have shown which side are you on. And people didn't come up to the table. And now so-called, all these voters voted for him with all this stuff that he is doing. And it's going to harm a lot of people, but we need to continue to fight as an African-American elder. We've seen this, so we're not surprised. We know we have to fight. We fought for the city and then we're still enough to give it away because we stop fighting for ourselves. We need support, Bernie's turner in our housing because black people pushed out all kind of ways. There should be, I don't care if you're calling, quotas, I don't care what you're calling, but we need to fight to make sure that there's blacks in the new buildings that are gonna come up, we should back the EPA can do building, New Jersey Square. All of these buildings should make sure that there's blacks in there. That means you don't have policies that push us out. Okay, and if people are not fighting for us or with us, we need to push them aside and continue to fight for ourselves. Happy New Year is a new day. I'm fighting the Dark Island Cardinist market. The place is filthy. You run me. Thank you miss. Thank you miss. And you need to fight with me. Thank you. Thank you. That was our last speaker for tonight. Thank you James. So I believe we'll be moving to item six informational reports 6.1 fiscal year 2024 25 council city council strategic priority second status update. Who will be doing the presentation? Thank you Madam Mayor. This presentation will be led by Miss Orley Amy, Assistant to the City Manager. Yes, good evening, Aval Mayor, City Council members and members of the community. My name is Orley Amy. I am an Assistant to the City Manager and I will be providing tonight's update. You can go to the next slide, James. So this presentation is going to be structured into, okay, now the presentation's sharing. So this presentation is gonna be structured into two key sections. So first, I'll briefly cover the progress that the city made on implementing the council's strategic priorities from October 1st through December 31st, 2024. So that covers Q2. And then part two will be an overview of the timeline and activities that will be associated with the development of our next four-year strategic plan and the two-year council priorities work plan. Next slide. the city is currently managing 94 projects related to the council priorities across multiple departments. So 57 projects are in progress. 21 projects have been completed. 8 are operational and 8 are on hold. And for breakdown of those projects, the city manager's office is leading 37 projects. The Public Works Department is following closely behind with 33 and other projects are managed by community and economic development and the subdivisions within that, the police department and the finance department. Next slide. So I'm not gonna get too deep into the weeds because you all have a very detailed staff report, but I will kind of go over the seven priority areas and just some brief highlights from all of those. So for housing, economic and workforce development, we completed the housing element updates, the affordable housing strategy, and the Ravenswood Business District Plan, and some of the key, I'm sorry, on the wrong side. Can you go forward to? Here we are, there we are. So in progress, we have the measure, HH development, small business and employment programming and registry. Next slide. HH development, small business and employment programming and rent registry. Next slide. For implementing the Transportation and Mobility Plan, some of the key projects that we have completed include the design of the University Avenue Safety Improvements, bus stop shelters, and safe fruits to school project, and some of the key projects in progress include the University Avenue Bicycle and pedestrian overcrossing, travel, signal updates and road improvements. Next slide. Under Health and Public Safety, some of the key projects they've completed include the expansion of the cert team, the San Francisco Crike flood protection coordination and some of the key projects in progress include emergency preparedness coordination, which will be bringing an update to you guys on that later this spring ongoing sanitary district coordination, legal dumping mitigation and various environmental justice initiatives. Next slide. As for financial and organizational health, some of the key projects we've completed include employee training program development, compensation study, and analyses of funding for public infrastructure projects. In progress, we have a 10-year financial projections in progress, an ERP implementation, Nexus Impact P study, and Tucheej Planning process, which I will talk about shortly. Next slide. For water infrastructure and public facilities, some of the key projects completed and that category includes the development of site recommendations for our future police department facilities. And in progress, we have the library design, police facility planning, and consideration for future city hall improvements. In the next slide. And for the last priority concerning community services and parks in progress,, we're also preparing to support the council's next four years of goal-setting and implementation. So the city manager's office wants to share an overview of what this planning process will look like. So in December, the City Council approved staff to enter into an agreement with Ramean Associates to conduct our Strategic Plan and City Work Plan development. And you can go to the next slide. From January through June, staff will collaborate with Ramean Associates to support the Council's creation of a four year strategic plan and a two year council priorities work plan for staff. Next slide. So this slide is just an outline of the deliverables that I am about to dive into. Next slide, you can tap twice. So this is the high level timeline and project schedule of the deliverables. The key dates to be aware of are March 8th, so that will be the study session for the initial goal setting for the council. April 22nd will be a subsequent city council study session for refinement of the goals before they go out to the community and and June 6 will be the adoption hearing. You can tap twice, James. All right, so during February, we are engaging with Ramin Associates to complete a document review of the current city documents. So this includes a variety of documents such as our master plans, specific plans, budgets, regional compliance plans, and various operational and technical documents and staff reports alongside with the survey of demographic trends and the recent community survey that had taken place. They will also be conducting focus groups, the leaders of key community-based organizations. So this will be small focus groups with the leaders to get diverse perspectives on the key issues facing the city. During February, we're also planning to hold three pop-up workshops at various locations. So this will be late February, early March in the community. And so during these pop-up workshops, the consultant is going to be asking the community to basic questions. One will be what are the issues that they perceive are facing the community today. Excuse me and then the second question will be what will what does the community consider the top priorities for community improvements and initiatives over the next two to four years. So this will be done as either open and a questions or providing a list of topics and ideas that have been generated through the previous tasks that I just mentioned. And so through these papas we hope to target the general public and then also just the various sectors that make up the community. And using all of the information gathered through the initial outreach, Rainy and Associates is going to prepare a summary technical memo that defines the key issues and the priorities that they heard through their listening sessions. And they will prepare an administrative draft and final version of that memo that will be provided to you all prior to your March 8th retreat. Next slide. At the same time, Rainy and Associates is going to be meeting with various business groups and property owners, some of which you can see here. There's going to be a lot of engagement going on this spring with this group alongside with the community engagement that's going to happen along with our economic development strategy project. So we expect there to be a lot of feedback that will come out of this. Next slide. Next slide. Yep. So next week, Ramy and Associates will be on site to meet with our city staff in order to hear about operational insights as to the city's work and programs and hear experiences from the departments themselves with how implementing the projects has gone and the realities that come with that. And so the goal of these sessions are going to be to gather information to share back with the council at your retreat. Next up. All of this initial feedback is going to be package up to you all for your study session to inform your development of the strategic goals and priorities for the next four years. So Raming Associates will prepare all of the materials for this retreat and that will include a staff report that describes the agenda and on the materials. A PowerPoint that summarizes all of the results of the initial stakeholder leaders meetings and staff engagement, as well as a technical memo that will summarize all of this. They will also deliver a draft vision statement and a draft strategic priorities plan based off of what they heard. Next slide. Auremi and associates will assist with the facilitation and the logistics of the retreat and by April 2025, an initial draft of the Strategic Plan will be ready for review by the public. So in this review and this draft, it will include the updated vision statements, the refined strategic priorities, and a list of proposed city projects and programs. And this list will constitute the initial two-year work plan that will facilitate the implementation of the priorities that you all decide. And so to make sure that there's accountability and teeth built into this, each project on the list will include the project title, the timeline, the responsibility, the cost, and the funding source. Division strategic priorities and project lists will be folded all together into a one strategic plan document. And this document will also include an intro, a summary of the process of how the strategic plan was developed and as I said before teeth and metrics to measure the success. Next slide. So that brings us to community engagement in late April through May. So this is where the bulk of the robust community engagement is going to take place. So the community will have a lot of opportunity to provide, excuse me, feedback on the draft plan through the workshops. So these workshops will be online and in person. There will be stakeholder meetings and online surveys. And we do welcome the council's feedback on how to get the most comprehensive feedback that represents all of the sectors of the community. And we also will be setting up the city webpage so that folks can stay informed on how and where they can participate. We are going to be leaning on Ramyan Associates to propose a community outreach plan. And we hope that the city council will contribute their ideas to how that should be implemented. Next slide. All right, so the final City Council review and adoption of the strategic plan will take place between April and June 2025. And so April, that will be the preliminary review and the city session on April 22nd. May, as I mentioned, the community engagement and feedback loops will continue. June will see the final City Council adoption hearing and publication of approved strategic plan. This adoption hearing is going to be scheduled for June 6th, dovetelling into the approval of our city budget on that same date. Next up. And that is all that I have for you. Thank you. Any questions? Hi. Thank you for the presentation. One question I had is how can we get more groups involved in this? So the groups listed seem to come from one part of the community and I'm thinking that you know to broaden beyond Yuka and other groups listed maybe get HOAs that have leadership I know there's some people here. Commission's our public works planning commission senior commission who there's members of, those are all, a live-in-piece group that does a lot of work here in Eastpile, I mean there's a lot of groups that were not included in your groups list and I think that needs to be broadened to get, be more inclusive with, you know, more, you know, different voices included in that as well because, you know, we do have, especially on our commissions, we have a lot of people who are deeply engaged in the community and be an easy source to define folks who can give you good feedback. Thank you, and I just wanna share that that will be the plan to do some of the broader engagement. Our scope for this initial phase is limited to, I believe, around 12 groups. And so there was a question that came from staff on whether we would be able to engage the commissions. And so what we thought we could do given the limited resources is invite the commissions and all of these other groups that you're mentioning to the second stage of the broader feedback when you all have your council priorities lists finalized. Through the chair also we have so the the focus groups that are happening with the groups that are identified that is kind of our staff's list that can be modified if the Council desire to switch a group out or add a group to it. Obviously, we have limited numbers of groups who the consultant team can engage. But as far as the advisory committees, we do intend to take the draft plans to the advisory committees for them to provide input on. But we did not intend for the advisory committees to be focus groups. Okay, yeah, I'd like to have, you know, at some point a discussion with the process of, you know, how you got the focus groups selected because they're very distinctly from one side of the political spectrum in East Palo Alto. And it's good to hear everybody's voice. It's good to have a broad selection, not just very select. And those are good groups, noise crosses, break group, things like that. But I think for focus groups, it would make sense to broaden the political. James, you put. And band that you're talking to, because if you're just talking to select groups, it's not including the entire community. Okay. We'll touch base and perhaps work with you to refine that list to be a bit more representative. It's primarily groups that we're aware of, so provide us with more groups. I'm not familiar with the various A.S.O.A.'s so it's largely based on frankly me and the groups that I was familiar with I thought we cast a pretty broad net knowing that we didn't get everybody but we welcome any additional recommendations folks have. Yeah I just recommend that we involve I think don't we have like a community emergency response or something? Yes, repacked. Okay. And we intend to reach, did you, we didn't reach out to them yet, but that was one of to comment on the vice-mayors. The liturization of, I guess, community groups being on the right and left. I don't think any of us, at least, with the exception of perhaps the vice-mayor, view the groups that are here as, you know, left leaning or right leaning. I mean these groups provide services to the community. They have e-groups. And HOA with all due respect is a group that addresses its issues in an insular way. Who do they represent? They represent the HOAs. If you want to do an HOA focus group, that's fine. But you need to approach groups that have strong roots, feelers and fingers into the community. What staff is proposed here, indeed, are groups that have that background. And I think it is problematic for us to create a debate around left and right. I understand that may be your perspective, but that to me is divisive. Questions if I may specifically on report? Excuse me. So I kind of want to understand the purpose of this front end input, right, is to provide information to the council prior to our developing our strategic or selecting or, I guess, developing our strategic priorities, correct? Sorry. I'm in need. I can take that. the strategic priorities, correct? Sorry. I can take that. So when we reached out to do an RFP for this process, we, they want to be prescriptive to the consultants on how they propose to do the project. And so this was the manner in which they propose and we accepted. So this specific component of this project is just sort of a listening session to get the communities, stakeholders, polls on what's going on to share that with you. So there was mention of pop-up groups or pop-ups that will occur during the month of February. I guess we're a little behind schedule if I look at your Gantt chart, but we're a little behind schedule, but we will be holding those focus groups also prior to, not we, but the consultant and the city will be holding those focus groups prior to, correct? Yes, correct. Yeah, so that's in it, and we will, I'm sorry, I say focus groups, I meant, yeah, pop-ups, forgive me. Yes. Okay, so those pop-ups will be advertised, I assume? Yes. Okay, so we could do an email blast everyone, including our HOA friends, right? Yes. And say, hey, come on in, come on down. You know, maybe there'll be cookies and... Yes, and we would welcome that. Okay. maybe there'll be cookies and- Yes, and we would welcome that. Okay, so I think that would be important to make sure we have a broader reach. And then again, that information is will be distilled for us in some fashion, and I know Ramey is quite competent in doing this, so that we can then take that information with or without a questioner. So I know we've done questioners in the past actually and I think our latest one was when was the last time we completed one was was was the new research one. Yes, we did the phone call questionnaires. Right. So is that going to be part of the backdrop for this also? We will have question we will have a survey tool that people can both. So we correct me if I'm wrong early, but the validation tool will be done through a survey. So there's, oh, so we will have a survey in addition to this. Yes. Okay. When does that get? So that will be in May. Okay. So that's after our priorities have been structured then. Yes. Correct. Okay. Is there any thought of having, well, it's probably not in the budget now, of having a survey prior to our meeting to begin to discuss strategic priorities? Prior to the March 8th. Correct. Yeah. I mean, we're closing it out as quick. We can endeavor so my understanding which showed a little difference in this presentation though is that we do the general. We have focus groups and then we'd also do broad engagement through a survey or a community forum where anybody could participate. And that would help us to propose priorities based off of the public input that we received to share with the council. So I'll say that this is what we heard from the community of what priorities could be, and on March 8th, the city council could take that information as they may and decide what they proposed the priorities would be. Following the March 8th, we then take the council established priorities back to staff to identify some projects to meet those priorities and then shop both of those to the community as well as the council before the council adopt the final plan and with the budget in June. And the community forum you referred to happens after that March 10th meeting? I have to clarify. I thought that that was happening before March 8th. But I mean, it'd be great if it did, but I don't know. OK. So we will straw. You'll get back. OK. Got it. OK, thank you. OK, that's actually I was calling around today to figure out if I could get this schedule and I'm glad it was presented today. So I just had a few, I think their corrections really on the priorities list that we have. First of all, on page 50. So that page 50 talks about our seeking of funding to construct the East Bay Shore road sidewalk improvements. And it indicates that we have a $2.5 million depth not deficit. But we have this $2.5 million gap. We did receive, and I think you guys should have signed the papers by now. We approved the TA $1.925 million grant from our Cycle 7 pedestrian and bike part of money. So, I mean, I'm going to say $600,000 off of that amount. So I would mean, we're $600,000 off of that amount. So I would assume that we could probably start this relatively quickly. Anyway, I just wanna make sure that this reflects that that money has been authorized by the TA and my understanding in December was that documents were to be forwarded to the city for execution. So again, that's 1.925 million. That should be reflected in this document. And congratulations to the public works and public works department for actually getting that thing in. The other question. One second, I think that senior engineer but tools are a little bit responding. Come. Yeah, just a few things. One, we still haven't executed any agreements with the TA. And I think that might be partially because they're working on doing master agreements. I can't remember whether or not I came to a council or not as a consent item. But I believe that's why we haven't executed any agreements for those awarded funds. The second thing is back in October, we actually worked with the TA to submit a grant application for RM3 funds to close that funding gap. And we should year back sometime this month on whether or not we got that. So we did submit a pretty good application, so we're confident in that and hopefully we'll hear back by the end of this month and we'll know whether or not that funding gap is closed. So just wanted to provide those two updates. Yeah, thanks. And again, I just wanted to actually try to update some of the projects a little better. It's a little confusing as to where we are on reach to, but clearly what's described here is incorrect in terms of when the construction of these elements will start. You know, it's often in a number of places, both 1.1 and 1.3 are, you know, certainly off. We're not starting construction in 2025. As a matter of fact, we have these gaps. Councilmember, I already got talk to that. But I think, again, the NULES Street project is not under construction in October. So I just think we should try to update these when they come to us, because this is what we should be using to track where we are, keeping ourselves on time and honest as well as staff. So if that could, if those could get updated appropriately. There's just a couple more quickly. So on the page 58, 1.1, which is work with the libraries to identify an implemented comprehensive funding strategy, Perhaps the city manager can, maybe not today, but certainly in the future, explain the comprehensive strategy piece because the county is only proposing to help us fund the $10 million that they believe through their consultants they can do. Get, this is a 40 to 45 million dollar project. The comprehensive strategy needs to come from staff in the council. So I just want to make sure that we don't rely on this as the funding strategies and the work for the entire 40 to 45 million dollars is coming from the county because it's not. So the the work that SMCL foundation did consulting with Lotus Consulting they did a feasibility study of how feasible it is to raise 10 million dollars and that's the study you're referencing. Is that that was like is it feasible to raise 10 million dollars and the response from the study you're referencing. Is that that was like, is it feasible to raise $10 million in the response from the study? Was yes, it is. However, SMCL Foundation working with the city of East Palo are striving to fund the entire thing. So just because the Lotus Consulting piece only assess the feasibility of a $10 million are work together, SMCL Foundation, SMCL in the library, and the City of East Palo Alto. The goal is really to fund the full construction cost of $48 million. In addition to fundraising, we'll be coming to the City Council with other ideas to fund raising meaning donations. We'll be coming to the City Council with other ideas to fund raising meaning donations will be coming to the city council with other financing mechanisms such as a bond and other things that for your consideration. That is so I will make sure that we provide more thorough updates in this but it is definitely not only a goal to raise $10 million. Yeah and so let's I mean definitely let's clarify this. When this comes back to us, which will actually, I believe, the mayor may have been talking about putting something on related to the design sometime in March, I think. March 4th, we will provide a date on a library. It might be helpful to, since we'll have the library folks here, to clarify this issue about how we get to a 40 to 45 million dollar construction slash soft-cost budget. Because I do believe that the county does not feel that they are going to be the ones that are going to be either working on a bond or working on federal or state funds. So we just need to make sure that we all understand where we are. And if they're going to do it, that's fine. But I mean, at this point, it doesn't sound like that's where that's coming from. There's no expectation by myself or anyone on staff that the library would fundraise and I can just leave it to them. This is something that the city council and the city staff and the community of East Paul are going to have to have a stake in. I can probably add something to that. We had our library JPA meeting earlier on Monday. I will be meeting with the library folks to come up, you know, try to get fundraising strategy. We have a lot of folks in this community that know how to fundraise. Regina Wallace-Jones, former City Council member, is the CEO of ActBlue, the largest Democratic fundraising platform, and she's interested in getting involved, along with a variety of other people. So we're obviously going to have to spend a lot of time and energy on this, but there's a lot of money in Silicon Valley for these types of things. And you know, there's people like to put their names on libraries. So let's see who wants to write a big check. So just two other quick things. the complete construction of water in your ties, it would lend and university and with Palo Alto. My understanding that was done, Hamza, isn't that done now? I don't know, it's Hamza on. I thought we actually- I can answer that. Oh, hi, Batool. Sorry. Hamza isn't on, but we're covering for him. So the work is done. The only thing that isn't done is the repair work. And we're working with the consultant because we're adjusting the repair work slope slightly scope slightly because we're also doing work as far the animal street were servicing project. So we're trying to be strategic with our repairs. But the scope for the most part is complete other than the repair work. So that's why that's probably still shown as, you know, under way. Okay, yeah, I just wanted to make sure that we, because I know we ripped up the streets sometime in the summer and you all did that. I want to make sure at least the bike part was done and it sounds like the pipes are done. And then lastly, and I guess we can bring this up later, but I'm I am really concerned that we still don't have a water infrastructure funding financing plan, which we received $800,000 for over two years ago. And that is critical for us to go after WIFIF funds. It's also critical for us to go after state funds. And so without that document, we basically aren't moving in terms of our being able to finance. What is, you know, a 20, 30, 40 million dollar kind of bulk of projects that we need to do for our water. So I'm really hoping that we can fast forward that infrastructure financing plan. Like as quickly as possible, it's been on this strategic priorities plan for a while and we should really get it moving. So that's it. Thank you. Thank you for the report. I don't know if we have any more comments. Yes, I have. Yeah, I want to take the staff for putting this together. And I think combining what the council has been doing over the years for very focused priorities. Under these large categories, which you laid out there, you know, we've been looking at trying to identify things that could be done in a year, two years, three years. So I think that's been a good process. What I like about this now, I think it's sort of a combination of what I know that our city manager has said and interest in that, all of us have had an interest, but he brought it to us in terms of really trying to create a process for a lot of community engagement in different ways, all these forms. So I think that as the initial document is very good in outlining many different ways in which many different groups and individuals can be involved. So obviously you can't do everybody all at once, but there is I think plenty of time, and I assume that you will be accepting, you know, if people want to write letters, if they want to send emails, they don't have to do the survey, they could come here, they can do all kinds of things, they can be parts of groups, right? So is that correct? I just want to confirm that. Yes, there will be a variety of methods that folks can get their feedback to us. And so definitely I think that's the best way to approach it. And I think that it will be a full spring because, you know, we are going to start also our budget hearings in May. That's also where the council will have to focus on what some priorities that maybe are not here or are going to be modified and how much they're gonna cost and who's gonna do them all of that. But I appreciate the approach of also letting kind of a timeline so people know. And I assume you'll put together maybe a very specific timeline on all the ways that people can, and by when all the people, you know, people can give their feedback or their ideas. And I mean, even down to the last minute before the, you know, when you have a draft document, it's still open in some ways to do that. Yeah. So, and, you know, I think just like you had have highlighted with the little circles here the different broad categories. I think it's good to keep using that so that people know that no matter what their interest is or what their organization is that belong to some organization or what part of the city they live in, they may have comments in any of these areas. Right, so the, yeah, so the categories I had, and it was mentioned in the, in the update that we got. So what we got today, we're discussing kind of what's been going on between October and December. What happened between October and December, sort of the latest update. And so I'm assuming that you also do another update because I think they're quarterly between now or January and March. Is that? Yes, we'll provide that update on Q3 in April. Yeah, okay. So because I think that will be a good document also for the community to understand and to study. So because I think it's a two-way process on the one hand we hear from the community. So we find out what their interests or concerns are. But I always feel that it's a two-way education process where the community needs to also study what is going on. Where are things? Are they gonna be finished this year or next year or at, you know? So, yeah, so I look forward to that update in April because that'll bring us closer to some things that are in process or wherever they are. I was interested in the one. So, you know, there's also different plans that are either finished or in motion that provide guidance as to what the city might do. And one of them that I think we're still working on is the environmental justice plan. And do you have an estimate when that might be finished or the environmental justice element is ongoing? I think we should finish that by June of this year. I'm not sure if Elena is one of them. She's leaning. Right. So, you know, one reason I mentioned a document, I think that in many of these areas, for example, well, you name it, you know, health, transportation, housing, I think that document is very important for us to number one, document the result of environmental injustices. Because for us to understand what's happened to us and what we might do, I think it's important to have that. So I look forward to that one. I think particularly in the area of health, and we're going to have a presentation later on, but the environment is everything, obviously we know. It's not only the natural environment, but the environment that we've created and how that has affected a continuous to affect our city. So, yeah, so that'll be a good document that I guess some of the comments could feed into that I assume right from yes. Let's see. I think the yeah those were my main points and I think that the two dates so we have March 8th and April 22nd is when the council will, when we'll get kind of yes focus done what the priorities are here. Yes. Okay. So yeah, thank you very much. Thank you councilman. The council and the public those are you know other so just want to reiterate that yes the the previous process we had was kind of a one day thing public could participate We still have these kind of two Council study sessions where public are welcome and will know about it We are getting in a habit of doing paper-based newsletters So we'll be issuing our paper newsletter by the end of this month for this quarter that will include information on this Strategic priorities update and the different engagement opportunities. So we intend to send that to every household in East Palo Alto. So people should know about these opportunities to engage. Okay, well thank you very much. I believe we're moving on to item seven special presentations 7.1 which is the social determinants of health, sharing understanding across public health and cities. Do we have to vote? We don't have to make a motion. There's no vote, but I'm not sure if you wanted to take any public comment or anyone else. Is there a public comment after this? I just have the same public comment on the information. I have one comment. I was looking through the list of things and under I think I already raised this issue under promote health and public safety and some of these things I'm seeing that are marked complete, which means like there's item 3.2 under promote public health and safety or promote health and public safety, which means establishing under item 3.2, which means establishing emergency communication protocols with community partners. And it's marked as complete. There's only two entities listed under this item. The city has communication protocols with the County of San Mateo Department of Emergency Management and the Minlow Park Fire Protection District. Are these the only protocols that we have in place? No, so we are what I've found so loud we have a emergency preparedness update coming to you all on April 15th and we'll elaborate on kind of additional community partners including the Red Cross and other kind of emergency management related entities. Part of it is also establishing like the projects up above was building certain membership there a community part and that we need to establish a relationship with and these updates actually this is the third quarter this project is showing up as complete and that's due to a scope of the goal at that time. But we we're still elaborating on this and can provide a more thorough update. But the first thing will be providing a complete overview of emergency preparedness on April 15th. Yeah, I'm just bringing it raising this issue because I know over the past few years we've had issues with flooding. You know, there was a week where we were without power, you know, and there's issues with water. I was being burst and flooding in the streets on the bird a few years ago. Someone had hit a fire hydrant which caused, you know, loss of water pressure. I just wanted to make sure that we have all of our community partners and establish protocols with all community partners because there has been issues with communication. And so to make sure all those, we have memorandums of understanding with those partners as well. Agreed. And the conversations that you and I have had pointing out just different agencies weren't necessarily part of the scope of emergency preparedness when we from the lens that the previous council and staff are thinking about so your new input is actually helping us see holes that we had so I appreciate that. Thank you. Do we need to do public comment for this as well or yes, I actually did receive one speaker slip from Gil Wilkerson. I noticed you guys were talking about your strategies and the plans and whatnot. I remember when I started coming back to the city council 2016, I brought up the general plan and I was told by, I read it through and it said it had to be reviewed every year annually. It's like interpreting the Bible. People got different interpretations. But I was wondering where the confusion is. Is there any confusion? Are you so confused that you're confused? I your confused views. I brought up the fact about having a prototype out in the middle of the lobby to show citizens how far we're going to be in five years, ten years, twenty years. I was told that they didn't want to review it every year because it worked. It was a lot of work for five years. Oh my God, yeah, we ran into the city. It's supposed to be hard, not easy. And somebody brought up fun raising. You got all that money on the books, ordinances, what not. What happened to cannabis? Somebody said, we're just gonna keep kicking it down to the road and Redwood City has it. They're thriving. A lot of city have it. I don't smoke. I'm pretty sure you guys maybe one of you might do it in a closet. But I'm a baby boner and when are you going to address cannabis? Cannabis for Oakland bring in 30 million a year and they sit back and they fight the federal government for their cannabis businesses up there. Cannabis is not bad. You could have medical cannabis, but you're looking around for and all those people on that list too, same old, same old people. I don't care what kind of deep roots they have That's the problem. They're roots are too deep garbage and garbage out garbage and Thank you, miss focus. Please clicks and clowns. That's what it about. Get some new people. I can find them for you You'll come up with a different solution resolution whatever final for you, you'll come up with a different solution, resolution, whatever. Thank you. And those are our last speaker. Thank you. So we're going to move on now to our special presentations. 7.1, the social determinants of health, sharing, understanding across public health and cities. So I believe we have some folks here that would like to do this presentation for us. Thank you. There it is. Thank you. Good evening, Council. Good evening, City Manager and City Manager and Staff. My name is Rafael Le Vendonio. I am actually a community member of San Mateo County for the past five plus years. I was here since I was five years old, actually came from Salvalor, San Mateo County resident, and I've just in August, my wife and I purchased a home in East Palo Alto. I'm also a community-based practitioner and public service person for the past 20 years, primarily in Rebid City and Norfolk. It's pleasure to be here with Dr. Sharon. Good evening. I'm Dr. Sharon DePiro. I'm from Daily City. I live in San Mateo, but I've worked in East Palo Alto just down the street at Rebid's Wood Family Health Center for almost 12 years now. I'm a pediatrician. And so in addition to my clinical duties, my personal projects are mainly around nutrition security and prescribing nature. So thank you for having me. So thank you again for having us here today. I'm here to represent the community health improvement plan through County of San Mateo's programming. I'm a co-chair for the Social Determinance of Health Working Group, and I'm really excited to share with you around the work that we've been doing. This is just a shared background on how your city can continue supporting the health and well-being of EPA residents, addressing social determinants of health via policy. You've all have a long history of advocacy, I think by far one of the best histories that I've studied. And so I just wanna be able to share with you as our team, our county health team is here, raise your hand, thank you for being here for all your hard work. And what it is that we're trying to do to address the social determinants of health, but also including you in the process. Next slide please. So I'm here to talk about advancing a shared vision to improve health and equity countywide. More than 90 different community-based partners have played a part in advancing this process. And it started a while back, and I'll go into the timeline a little bit. It's centered on seven different geographic areas in the county and it informed three different priorities. The first one was social determinants of health, access to health care and mental health. You all are pretty aware that these are issues, underlying root causes. It's kind of like the history of East Palo Alto, right? It's like the rose out of a concrete that's now blooming and now you're just having to prune and weed, right? Well, that's pretty much similar to health, right? Is how do we really advance it in a way collectively? So why we're here today is to share the work of the chip to provide it from information and also education to local cities like you, informed decision makers, right? And discuss how we can co-create, right? That's the word today. How we can co-create and involve you in the process. Next slide, please. Oh, actually, yeah. Actually, yeah, that's good. The timeline. This work started in November 2023, and we're now in 2025. It's been a long time coming. I want to thank one of your council members who's been involved since the beginning. Ruben Ubrica, what hasn't Ruben been involved in when he talks about social determinants of health, right? He's a champion for it. He lives it. He breeds it. And he actually invited us here today, so I want to thank you for that. And one of the goals is actually to advocate for policies across sectors to improve social determinants of health. And we have actually been able to do that in different ways by including decision makers on the table. This is actually a map that you'll see. I highly urge you to look into the whole plan. It's on our county website for those of you who are an online here in the audience. There's a whole county website to it. There's a plan. I'm sure county health can give you a printout if you need to print out. And it's really to advance these two strategies, advocate for policies, and also to enhance coordination of delivery of essential services. We always talk about that being that trusted messenger. And I know cities, counties, unincorporated areas like the one I have experienced in North Faroaks primarily, that's important right is that cross-pollination to occur right so that you can have fertile soil to grow wonderful flowers right which I think you can have fertile soil to grow wonderful flowers, right? Which I think you all have some amazing fertile soil here, which is really exciting. And the priority areas, next slide, please. Actually, one back, thank you, thank you, Clerk. Some of the priorities that we've been working on is conducting environmental scans to identify collaborations and organization working on is conducting environmental scans to identify Collaborations and organization working on policy and advocacy. Another one that's been identified is again policy approach That focuses on increasing knowledge about the impact of policies and community health disparities And also the second one is to increase understanding of current screening processes So like when you go to the clinic or when you go to a community-based organization, how are folks screening for? Do these folks have some adverse living conditions? Is there any adverse family trauma? Is there any really tough situation that's causing them to get to that next step of turning in that application? So that screening process is really important so that they can get the care that they need. And then creating a resource inventory so that we have kind of like a really wonderful, like you could say, a hub and it's not just a maze, right? It's not closed door after this door after this door. You actually have a hub of resources. I like to call it the blanket of love, right? Next slide. So again, this presentation is actually working to advance strategy number one. And I want to thank you because our focus on activity today is to increase knowledge to you about the impact of social determinants of health and policies around health disparities. These are all the organizations that are involved in the process right now, and I want to thank them. Those who are in the room, those that are not in the room, it's not too late. You can actually get involved. Some have actually been involved since the beginning of planning phase, which has been really electric. I think that's causing a really good kind of co-creation model and I want to applaud county health for being brave and this is the first time they're doing it this way. I do want to say for doing it this approach other cities other places nationally have been trying this approach and it's had it had really good response. Next slide please. So why social determinants of health? Social determinants of health, you know, it really goes into education, like the power of education really matters. Having employment, this slide that you see here, 50% of inequitable outcomes across health are because of these issues. If we don't really focus on them, like if we don't really focus on what you just talked about, the built infrastructure, the social capital, the economic stability, all the things that you're actually, before we came up here, like you're actually working on, those are all reasons of why health matters in the approach. And our greatest ability to affect changes in health disparities are addressing social determinants of health. So I go back to that kind of like picture, right? Right now you're really watering that rose out of a concrete, and you're dismantling concrete that has been built, right? To really have fertile soil to build. That's what we're asking you to do is to consider social determinants of health in your design process. And with that, I'd love to call a doctor to share more around that process. Next slide. So what affects health? So traditionally physicians like myself and the health care system has been focused on the right side of this slide over at disease and injury. And then now focusing on primary care and trying to bring up a team approach. We now have social workers and health coaches that try to address the risk behaviors, decrease smoking, increase physical activity, get people to eat better. But again, that only affects about 20% of health outcomes. What really affects health, the real factors that causes the most are at least 50% of health is the living conditions, the institutional inequities and the social inequities that patients experience on a daily basis and in their lives. The history of redlining which causes school segregation or the history of the widening of highway 101 through thriving EPA businesses or the history even of becoming a city and incorporating with the tax dollars and rights that that includes. All of those social all that social context that affects health and even if it's historical, it affects it today. So next slide, what can we do? So that's where we try to partner with everyone we can, with the community, with policymakers, with community organizations. So on things like housing, so building affordable housing trusts, legal support for renters and healthy homes that affects things like, for example, having mold in a home can really affect asthma. Having access to stable housing can really decrease chronic stress. Complete streets. So accidents are the number one cause of death in kids of all ages. And so having complete streets, sidewalks, bike lanes, you're going to help decrease pedestrian and bicycle deaths. Increasing green spaces. So green spaces decrease stress hormones and decrease blood pressure and decrease heart rate, it increases concentration and decreases depression, anxiety and increases happiness. People tend to be physically active in green spaces and they tend to congregate with their friends and so that improves physical health and social health as well as the mental health and emotional health. Next slide. So in East Palo Alto, Residence Report, worst health outcomes, then in other places in the county. And that's really only 20%, the healthcare system and current health behaviors and it's really rooted in the systems and the environment and the historical context. And so the hope is that policy systems and environmental change will help improve those health outcomes and make the outcomes more equitable. Next slide. So some of the things that our partners have been doing in San Mateo County are listed here just a few examples. So guaranteed income, the baby bonus, 200 families are getting $300 a month for the first three years of their of a new baby's life to help with anything that they need. Anchor institutions or equity ordinance. So the county has adopted the these resolutions to try to leverage their power as hiring as an employer and then also their purchasing power to help lift up local community businesses, small businesses, and then also with the equity ordinance to advance racial equity and promote a culture of belonging. With the Mariposa program, we've partnered with county parks to provide free park passes to low income residents throughout the county. And with the ACE program, people who low income folks who don't have access to other forms of healthcare insurance can have access to health. So these are some of the things we're doing. Cities definitely have an opportunity to affect health, maybe even more than I do, by providing infrastructure and the services and the policies and the places that people need. Next slide. So we're here just so to really invite you to co-create with us on how we can collaborate to really improve social determinants of health and EPA. You all are again, an amazing council historically, right, for a city that is young. We could make a really big dent into the future. I like to say cultivating for this beautiful garden that you have that you're building. And so we really want to invite you. There's three working groups in a steering committee that's helping champion this work. And you could be a part of those working groups or just attend a quarterly meeting or so or have us come and report and say how it's moving but I want to ask you how do you feel you would like to be engaged in this process? So I used to actually work at the California Department of Public Health. So I'm very familiar with a lot of this data because we would basically look at some sort of a health equity index or something. And you can tell like which neighborhoods were likely to take up the vaccine versus not, you know. But nevertheless, I think that this could be incorporated into our planning. Maybe if we update our general plan, we could include a lot of this information and how we are coming with our land use. And there's a lot of decisions that we make as a city that can affect healthcare kind of outcomes. So I think that's probably how we could potentially collaborate because we can take these recommendations and incorporate them into how we're planning our city's development. Thank you. Yeah, thank you for the presentation. This is an exciting area and it's one that East Palo Alto, you know, public health is a struggle, you know, in a place like East Palo Alto. We have a lot of, you know, the cards or, you know, the deck is against us. I had a few questions. One of them is, what are we doing in East Palo Alto to address unplanned pregnancy, family planning and reproductive health? I've lived here 15 years. I don't think I've ever seen any Fliers on pregnancy or preventing pregnancy. One of my friends was dropping off they had baby clothes and They were dropping off in Woodland Park To you know donating to a family the mom was 11 and grandma was 24 So it seems like this is an issue. Enees Palolto. And obviously if you have a kid at 11, there's all sorts of issues with that, but it will lead to bad health outcomes, you know, not going to school, all that. So what are we doing from a public health level on these issues? Or do you see it as an issue in East Palo Alto and you know what are we doing if so. I mean I can tell you from the clinic perspective the clinic doesn't have community programs like outside the clinic that I'm familiar with again I'm in pediatrics and not in the women's health we do do have a Driving Women's Health Department. We will take and, you know, we serve all teens and adults. If you don't have insurance, you can come in, and this is for both family planning and also once you are pregnant. You can come in, we will help you get insurance, we will, we have a CPSP program, and then we have like centering pregnancy which is group visits that have been shown in the studies to decrease preterm births and increase breastfeeding and have all kinds of positive outcomes. I don't know if someone from public health could answer the other side of that question. So, you know our co-chair. Hi here. It's nice to see the City Council so engaged on this topic. My name is Vina Rogavan. I'm a management analyst with San Mateo County Health with our public health policy and planning division. In reference to your question regarding family planning and unplanned teen pregnancy. We're fortunate to be able to collect data on this topic and we've seen a decline in birth rates for teens over the course of a 20 year span and such a significant decline in those rates that we actually don't release the data anymore because there's a chance that the data becomes identifiable. So without that ability to de-identify, we encounter some concerns in that area. So if there's an intent to learn more about specific teen pregnancy rates and data that we can share for East Palo Alto or the zip codes in this area, that's certainly something that County Health can work with the city on and Council's more than welcome to reach out to our staff at County Health so that we can engage outside of this meeting to provide that data to you more directly. Yeah, thank you. Second question I have how is the County and Ravenswood using social meeting other channels to get public health messaging in a broad, broader sense because if you know if you're not inside the Ravenswood using social media and other channels to get public health messaging in a broad broader sense because if you know if you're not inside the Ravenswood clinic you're not getting messages from Ravenswood. Certainly during COVID we didn't see anything from Ravenswood clinic in terms of community messaging. There weren't flyers. There was if there was stuff on social media I didn't see it and so I guess social media is incredibly popular in East Pau-Altum and the European neighbors the group I run has over 14,000 people and it's primarily Hispanic at this point and so people are getting it. I guess is there a strategy to educate people because it certainly is good right now. There's what chicken flu or H5 and avian flu, sorry. I saw there was something from San Mateo County, but it wasn't pushed. You had to go reach out and get it. Is there a strategy there to reach folks who may not be in any health program right now, but would see it on any of the various social channels. So to speak to that, there are a number of communication channels. The county does have a comprehensive communication strategy. Again, I would defer to being able to discuss the topic and learn more about your concerns locally and to be able to address them in a setting where we have the staff on board who work in this particular area. So if there's an opportunity, we really invite you to reach out to County Health and we'd love to engage further in a conversation on how best to, as Raphael has been saying, co-create and work together to address these issues. Okay, thank you. I'm happy to talk more offline. Indoor air quality is a big issue. I guess what's the, how do you see a certain situation or a current situation with aging property? You know, things like moles, gas appliances, heating systems that might put a particulates and, and you know, toxic chemicals. I saw that our asthma rates are significantly higher than other cities and I don't know if there's any way to actually break that down between you know what the causes are whether it's you know is there any connection there between our indoor air quality and subpar housing and that? Community-based organizations working on that. So council member Denon, there's a lot of really great community-based organizations working on that in your city through CCRC with Violet and our wonderful team, Chase Donald. In addition to that, you have Nuestra Casa working on a lot of that environmental justice work and you have a Concilio of San Mateo County. I do advise that just, you know, applying a good conversation with them in being on their newsletters around the work that they're doing to use your channel of social media so that our community residents get access to those things or again co-create with them to build that bridge. I think that those are really great ways on the community-based organization front. And in reference to county health, in reference to county health of the health education front. In reference to county health I'll mention two resources that might be relevant here. We do have a tobacco education program and specifically tobacco education coalition that's really engaged with residents across the county and in cities that have higher rates of asthma as second hand smoke exposure is a leading cause for that. There's also the related to lead mitigation and lead abatement. We have a program that's really focused on education around lead and childhood lead poisoning. So that's another opportunity for us to connect and show the resources that we have through county health. I have a couple more questions. I guess one of the things you notice with the San Mateo County is that there are mobile clinics and I know when I was looking at the schedule I know it's just in San Mateo right now but it had two days in Redwood City and no days in East Palo Alto. How can we get when the mobile clinic I guess guess, must be broken down right now, the truck may not be working? But when it does get mobile again, how do we get that located in East Palo Alto at a site? Is there something we have to do to request it? Or because I think it would be very popular just to take care of vaccines and things like that. As far as vaccines are concerned, Ravenswood does have an immunization clinic on Mondays from 1 to 3 pm and on Wednesdays from 2 to 6 pm. You do not have to be a Ravenswood patient to access that, but you do now need an appointment. It used to be a walk in clinic. And then if you are a patient of Ravenswood, then you don't need to come at those specific times. We have, we're open Monday through Saturday. I'm not sure what the other services on the mobile clinic are that you're particularly concerned about. I mean, it's a, it's a, on the website it does all sorts of screening, you know, blood pressure, blood sugar, all the, you know, things that are a mobile medical clinic would do. So it seems that if, my only point is if Redwood City gets two days, we should maybe get one day and put it in the, you know, YMCA parking lot or something like that, just so that people Clinic, you have them just be like another option for public health. And then maybe they steer you, steer people to the Ravenswood Clinic, but just get out there and do it. I don't mean we can talk, they're not doing anything outside of San Mateo right now, but it's a talk offline about that. And then, you know, final thing is, one of the things we're talking about is funding the YMCA to enable more people in the community to have access to the Y. The YMCA is built on city land. It was the formerly of the Bel Street pool and the you know, Bel Street gym. One of the things we're thinking about doing is getting money from the city to enable a lot more people to use the Y, whether it's swimming or weightlifting. I mean, what would be your thought on that from public health and exercise perspective in terms of that, you know, what we're talking about. So societal outcomes. I could say I'm a big proponent of that. I actually I've had some meetings with Health Plan Assembly for something different and I advocated try to say, well, in Santa Clara County, they provide YMCA memberships for everyone. And so they did, I did hear that they are providing that for the Medicare population at least. But I do think that I think a lot of my families would take you up on that because they do have financial assistance, but I believe it's almost $100 per month. And that's the assistant, that's the scholarship rate. Yeah, this is a talking to them. I mean, this is in the very, very early stages, and we need to get votes from council. On top of the idea would be to subsidize it so that it's like 20 bucks a month for a family, as opposed to, you kind of want to repeat something because otherwise people will sign up and not use it. But it's, you know, when you start talking about diabetes, you start talking about weight, you start talking about high blood pressure, exercises is magic for that. And so I say that as a diabetic who every time I go for work out, my blood sugar goes down like that. So, the other thing, and I'll just throw this out there, one of the things that rich people do is they get a calcium heart score. And that's a screening for heart attacks. And I don't know how we would do this, but it's basically a cat scan for the heart. I had one of the showed that I had heart disease and it was very early. So, you know, now I'm on a statin to do this, but I think widespread screening, anytime I read about somebody who's, I'm 51, somebody a little bit older than me, who dies of a heart attack and they're like, oh, they had no idea. I think of something like a calcium heart score, which is like 150 bucks at Stanford. Wow, that could have saved their life if they had done that. And yeah, I think a lot of these screenings, whether it's blood sugar screening for diabetes or blood pressure screening, we can do a lot more of that in this palato. I mean, a lot of the treatments for these things are not terribly expensive. And we can hopefully move the needle a little bit in terms of outcomes. So I'll leave it at that. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate you coming out tonight. So Councilman Dunin, if I may, I think I really appreciate your energy. And it goes into what you saw earlier with your strategic plan. If there is going to be an aim statement or indicator around health that we can align with through this plan. That's really our ask. How can we co-create with you to create some of those indicators you mentioned around having a universal screening with you all, right? So I think there's a lot of energy there and I do want to say I want to thank Rubin for allowing us to have the space because it feels like there is that kind of energy to co-create with you all. I'll start by saying that we are the first city that the presentation has been made to, and I know maybe about five months ago, maybe Marta about a guy named I were I think faster city when I basically invited all the other cities you know and then we said well we could be the first ones and so I want to thank our mayor for saying yeah you know she agreed and so I think this could be the beginning of a good process because this is the first time that the county is really coming out. Public health is coming out that has a community improvement plan and just like we've been hearing I think there's a lot of ideas, a lot of ways and people are already doing things out in the community. We just need to organize it more and yeah, I just want to say that that, this coming year, I know there'll be presentations and I'm for all the cities, I keep saying, everyone should get on board because that's also another way in which, we can help each other and raise the awareness of different issues that maybe some cities have more than others, but yeah. So, you know, thanks again for your presentation and for having it. So, Rafael, I think your question to us is not what you can do for us, but what we can do for you, really. Because we're not here to tell you we need this health intervention We need this type of injection these are social determinants of health that are outside of health system right it's housing Right it's tenant supports it's rank control even though you don't have it here because you're stabilizing people's rents Right it's access to parks right it's streets that are safe for us to walk on and bike on, because those are healthy. I'm actually proud to say that we are one of the few and actually the first in the county to ever put in a health and equity element into our general plan. It is not a required element. Yet we went through the exercise of saying, this is how we get to a healthy community. Well, then you were there when we did that plan. The first, we need to review it. We need to continue to implement it. But again, what can we do? I want to figure out again how we can continue to support just on this last election. We passed an ordinance that provides for emergency rental assistance guaranteed forever at this point. I mean, it's emergency rental assistance and the money doesn't go away, right? It is a tax that is specifically dedicated to that that keeps people from being homeless. It is like one of the number one things that you can do, right? As a social transformative of health, it's not that I want an injection from you. It's not that I want to get the teen pregnancy folks, whatever to be here. It is that we are providing the social net that keeps people healthy so that they don't have to go to the point where, indeed, they need the medical intervention. And so I certainly think that the vice mayor here is a strong proponent of parks and stuff. And I think, yes, we need to figure out, and Robin and I and a couple of other people did a focus group with seniors in East Palo Alto, well, I've been on this couple of, a couple of three, four months ago. And one of the things that came up for seniors was like, we wanna make sure that our parks are open to us and that we feel safe in them because we want to go and we want to do exercise things. Well, that's an intervention that we can figure out how we get to. And we're going to be talking about prioritizations. But I think those are the things that we need to think about with you, right? You know, certainly I think it's really important to have the Ravens with Health Clinic. I mean, you know, had we not had the clinic during the pandemic, right? It's kind of a catalyst for all the vaccination work and all the education that was happening. We would have been in a, you know, very sorry state, right? So that's important. But again, what we can do in terms of ordinances and in terms of actually, you know, very sorry state, right? So that's important. But again, what we can do in terms of ordinances and in terms of actually, you know, having class for bikeways, right? Where people actually feel comfortable sending their kids to school in a bikeway that's protected, right? Or for that matter, potentially having ordinances that say, like in the morning in certain places, streets are only one way because it lets parents feel more confident and comfortable to let their kids walk to school. So I think those are some of the things that we think about. By the way, I'll probably be voted out of office if I put that one in. But for the less, I mean, I think we have to think about what we can do on our end to make sure that we don't need your services on the back end. So absolutely willing to continue this conversation and look at what other places are doing. But I think we have done a significant amount of work, at least to get us there with that health and equity element, with the way we've only sit in the county that actually has rent control. Right? I mean, I think that's important, you know, render protections, et cetera, et cetera. So we can do a whole held a lot more. And I think this council has proven in the past that it's interested in moving in this direction. So thank you for this. And I hope we can collaborate together. Yeah, I just wanted to follow up on what Carlos said that I think we're in the process of updating our safety and environmental justice which includes health and medicality elements. I think they're supposed to be completed by the end of the year. So I'd be interested in knowing how we at least the city could potentially factor in social governments of health and to that process. So I think that'd be interesting if there could be a potential opportunity there. Well, thank you so much for all of the information that you've provided tonight. And we definitely look forward to continuing this partnership and collaboration in making our community safe for healthier and to continue thriving. Thank you. And I believe that we will go to public comment. For the Mayor and Mayor, I just want to thank you again for continuing to be the first in allowing us to provide this presentation. It just shows your character as a city that's you know hasn't been around so much. But again, just pioneering the future. Thank you. Thanks and welcome Deepz. Hello, Alta Rafael. Yes, of course you're welcome. Thank you. All right. Does that work? Thank you. My name is Diane Lutteen. I live at 1765. I used to be sure I wrote. Been here a long time. Nice to see you all. I'm here. thank you Madam Mayor and City Council members and for the presentation from Public Health which is what I'm at least connecting up with the presentation. I am here as a member of the, of an ad hoc community group, which has been formed, everybody being welcome in the community for the purpose of promoting walkability and walking in the community, as of course a public health, both physical and mental, and that we have specific activities that we have. We have a strategy that we've started, so I wanted both the county to know about it, and we've gotten help from community services for our efforts. And I have, we have a couple of members on the left, but also Gregorio Prieto is here as a part of our Committee Actually Donna Rutherford a Prior City Council member is a part was going to make the presentation. So I'm ceiling big shoes here to talk about this And I see we have some other walkers So I'm selling big shoes here to talk about this. And I see we have some other walkers. Robert Jones has been a longtime walker and also Elizabeth Jackson is a longtime. So we do walk in the community, that's for sure. But we need to do it more in a more organized way and a healthy way. And that's what we're trying to do it more in a more organized way and a healthy way and that's what we're trying to do. Our strategy in a practical ways is two ways. One of this, we're actually doing pilot projects in the community. I have to stop. Pilot project, I was paying attention to the time. Okay, I should. We do also have Speaker on Zoom. Is Tiambi? Hello, Ms. Tiambi. Did I get in? Yes. Okay. Thank you. Okay. So the health disparities, one, you have to deal with history. If you don't deal with history, then you, you were being silly because it's the same thing that's going to happen over and over again. We have to deal with how the county manipulated, drew funding, et cetera, et cetera. And so we lost funding when they chose not to give it to us. So then we got to the Ravenswood Center, which I don't feel addresses African-American needs. And that's what I'll be talking about since we have a new precedent, specifically. I'll go real quickly with the Chinese. Okay, so Black-Ram mother decided to help addicts, mothers, mothers with children that came on the Ford Caterpillar. Homeless mothers with children who had addiction. So it was a great program, Harry Tubman home, great, great program. People got in back rooms and he started to take it and they went to Catholic charities. They kept it open for a year and then ended it. When drug monies became available, the county wanted those monies, they didn't want us to have them, etc., etc. So there's a lot of things going on. Just in God, environmental issues. Of course, right now I'm on a freeway street. When we had the Harry Tumman home, I was on this freeway street because we're surrounded by freeway. So asthma and respiratory issues, etc. etc. So there's a lot of things that are going on. We, the Barbara Mootan Home, there's a black young man who's right now is in a bad situation. And there was another therapist. We could not use the Mootan Center. The Mootan was named after an African-American woman. So there's a lot of work if you don't answer, then you're just faking the funk. You're not being real. Diane Nadine, I need you. I've been trying to find you regarding acupuncture. Did you cut me off? If you can please wrap it up your last conversation. Yes, we do need young people to get on these committees, because I'm not going to do the same thing with the same old people. So anyway, young people learn your history and you fight for something that's permanent for us. Thank you. Thank you. We do have one last speaker, Miss Elizabeth Jackson. Good evening again. I just wanted to come and support Diane Lending because she has some good programs. I have attended a couple of few of her workshops and I have to do with nutrition and exercise. So I think it's a good idea if we all come together and walk as a group and do something as a community. I'm usually an individual, but I will go together on healthy things like that. And I just want to say that last month, I had a program wellness kits. I was able to give out 100 wellness kits to people who are in homebound. So, and the community came together and we donated all the materials and gave these kits out. So whatever we do about health, I'm on board and I want to support Diane and her efforts. Thank you. Thank you. Those are last speaker. Thank you James. So moving on to item 7.2. The HIP housing presentation. Good evening, Madam President, members of the Council. City Manager Gaines, yes please distribute those. My name is Peggy Jensen and I'm here this evening as a member of the HIP housing board of directors. But first I'd like to tell you a little bit about myself and my connection to East Palo Alto and why I asked to be here tonight to share the information with you about the information about HIPP with you. I retired as the Assistant County Executive almost two years ago and during my tenure with the county I spent a lot of time working on affordable housing, working on homelessness issues, but I was also the liaison with the San Mateo County libraries. And over the years, I worked closely with Library Director Anne Marie de Spain with EPA staff and with elected officials on concepts and plans for a new library in East Palo Alto. I was very pleased to chat with Anne Marie the other day and hear that work continues on this project. So long history with these Palo Alto and excitement about the work that you're doing. But turning back to hip housing, because of my work with the county, I learned a lot about what hip did. And I was very impressed with the programs that provided, that really kept people from homelessness, that provided them with a safe place to call home. Hip provides quality affordable housing to over 750 low-income families and individuals, including many seniors. And they also provide a variety of housing support to people from throughout the county. One of the things that I felt most strongly about in terms of HIPP is the people who they serve. HIPP clients and residents, housing residents, their teachers and teachers' aides, their case managers for nonprofits, their nurses, their caregivers, hip provides affordable housing and housing assistance to people that are really important part of our community, the people that provide the services that we all depend upon. So this evening, I would like to thank all the council members for your ongoing support of hip housing. And there's a small stack of them to thanks. We'll be sharing copies of the 2025 hip housing calendar. I don't know if you've received one in the past, if you're not familiar with it, I think you'll enjoy it. But each year, hip asked children from around the county in grades kindergarten through fifth to draw a picture of home and Tell and make a statement about what home means to them This year over 500 children share their pictures and statements From all these entries 13 pictures were selected for the county that you now have for the calendar that you now have I was on that selection committee. It was a really, really hard job because there were just many, many wonderful submissions. My favorite picture, unquote, in the calendar this year is from Anna Patricia, who's a first grader who said, where I live makes me happy. It protects me from the cold. The picture of Anna, the picture she drew, and her statement about home, what home means to her, both in English and in Spanish, along with a wonderful photo of Anna, is on the July page of the calendar. So on behalf of hip housing, I hope you enjoy the calendar, and that it serves as a reminder throughout the year of how important housing is to everyone. Everyone in our county, especially our children. So thank you very much. Thank you so much for presenting us with this calendar. And yes, I appreciate every calendar. You give us every year. I actually posted in my classroom. So thank you so much. As a teacher and a mom, I appreciate anything that is done with love from our children and our community. So thank you so much. Very welcome. I've got about 15, so if you want to share with others, please feel free to do so. Thank you again. Okay, so I don't know if we have any public comment on this item. Seeing none, Mayor. Okay, so we're gonna go ahead and we're going to adjourn the city council regular meeting to the East Pole Law to Sanitary District. Yeah, I'm sorry. They're just this is one question. By the way, hi. Nice to see you again. But a question about, and I've asked this in the past. And that is that hip in the past, we do have a number of residents in East Perala, who are at risk, many of whom have actually had prior criminal records, and they are no longer in the system, right? Certainly in this state, once you're out of the system, you have full rights, you can vote. But in the past, HIPAA's had a screening process that would maybe, you know, marginalize them, just they were not able to qualify. It has thought about that policy or somehow figured out there's a way to, you know, potentially work around, you know, some of those issues of, you know, prior criminal convictions. I'd be happy to bring that comment back to the executive Dr. Kate Comfort-Hara and hopefully she can work with you all to figure out how to address that problem. Thank you and appreciate your one all the work you did in the county with us and the great work that you're doing with it. So let's see you again. Alrighty then. the great work that you're doing with it. So, nice to see you again. Bye. All righty then. We're going to go ahead and during the City Council meeting to the East Palo Alto Sanitary District Board meeting. The time is 8-27. I Thank you. Second. Good evening and welcome to the east Palo Alto Sanitary District meeting. At this time, the city council will be meeting for the East Palo Alto Sanitary District meeting. All right, thank you. Sorry. Bear with me one second. We have item nine, which is approval of the East Pell Autosanitary District Board meeting consent calendar. That include, do I read the items? You do not. You can just ask if any of your colleagues would like to pull any items. Uh-huh. Would anyone like to pull an item from the consent calendar for the East Pell Autocenatory District Board meeting agenda? Mr. President, I guess you're not chair. I move approval of the consent calendar, but I guess we need to have a public comment, but I move approval. Second. All in favor. Are there any public comments on this item? I'm not at this time. Okay. We'd like to call for a vote. All in favor? Aye. Aye. The motion passes unanimously. I believe that is that's it. The meeting is adjourned and we will return to the regularly scheduled programming with East Palo Alto City Council. Thank you very much. Council member Dynan. We're going to go ahead and I don't think we have any public hearings which is item 11 at this point we don't have any so we're moving on to item 12 which is policy and action 12.1 purchasing ordinance who will be doing that presentation? Sherry Klemma assistant city manager will be providing this presentation. Thank you. Good evening Mayor vice Vice Mayor, Mayor members of the council. My name is Sherry Clemem, your assistant city manager. I'm going to be presenting on the purchasing ordinance and I apologize for not being with you in person today. I'm actually traveling for a conference that begins tomorrow. But James, can you put up the slides please when you get a chance? Thank you. So the purchasing ordinances you saw from the staff report is detailed. There's a lot in it and certainly there's a lot of nuance that we can discuss if you're interested. But the real big picture here is that the current purchasing ordinance is antiquated, particularly in the areas related to construction projects where the you know the process is very slow and unwieldy and then also in terms of what the city manager can and cannot award contracts that he can and cannot award and we'll get into that in a little bit. But if you can flip to the next slide, please. Our recommendation is to take the following four steps by motion. Adopt a resolution electing to be subject to the UPCCAA. That is a procedure and state law related to contract and repairs, construction rather and repair contracts. And this resolution must be adopted per state law in order to avail yourself of those processes. And so this resolution needs to be sent to the state to show the state that we, the council did in fact adopt the resolution and you do want to avail yourselves of this portion of state law. Number two, wave the first reading and introducing ordinance limits. And number four, find that the proposed actions do not constitute a project for the purposes of CEQA. Next slide, please. So a purchasing ordinance in its essence has to strike a balance between operations and controls. And what I mean by that is if the ordinance is too restrictive, then we cannot implement, we as a staff cannot implement the your direction, your policy direction. So if you give us a lot of construction projects, but we can't award any of those, we have to come back with plans and specs. We have to keep coming back to council. We are hindered in the process. It slows down our process. Now, this isn't about transparency. You as the council and certainly members of the public are welcome to have as much oversight as you all would like to have that the question is do we need to slow it down every time for approvals. And so that's where the controls come in the controls are about oversight over city staff oversight over the council by the public and making sure that the public dollar is spent well, is spent correctly, is spent in the proper direction that we're balance. And that's what I'm asking you, the council to think about is does this ordinance strike that balance? So we are asking in this ordinance for a large shift toward operations, meaning allowing us the staff to you authorize more ourselves and that allows because this council has come with some very ambitious plans allows us to move projects faster. And I need you to think about what controls you would like in place. And I can suggest some if you have particular issues that you want to address. What controls need to be in place so that you feel comfortable with this level of delegation of authority. Next slide please. So I will not read to you all of state law but the term public projects are defined in state law and the big picture is these are the construction and repair projects these are not maintenance projects, but these are the projects where you know you're building a street you're building a pipeline. You're repairing a street or a pipeline. They're large expensive projects typically done by trades. Next slide, please. When I use the term supplies and equipment, and that is used in the ordinance as a term of art, it's anything that does not require special installations. Something that someone without training or expertise could plug in or attach. So I always, when staff asks me, is this a public project or is this a, you know, equipment purchase? I asked them, if you gave me this widget, this thing, could I plug it in and figure it out? If it requires a person with real training or certainly a degree or some sort of certification to run the equipment or to attach and, you know, install the equipment, then it is a public project. But, you know, office supplies, body cameras, software, food and beverages, printers, chemicals, those types of things are considered supplies and equipment. They're not regulated under state law and it's up to the city to determine how we would like to procure those items. Next slide please. And then there are services and these could be professional services like accountants, attorneys, engineers, or they could be trade services like custodial services, security, landscape maintenance. Again, this is not services utilized for public projects. So it's not electricians, services or plumbers, services. These are other services. And these are the terms that are used in the ordinance. There's sort of three broad categories to tell us how we bid out for those processes. And then also how we award those contracts. Next slide slide please. So this ordinance deals with those two aspects. First of all the bidding, when you must bid, what you have to do to properly bid, when you can be exempt from bidding all those nuances. And then secondly, the award on what basis can we award contracts or purchase orders and in what amounts, who has the authority to award different types of contracts and purchase orders? So we're going to start with part one, which is bidding. Next slide, please. And the one after that. Okay, this is a list of exemptions from bidding. It is a long list. I'm not going to go through the entire list. But the law in short of it is most of these items, we cannot bid for. We can't ask for different pricing because either there's only one vendor that provides it or one entity that provides it, or it's not subject to a bidding process. So for example, you know, postage and US Postal Service fees, we can't put out an RFP and ask different people to apply for postage fees. They are what they are. If we go to the US Postal Service, whatever fees they charge us is what we're going to have to you to pay. That's the same with utility payments. If we need to pay PG&E for gas, we can't put out, you know, requests for bidders for alternative electricity providers. There aren't any. And then, you know, some of this is just the process is done differently. It's not done through a bidding process. So insurance, we do have a process for looking at, you know, different options within insurance and seeing what the pricing is and so forth. But it's not a bidding process. We don't put out an RFP. We don't put out an RFP, we don't put out a bid packet, we go through the professionals that work and can offer us different insurance options. So I don't think there's anything wildly controversial in here, but certainly we can go into detail about any of these exemptions if you have questions. Next slide, please. And so back to the Uniform Public Construction Cost Accounting Act, which the acronym is UPCCAA. And currently, the city does not implement the UPCCA. So that we follow state law that says anything above $5,000 in construction, this only applies to construction, must be formally bid out. So if the Public Works Department wants to put out a bid for $10,000, it needs to put together formal bid packet with plans and specs drawn up by an engineer or an architect. Certified by our city engineer, they need to come to you, the council, you need to sign off on those plans and specs. Then they need to put it out for bid for 15 to 30 days. I don't recall what our ordinance requires, but something like that. And then look at those bids, come back to you and get it awarded for a $10,000 project. Now, when those statutes were written over 50 years ago, $5,000 may have gotten you a lot. But today, $5,000, obviously, is not that much. And so in 1983, the UPCCA was drafted in the state law. It's an alternative bidding procedure. And it's designed to reduce cost, expedite the awards process, reduce inefficiencies, and simplify administration on these smaller construction projects. So right now, they have these three tiers, and we're going to build those tiers into our ordinance. Tier one is under $75,000. And according to state law, those don't have to be bid at all. We in our ordinance have built in a slight bidding process because we don't want no bidding whatsoever. We do want something done. But it's certainly not nearly as foremost the more expensive projects. The tier two projects are over 75,000 and up to 220,000 and then tier three are over 220,000. These dollar amounts are set by the state legislature and they're reset every three to five years. They look at inflation, they look at the cost of construction, and they keep adjusting those amounts. These amounts just went into effect January 1st, so a month ago. Before that, they were lower amounts. So our first recommendation is that Council elect to be subject to the UPCCAA. And what that means is the look the smallest the tier one projects do not have to be bid. Again, in our ordinance, we're going to require some bidding but not formal bidding. The projects between 75,000 and up to 220 are going to require what the state calls an informal bidding process. And what that, we'll talk about what that means in a little bit. And then the projects over 220,000 have to be formally bid. So currently projects over 5,000 have to be formally bid. Now the UPCAA allows that formal bidding to only start at 220,000. Next slide, please. So, the tier, so up to $5,000, we're not going to require in our ordinance. Any kind of bidding. That's, you know, the police is in the middle of something, they need to run out and purchase some material, something really minor, they can buy it on a credit card, or a public works department, they can go buy it on a credit card because these are really small purchases, right? But anything over 5,000, up to 75,000, that tier one, we're gonna ask them to obtain at least three written bids. And obtain, I don't mean solicit three written bids, I mean obtain three written bids. So what that means is they should email it out. Let's say I've got a, you know, a street repair, let's say for $20,000 I'm fixing just a couple of maybe it's a slight slurry seal or a slight maintenance seal or some pothole repair. It's not a complete overhaul of streets and a rebuilding but it's something minor and I'm gonna email five six seven vendors and at least three of them will reply to me. I'm going to give them the scope of work in the email. I'm going to tell them, please reply to me by the end of the week. And then they're going to, you know, let's at least three of them right back to me. One of them proposes 20,000, one proposes 22, one proposes 25. The one with the 20,000 gets the contract. It is a bid process, so we're making sure that we are getting the right value for our money, that we're not wasting our money, and somebody's not doubling or tripling the cost of a project, but it's not an onerous process. For tier two projects, and this is again, public projects, construction and repair, which is the over 75 enough to 220,000, they're gonna have to put out a bid for 10 days, at least 10 days, they can always put it out longer. And they're going to send a notice inviting informal bids to construction trade journals. So there are state law actually designates which journals we must supply. You know, it's by region and so forth. And so we're going to send to those trade journals our notice inviting informal bids. We're going to see you have 10 days to send us a bid. Here's the bid packet. Here's the informal plans and specs. Send us a quote, please. And then for tier three, which is anything over 220,000 state law requires 15 dayday bid period or longer, a notice inviting formal bids, and that has to be sent to construction trade journals, and it must also be published in the newspaper. For supplies and equipment and also for services, we tried to mimic state law. State law has set this bar and they do extensive research about where the lines should be drawn. So we thought we would use the same tiered system. Again, obtaining three bids for tier one projects, leaving a bid out for 10 days for supplies and equipment or services for any and putting it in any relevant trade journals. That's really dependent on, you know, what the services you're providing or what the supplies and equipment are. But if, for example, we're asking for engineers, we're looking to get some engineers. We maybe there's a trade journal that is commonly read by engineers and engineering companies, and it would be good for us to send it to them so that they see it so that we can get as many bids as possible. And then tier three, again, leaving it out for 15 days at least and putting out a notice of formal bids to any relevant trade journals and we're posting or publishing it. So again, our ordinance for supplies and equipment and services is really designed to mimic the state law. But there are some nuance differences. For public projects for construction and repair, we cannot piggyback. Piggy backing means that some other entity has done the bidding and we're just going to use their bid process and and use their contract. State law does not allow this to be done for construction projects. However, for supplies and equipment and services, we are going to allow this. Why? Because some large cities or counties and certainly states, because they obtain bids for much larger entities can get much better pricing. And so if they can offer better pricing, we want to be able to avail ourselves of that pricing in those terms. So we are going to allow piggybacking for supplies and equipment and also for services to the extent that the contractor vendor allows it as well. And then cooperative purchasing is allowed for both and that is truly when we are purchasing with other entities. So if for example a group of cities in the county decided to join together and purchase let's say services for installation of storm drain traps, right? And we want to work together with the county or just a group of cities and we all join in one contract together. Then that is allowed both for construction work and for supplies and equipment and services. I want to pause there just to ask so far if there are any questions because I know this is a lot. There's a lot here. Is there anything so far from the council or should I continue? Do you have any questions from the council at this time? Okay. I think we can move on, Sherry. Thank you. Okay. Thank you, Mayor. Can you switch to the next slide, please, James? So if there's an emergency, meaning we want to skip bidding, we don't want to continue, we want to rush. For example, what we saw earlier on the EPSD agenda, we had a sewer pipe fail and were concerned that the sewage would be leaking elsewhere. So we may, the city manager is authorized under state law, and we wrote it into our ordinance so that we can avail ourselves of that authority, because again, it's required to be written in. So the city manager, the acting city manager, or the council, has to issue a resolution that declares that emergency and allows us not to bid and allows us to expedite the process so that we can immediately handle that public project. services we drafted into the ordinance, looser option. And what that means is at the city manager's discretion, if he can, he or she in the future can determine that obtaining bids is not feasible due to the urgent nature of the situation. And that public interest and necessity require immediate, the immediate expenditure of public funds to protect life, health or property, or to mitigate substantial economic losses. If the city manager can make that finding, then he may waive bids. And so that is a more flexible standard that allows us to, for example, if the price is about to change, and we really want to take advantage of a cheaper price, the city manager can wave bidding and allow us to go forth with the purchase. Next slide, please. Brandon trade names are regulated by state law for construction projects. So that means if you want to put, you must order, you know, this or that brand, you have to write or equal in the bid packet and that is a determination by City staff, but the contractor in each case may submit documentation that shows that their other brand or generic is equal in quality. The reason state law is is adamant about this and construction is of course it could save a lot of money if you purchase generic. Unless there is a real narrow definition and you see on the slide that there are four reasons that state law allows. For example, if you're matching a particular brand that you already have, without those exceptions, state law requires that you allow for alternatives. And it's not allowed by itself. City staff has to look at that documentation and determine that yes, it is equal. So we are building that in also for our equipment and supplies. Unless there is a very narrow particular reason that it must be a brand name, we're going to be buying generic or we're going to be allowing for equivalent brands so that we can continue. and the government's development brands. So that we can continue. And then can you skip. To the next and the next slide. Thank you. I think we can skip over this. And that's the bases that the city awards contracts. If you can skip the next slide as well, there are exemptions to public contracting, which I can go over if the council decides that's important. But then the following slide really is important and that is we looked at other cities that are similarly sized and to try to understand where does the city manager have authority to contract? And for public projects, almost all of them give the city manager 200,000, which again just changed to 20. I'm sure they're going to adjust to 220. So that's our recommendation. And with respect to supplies and equipment, we're proposing 75,000, be the city manager's new authorization limit. And that is kind of all over the place. That's a judgment call for the council. Next slide, please. This is what we're authorizing what you would be authorizing the city manager to award contracts at versus your authority. Next slide please. And this is when a contract can be awarded by the city manager beyond that authority. It would be awarded by the city manager and the mayor when there is an immediate need. Next slide. And for real property, the city manager would have the authority to award a contract up to a million dollars and up to five years. So it's really a lease that we're talking about or a construction easement. So I've listed on the next slide the recommendation again and I welcome your questions. Do we have any questions at this time? Or council members?, just a quick question on your staff report that mentions, oh God, it's on PTA-88. And second, the city manager may award an executive purchase orders contracts or tax orders related to confidential ongoing police investigations to $75,000. Beyond that amount, the award and execution may be jointly made by the city manager and then here's what I am confused. And the most senior available member of the city council. Now is that senior in age? Is that senior in tenure on council? Is that senior related to an executive, you know, a position of chair or vice chair, mayor or vice mayor. Is there any need to define what that means? I mean, otherwise, you know, Ruben is going to wind up doing everything. Thank you, councilmembers. You know, we don't ask you for your ages and we're not going to write that into any kind of ordinance. It is the most senior in terms of role. And so typically that is the mayor. The reason we don't write in the mayor is because if she is unavailable for some reason, we need to go to the vice mayor and then to a council member. Yeah, then it's not very clear. Just to use the term senior is not very clear. So perhaps, you know, some other wording can be fine that it can be found. Okay. Thank you, council member. We Will work on adjusting that. And then my last question is related to these emergency bids in which these emergency expenditures in which the city council will be informed of this within three regular council meetings. I don't know, but why couldn't it just be at the next regular council meeting? Why three? It just would seem that it would be very quick and easy to say, yep, we had to spend whatever $85,000 on X and we're just letting you know today, because you already spent the money. Is there any why we put three? Yes, Councilmember. If we have already published the agenda for the next regular meeting and we cannot put an item on that agenda, then we will probably go to meeting two. It just allows us a little bit of room to be able to update you all right away. But certainly our goal is to update you all at the first meeting. Right. So I mean, I still think you could do in the first meeting, but I would say rather than say three, I'd say two meetings. And again, if you really need something on the agenda, I think you could probably figure out a way to do it in a number of C fashion, but we've done it before, but yeah, I think three is too many and to the extent I would be in favor of moving that down to two. Those are my only thoughts on this time. Otherwise, I'm in support of increasing these authorities. Thank you, Webster, did you have something to add? No, I'm kind of just in favor of streamlining the process. But yeah, I kind of want to get some understanding wise three regular meetings is that just to consolidate or hell out for time to put stuff together. I think, you know, a formal report, is that why it'd be three council meetings? Correct, councilmember. It takes us time sometimes to put together a formal report. Also, frankly, if we're working on the emergency, I don't like to pull staff away to be drafting this. We will be keeping you all informed informally anyway by via email and so forth. But in terms of putting together a whole council report, it sometimes takes us some time. But I am open to the amendment. I really urge you not to say at the first regular meeting because we may not make that timeline, but I'm open to the amendment that the other council member proposed about making it two meetings. I think we could make that happen. Yeah, I'm just kind of in favor of more flexibility in time. Not trying to put too much of a burden on our staff. To rush out of reports, but that gives them some flexibility in time to put them together. So I kind of support the three regular meetings. Hey, so we have to go ahead and Before we go to public I Guess I'll go to public comment first and then What we have to vote on this after public comment or just adopt the recommendation After public comment of course, so after public comment what we could do is see if there is Emotion on the floor that would incorporate Councilmember Romero's Recommendation and I think at that point, staff could provide you with a recommendation of some language or some options for clarifying that. And then you would vote on it. Okay, thank you. Mayor, may I also add, we had a couple of last minute edits that we would like you to consider. I don't think any of them are that critical in the changes, but I do wanna thank the city attorney for catching some nuances that would be really helpful. From section 2.84.03.0H, which is a definition we wanna remove that is not related to a public project. From the following definition, subsection I, we want to remove with a total value not exceeding 100,000. And then throughout the ordinance, whenever we are citing to state law, we would like to add, quote, as amended from time to time. If it's not, if it's acceptable to you all to include those three amendments, I would propose those three changes as well. Hi, Shuri. Thanks for your detailed presentation. It's captivating. I guess I had a question. Is it any ordinance? Do we have, you know, one thing that would be nice is to not to pass this and have it automatically update as there's inflation and you may have mentioned this, but is there an automatic function where it goes up as the state law goes up? So we're not having to come back with this, say, five years from now just to do some routine updating because it seems like our old ordinance got caught with something that was appropriate for 1983, but it wasn't updated. It would be nice to have some, I don't know, the equivalent of a cost of living adjustment incorporated into this. So, thank you, Vice Mayor. There is a way to draft that. We did not draft this ordinance that way, but what we did do is make it such that there are not dollar values in the ordinance. Those are done by resolutions separately. So the resolution that lists the amounts is currently there. You have it in your packet. And in the future, if you all want, we can put it on consent so that you can see what changes we're adopting, but you don't have to listen to my riveting presentations on these topics. Yeah, thank you. I mean, I guess that probably makes sense. And yeah, I appreciate your time explaining to me this to me before the meeting and answering my questions then as well. Thank you. Thank you, Sherry. James, do we have any public comment at this time online or in person? Let's see, none mayor. Okay. So I guess we're going to go ahead and John, can you help us with this process? Absolutely. So, if the motion is to, I think that if the motion is to adopt stats recommendation with the amendments, and James, if you could kind of project a summary of what Sherry was proposing those cleanup amendments, it would incorporate those cleanup amendments. It would incorporate those cleanup amendments and also I suspect the council would probably want clarification on the language identified that you're currently, that you currently have before you, does allow for the council to delegate to Melvin the authority to establish a purchasing manual, which could clarify this very point administratively so you don't have to put it in the ordinance. But one suggestion I would have is after the language most senior available member of the city council maybe it would say quote comma the may beginning with the mayor the vice mayor and any council member based on seniority of tenure but that would be kind of the concept and idea you can either put that in the ordinance or if you want to just delegate that to Melvin in the purchasing manual to clarify that it would be that language and again it would be a comma after City Council and state quote beginning with the mayor, the vice mayor and then any council member based on seniority of tenure. Okay, thank you. So I'll make the motion to include that to approve what is proposed including the three changes to the ordinance itself that are presently on the screen. And I'll retract the two weeks. It doesn't sound like, it sounds like there's some objection from a council member to, from council members Lincoln to reduce the number of meetings before we get a report. So I would just my only change is the one that has been articulated now by the city attorney and these three items. Anyone that's willing to second all second. The right to I just want to make a comment. So I think, as I understand the last time that this was revised was 2011. Is that, so I know it's been updated, maybe a couple of time over the years, but maybe it's an administrative node somewhere that every five years take a quick look at it or something that you know not necessarily bring it because I know we updated it maybe a couple of times but it's been 13 years or 14 years almost yeah that's all so it's been properly second by council member Dynar, Vice Mayor Dynan. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Okay. So then moving on to item 12.2, the Budget Ordinance Amendments. And I believe is a tumult that you'll be presenting tonight. Thank you. Yes, thank you, Mayor. Good evening, Mayor and Council members and members of public. Whoops. Again, good evening Mayor. Council members and member of public. My name is Tomo Oku, finance director. Again, good evening mayor, council members and member of the public. My name is Tomo Oku, finance director. This item is a amendment to budget ordinance. Next slide please. Overview. So we found two issues in the current ordinance, and then we want to fix them. So one is the timing of budget submission in chapter 3.08 and second one is the legal level of budgetary control in chapter 3.16. Next slide please. So first timing of budget submission. So the current audience requires stuff to submit budget by March 1st to city manager and April 30th to counsel. So what we are recommending is to eliminate those dates. So the reason for that is, it's very simple. Just it's operationally challenging to submit well-thought and deliberated budget by the required time because of lack of sufficient data and information. And the data and information mainly come from three sources. One is the audited financial statement for the previous year, which is due by December 31st. And the second one is a mid-year budget. We typically present a mid-year budget in February. And in fact, we are presenting it in the next console meeting. And this mid-year budget is also at time constraint, because we want to capture the first half of the year, which is until December 31. And to reconcile or review, at least it takes a month or a month and a half. So February is fixed for this item. And then last source is the Council strategic priorities. You know, earlier we presented, you know, we're going to have opportunity to speak up about the priority in March and April time. So those three are all set. So it's very difficult to meet this deadline for us. Next slide, please. The legal level of budgetary control. So what is legal level of budgetary control? So the level at which spending authority is established by law. In other words, the level that staff need to seek can so approval if the expenditure exceed the budget. So it could be by fund, by department, by object code, or combination of those three. So in other words, city manager can transfer budget within the same type in the level. So for example, if it's by fun, then city manager can shuffle budget between two different departments. Next slide, please. So the legal level of budget control is at the department level in our current ordinance. It's not explicitly talk about the legal level, but there is a section in the ordinance prohibiting transfer budget between different two different departments or more. So as our practice, we apply both fund level control and department level control because of the section of the ordinance. And for us, this is too constrained. So our recommendation is to amend it to fund level. Next slide, please. So there are a lot of reason that we want to budget at the fund level. First one, it improves transparency. So financial statements are presented on a fund basis, like a general fund, water fund, like a major HH fund. So budgeting at the fund level wise more benefit and clear and transparent view of how resources are allocated and spent. The second reason is it improves financial management. This is similar to transparency, but it can better monitor overall financial health and make sure sufficient resources are available to meet obligations. And it can better plan and allocate resources effectively for long-term projects and obligations without being overly constrained by departmental tracking. Because again, we are tracking resources by fun so if you have available resources we can roll over to the next year's budget easily and it ensures compliance. So city receipts funding from the diverse sources with specific legal and regulatory constraints and again you know those And again, those sources are accounted in different funds by the sources. So it mitigates the risk of misuse. And lastly, it enhances operational flexibility. It's similar with what she mentioned. It's a balance between the operation and the control. So staff can prioritize spending based on challenging needs within the funds legal limit. Next slide. With that, I'm happy to take any questions. Tomo, why do you say it mitigates? Go back to it. Would you please go back to the previous slide? The second to the last slide. Is this the one that says, yeah, that enough, you're right. It's that one. This mitigates the risk of misuse. Because what we're doing is we're going from the specific to the more general, that is to say, instead of doing the department, you're saying it's the fund itself. Is that what you're saying? And by doing so, that mitigates the risk of misuse. Tell me why that particular bullet point is there. Okay. Thank you for the question. So let's say measure hh money. There's a restriction for the use of money, affordable housing and 15% you know admin administrative expenditure. If it's a fund level control, we can make sure the money is used for those specific purposes. So we can easily mitigate the use of misuse of the money. But if it's accounted by the department level, for example, housing received different kinds of housing funds, some are grants which has a different legal requirements. So I think it's, you know, it fits by department or division and it can commingo the, you know, different sources of money. Yeah, okay, it would still seem to me that you could track the provenance of the money. If it were by department, but I'm not going to Then a object to your to this proposal. It's just I'm trying to understand the this fund versus department distinction and how you know one The the fun piece. I'm sorry the department piece actually leads to you know possibly losing that provenance of the money so but yeah I'm fine. Okay do we have any more comments from the dice? Yeah thanks Tom. One would when would we expect the budget to be published? Is there any fixed date if it's, you know, they said you were moving the constraints of the day, it's which makes sense to me. Is there any time we can expect the budget or is it just gonna be kind of at the whim of staff or is it gonna be by like June 1st or July? Or when can we expect the budget to be published? Thank you for the question. So in a different part of the budget audience, it requires a city to adopt the budget by June 30 every year. So that's a hard deadline. But we, we provide the budget study session schedule along with the City Council meeting schedule, sometime in December, right James? Yeah, so in the schedule, we have the specific dates for the budget study sessions. For this year, we have two sessions in May and one additional place for the session in June and on the regular council meeting second week of the June council meeting we are prone to adopt the budget. Thank you that's my only question. It's so the dates are March 28th. How it on does not to council. Yes. No. So May 13 at 6 p.m. is the first budget meeting. May 20th. Sorry, May 27 is another budget meeting. And then might need additional budget meetings, but the adoption will be by June 30th. I think we have the schedule will be adopted on June 24th. So this is what this is doing for the new council members. This is compressing the amount of time that the council will eventually, essentially wind up compressing the amount of time that the council has to review, you know, and potentially take reports from the various departments. I'm not opposed to the time piece. I do know we have a statutory June approval, right? So it will obviously not reflect well on staff if we wind up in a situation where we're doing everything in June, right? I mean, we're telling you right now, if that happens, then this is not a good idea and we're all going to be out of the woods yet. So to be clear, we've got the mid-year budget coming February 18th. And then from there, we will have a budget meeting on May 13th, an additional budget meeting on May 27th. And adoption meetings will be in June. And and there's, but we there's, so there's 13th of May, 20th of May and 27th. And yeah. Okay, thank you. So I'm looking over again for John Skiden, so we would just go ahead and vote on the adopt of the adoption resolution. By motion, wave the first reading and introduce you ordinance has proposed by staff. OK. So before we do this, any public comment has come your way, James? Yeah. OK. Sorry, no mayor. So thank you for that. So with that, who would like to make the motion to adopt the resolution? Make sure I'm reading the right one. Should I move the resolution in the waving of the first reading? Okay. Anyone like to second? I will second. Okay. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Aye. Thank you. Now moving on to item 12.3 that coming's loft project prefer, prefer to lay out. I don't know if we're going to have someone presenting online perhaps. Good evening. Yes, I'll be introducing the item. Good evening chair and members of the council. My name is Batouille. I'm a senior engineer with the city's engineering department. And tonight we're going to be discussing the Cummings loft capital improvement project. We'll be providing an update and requesting some feedback from the council. Several years ago, the city acquired an approximately 1000 square foot space from a development and the space will be used as an incubator space and last spring the city brought on MBH architects to design the space and tonight we have Marlene Hurtado from MBH architects to present this item so with that I'll pass it to Marlene to share a screen. All right, thank you everybody. Thank you for having us today. I'll start sharing my screen. All right, so my name is Marlene Rathavo and I am the Cedar Drop Captain for this project with MVH Architects. MVH Architects were headquartered in the Bay Area My name is Marlene Roussevo and I am the senior job captain for this project with MBA track attacks. MBA track attacks were headquartered in the Bay Area in our studio focuses on work spaces of all scales. And we pride ourselves on making efficient flexible and functional offices that foster creative thinking with this 10 and an improvement project at Cummings loft. We want to we will be converting an empty space into a community incubator. Our goal for today is to narrow down the three options we will present to you for space planning so that we can further develop the selected option and start our permitting documents. A little more background on the this project is the city of East Palo Alto applied for a grant to construct the incubator office space for the community. $555,000 of congressional earmarked funds were awarded to cover design and construction costs. And with this grant, we will construct an incubator office space for local small businesses and nonprofit organizations. So the incubator will be located at the second floor of a community acquired commercial space known as Cummings Loft on East Bay Shore Road. The incubator will be accessible from a secured ground floor entry down here under the 1765 address. Here we see the existing space roughly 1,000 square feet. It's currently in cold shell condition with existing utilities that serve the living spaces above, as you can see, kind of the pipes and the conduit and the ceilings here. And as part of our work, we will be adding infrastructure that routes down to the ground floor ceiling of the parking garage below, which on a sidewalk we notice that that's what other tenant spaces are doing. This cold shell space apports us a flexibility to locate walls, infrastructure, and finishes as needed to best serve the incubator and its future tenants. Next we will review three space planning diagrams and are asking for Council input to narrow down the three plan options so that we can further develop one of them. Here's an overview of the options. Orange is for open office space, blue is for private office, green for meeting rooms, and purple indicating communal spaces. Option one at the top shows a more traditional office layout with clear separation between office and common areas. And this option uses larger desks from the other two options. So you'll notice that it is a smaller desk count overall for that reason. It does however provide a prominent meeting room, which can be more desirable for presentations to future clients or investors for these startups and new businesses. Option 2 provides more balance between office and communal spaces. By using smaller desks, we can provide more space for tenants, coupled with the communal work and break table that affords more flexibility for the users in the space. An option 3 is the most vibrant breakdown of office and communal space. It provides the most number of desk and maintenance a large conference room for video or in-person meetings. So now we'll take a closer look at each option. Option 1 includes an open office area with 9 desks, 1 medium and 1 small meeting room, 1 private office for up to 3 desks. A lunch counter that's adjacent to a kitchenette, soft seating and lockers for securing personal items. One would enter the incubator into a common space, the kitchenette, and all of the options we're showing today is meant to be a coffee bar with refrigerator and microwave, not for cooking. In this configuration, the open office area is protected by rooms on either side for privacy. So office on one side, conference room on the other. And this kind of protects the open office area from the entry door. We also want to point out that in all of these plan options, small meeting rooms and private offices are about the same size so the green and blue that you see on the left hand side. And so these rooms are interchangeable. For instance, if we want to provide just one conference room and two private offices for this plan option, we can do that. So these are still flexible. The images around show a representation of what the space might feel like with different materiality, glass walls at meeting rooms and private offices help the space feel larger. White painted ceilings and ceiling elements will brighten up the space, open shelving at kitchenettes will also help the space feel more open. From our experience with similar incubator spaces, providing various seating options has been useful in creating functional and more dynamic work environments. Closer look at option two. This one features a smaller kitchenette and more communal seating with a large table that can be used for work or break. We found that large communal tables like this are very popular in similar incubator office spaces. In this option, we're able to increase the open office desk count to 12 by using smaller tables. This configuration also shows team grouping instead of long rows of desks. So we'll be specifying open office desks that are easy to reconfigure as needed by the tenants for more flexibility inside the space. And lastly option three, centralizes the open office area with common space more evenly distributed throughout in order to provide a comfortable and interactive working space for entrepreneurs to the right of the entry as a kitchenette with the communal table. A small lounge to the north of the open office area and a communal round table with low stools for more in-problem to casual team meetings, more like a touch point, adding table mounted dividers, dividing panels to the desks, will help reduce noise and provide more privacy for the users. The communal table next to the kitchenette can also serve as a casual team meeting table. And this option also includes a larger conference room. So with these three space planning diagrams, we would like the council's input on an option so that we can further develop and move on to the next steps. Thank you for your presentation. I would like to see if we have any questions comments from the council at this point. Yeah, thank you for the presentation. I don't know if I have really strong feelings on this. But I would say that more meeting space in meeting rooms, that's a lot of smaller companies are work from home, and they're doing onsite for meetings. And the more meeting rooms you can get into a place, the better, and that could also, I would include offices. They're functionally the same thing. I don't know if there's any real big difference, except I think option one and two are fairly similar in terms of meeting space, private meeting space. I do like the larger meeting room in option one. But again, I mean, these all seem like nice options compared to what's there right now. So, you know, there's people who do this for a living and I'm sure there's other folks who have a lot more insight than I do. Thank you. Anyone else would like to comment council member Lincoln. Yeah, I'm kind of in favor of either option wanted to, I think at least having the private meeting rooms are beneficial as well as having an open office just to get out of your house. The communal space, it's nice, but I think what most people want is probably a desk or a meeting room they can use for group meetings or Zoom conference or something like that. So I'm in favor of the option one or two. Thank you. Okay, great. I don't have council member. No, do you have a comment? Yes, I actually also want it to give my comment. I agree with either option one or two. And I think that the reason why we would like to continue with this idea is that, you know, as the other previous council members mentioned, people in our community have been requesting to see something like this for them. They might not have that space in their household. So I think this provides also the privacy that they need when they're having those important meetings with potential clients. So I'm more inclined to option one or two as well. Thank you. Okay, perfect, thank you. We will go back and further develop one of these options. Just a quick question. Sorry. I want to if you allow me. I may, I think I'm going to take issue on the two options, or actually the option two that actually has a, I guess it's a communal space that has what is at 16 potential chairs, seats around the table. I just, I think that for the type of incubator space that we're talking about, we're not talking about large meetings that are going to be conducted in this place. And so actually option three, which allows for more deaths, but still has those private rooms. There's one that fits six, the other eight within that, that you know, space. It may just make more sense, because I just don't see meetings of you know 16 people occurring in these spaces but the other thing that I wanted to comment on and it really does concern me and when we talked about this the potential design we talked about actually having the entrance not be the primary entrance for the building, right? So it's that because I think that's the entrance they're going to be using. But we talked about potentially using the side yard entrance, which would be if you're facing the building from the parking lot, it would be on the left-hand side. There is a gate there, and if you walk through that gate, you could then access the stairs that were on the outside that would take you directly up to the mezzanine. And it would seem to me that that would be the most appropriate way to enter this so that you didn't have this, you know, disruption. So, there's a more direct access by the users of this space, including, let's say, if you have an incubator space and you have a client that may actually come and want to talk to you because I don't know what business you're running out of there. So yeah, I'm surprised that the proposal is to use the central access of Cummings Loft and not utilize that outside gate that literally leads you to the stairwell on the side of the building that leads you directly up to this unit. I can add a little bit to that. I will say the current building access that we have is only through that the main entrance that Marlene showed, but I can check in with the building manager to see how we could access that side space. I know what you're talking about because the first time that I went into this space, we kind of walked around and we saw that, but we didn't have the keys or the ability to get in through that way. So we could definitely look into that of maybe report back on that. Look, I think it did make sense. It may add some cost because you have to have the system that opens up the door and what have you. But I think to make this a more independent space, I think that would be helpful. I will add though that regardless of if you go through that entrance that we showed or the side entrance, you do kind of have to walk through a few hallways and I could always arrange a site walk, but it's kind of deep into the building. So we were planning on, you know, putting some sort of wayfinding signs to get to this space, but regardless of the access point, we have to walk through a few always. But, but tool that would not be the case if you use the side entrance. It's on the second floor. I don't know. I could probably look for some photos, but there's one side. I don't know if Mar probably look for some photos but there's one side I don't know if Marlene you want to pull up the layout. Yeah so even if you have people all the side. All right well you can look into it. Yes the top portion of the layout if you can go to the next slide or the one we want the options. So where the window is, that's kind of overlooking the parking lot. So there's only one door into the space and that's using the hallway. I know it's hard to visualize so we don't have those pictures. I mean, so I'm just in terms of fire access and the way the way architects design, if you look at the, if you look at, let's use the last option three, right, you look at option three, if you walk down the hall to your left, there's a door, right, that leads outside. That I believe that there is a stairwell that leads from downstairs up to here. And I, now that door cannot be accessed at this point because of, you know, issues of security, but that leads outside. That door on the left of the land. I do know that a few years ago, after speaking with Jay, the maintenance manager, he did let me know that there were some changes to the actual space. I think it was a little over a thousand square feet a few years ago And there were some walls that were put up So I think that might be what you're referring to there might there might be some changes to the space and Where that that side door leads to but I'll for sure look into this and I'll check in with the building manager and I know in our RFP scope. We had included, included budget for, you know, egress. Yeah. Yeah. So that was included in the scope. So it's definitely something that we'll look into. Okay. Thanks. And again, that, that I think is the most important issue for me. I mean, again, I like the reason I like option three is because it, because there's less space dedicated to a large conference table, which I doubt is going to be used. But if my colleagues want to go with option two, you know, I'm not going to like going to fight this one. Thank you, but to I think we have council member Lincoln that wanted to see something. Yeah, I just had a question about ADA compliance. I saw there's a stairway and I know that we have some seniors that might have bad knees. But how could they access this space? There is an elevator in the building that leads to the second floor. Okay, thank you. That answers my question. Tool sorry. I just wanted to say I personally would be interested in maybe getting a tour of the place I can better have an understanding of the layout and you know what would be the best way to enter. Mm-hmm. I can put your schedule down. It really helps to visualize. Visually be. Yeah, be there. Thank you. Yeah, I was I was thinking the same thing a field trip. And then, yeah, a field trip because I kind of like two and three one because three has many more little stations or tables. I feel I feel like the more people that can make use of the space, the better. But other than that, I think having a little tour would help to find out nice things. And what we could also do is take certain elements from one and add it to the other. It's not kind of like you just have to select one of these. So we'll kind of take in your feedback and maybe try to find something maybe between some of these options as well. Exactly. We'll take these. Everything into consideration. Look more into the access to the site and will develop a design further. We also will be doing an informational public meeting to present the programming of the space. And then our next step is to finalize CDs for permitting and forbid. And just the quick project timeline, the quick timeline. So for spring of this year, we'll finalize design permitting and bidding. We hope to start construction in the summer and then project closeout before the end of the year. Just add one comment. I think with the exception of the meeting rooms pretty much everything else could be moved around and configured if they're based on the usage and what's needed, you can add more dust, take away desks, do you think? So I think the meeting rooms are really the only constraint I mean, you can do anything with the seating, you can figure it as things go on. If there's a company that needs more seating for an event, they can always get more or you know things go on if there's a company that needs more seating for an event they can always get more or you know if they move out then you may have less seating but these are usually not the seating and the layout isn't necessarily the permanent part it's only the the meeting rooms. Yes correct. I'm sorry I'm not sure if we're at the stage yet, but how are we going to manage access to the space? To clarify, do you mean like use of the space? Yes. So could anybody just walk in and just sit down or is it going to be prioritized for our residents or do that to pay a monthly fee? Or is it a fee to book the conference rooms and how would that be managed in the software and all that. Yeah, those are all great considerations that we will be coming to the council in the future to figure out how to program this space and how it will operate, who is eligible to use it. And those are all things that the city council will have to provide guidance on. Thank you. I'm assuming that would also include the maintenance and keeping up the area. So it would be a city facility so we'd likely control maintaining the space and as well as janitorial. However, whether or not the city wanted us to charge a fee for people to use that space or something like that that would potentially help pay for those things is something that the council could provide direction on. Okay, perfect. Thank you. So yes, before we go on to public comment, I just wanted to say thank you, Patul and Berlin for your presentation or Madeline. Sorry for your presentation. This is exciting and I'm not going to say anything more because I know that there's a few public comments and they're easier to say something. So James, can we please go to public comment? Thank you. Absolutely. First speaker, court scanner, followed by Gil Wilkerson. Two years ago I had a small company called Computers for Everyone. Carlos invited me over to check this place out as a possible place where we could move. One of the issues that came up was the lack of a bathroom in a convenient place. I'm not sure how we would do that, but having to go downstairs to the bathroom is a bit of an inconvenience. Now, the other thing that occurs to me is that depending on what, you know, it is, you call it an incubator, which if you're successful, then the people will come do whatever they do, fail and go on news upmails or succeed and go on do something else. So they're more than likely not going to be anybody there that is sort of there indefinitely. They're going to be there for a while and then they're going to move on up or out. But keeping in mind of something like computers for everyone, what you needed was a work bench and a place to store tools and various and Sunday pieces. And then that, and you compare that to four guys doing apps for something, where they just need a computer and a desk. I'm not sure there's also entertaining customers if you're actually going to sell something as an incubator. Then you want to have some some convenient way of isolating one from the other and making that work, which means which gets back to the March comment of, how do we set it up so that we can kind of reconfigure it as necessary, depending on what the custom, what the person using it wants to actually do with it. Thank you. Thank it. I'm not sure if you can see it. I'm not sure if you can see it. Queen of leasing here. Okay. Did she say how many square feet that is? I heard thousand. I. That is about a thousand. You know what a thousand is? You hope somebody take the bath and brush the teeth. That's not enough room. I hate to be. So laugh and go, have you been into we works? I've been in, I've looked into office sharing all from San Francisco all the way down to Sunnyvale. I hate it. It's only good for youngsters. They don't know no better. You have to concentrate. You have to be wary of your clients coming in. You have... I'll cut you on. And all that kind of stuff. I've been up in here. It's a nice pleasant. You go upstairs and you've got an elevator and everything. But will you be able to work there right down here on a what Embarkadera Road they turn theirs into incubators and just what it be starting camps. I don't know who would you get the gold there? I mean, it's not big enough for anybody to want to come there and work. The conference rooms, the meeting room, you gonna have to reserve it. And he brought the bathrooms and all the other thing about all that stuff. I don't think it's enough space. Did you guys buy that? Really? $555,000? Wow. And you could always beat your clients downstairs at Wingstop or the pizza place. Why didn't you get old office depot? That's bigger. But I don't know know that's not enough space for incubators say why don't you call it starting in can okay sorry Thank you and we have one more speaker on zoom Adrian Bryan Yes, good evening, Council members. I as a long term business license holder in a community going on 20 years and also someone that's championed small business and also stayed engaged with this coming lot space. I really like option number two. First of all, there wasn't really much specifics on how and by whom the space will be used, but I think that number two provides the best flexibility for those wanting to get out of their home office to those wanting to collaborate or have a space to meet with clients or stakeholders. I like the open office configuration of number two. People are not sitting next to each other, but arranged in a tripod, I guess you could call it. That's conducive to both privacy and collaboration. There is also 12 desks, oh they're very small, but like I just stated, people are not arranged on top of each other. I also like that it has the two leading rooms and the most communal space, 12 seats. I also think it is the best layout in terms of where the communal space is located, away from the open office space in the meeting rooms. But I'd wondered if a wall could be placed behind the last desk in the open office area next to that door, like between the two. That would really set off the open office in the meeting rooms. I'm sorry, the communal space. So that's about it. I'm in favor number two, but okay with number one, not in favor number three. I don't think it provides enough privacy and it's just to open office. That's off. Thank you. Thank you, those are last speaker. Thank you, James. I believe at this time we're just receiving the presentation. Are we doing any motions in particular to? No, I think as long as staff has sufficient direction on how to proceed to come back to council we should be good. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Patul and Madelineia again for your hard work. Greatly appreciate it. So with that, we're moving to item 13, which is Council Reports, item 13.1. Council Member Ruben and Prikis, response to allegations regarding December 17 meeting. So I don't know how we're going to proceed. I did submit my letter and so I just felt I needed to respond to comments that were made in the press and letters regarding what transpired on December 17th, at least just from my perspective, I don't think the council did anything illegal. Didn't do anything unprecedented. And that's it. That's really all I wanted to clarify. And I don't really have anything else to say. I don't know if we should get comments at this point or if we should move on to Council member Lincoln's response to the letter. I see no public comment, Mayor. Sorry, public comment. No, no worries. Sorry. I don't have any further comment. I think I made my statement in the letter. Okay. Thank you. So I don't know if I would like to respond. Okay. Good evening. When I was sworn in on December 17th, I sworn oath to uphold the Constitution of the state of California and the United States of America. It's ironic that at the very meeting that I was sworn in, the City of East Palo Alto violated election law and had legally held a meeting with expired council members to approve the Ravenswood Business District specific plan. The RBD specific plan is the governing planning document for several million square feet of development in East Palo Alto. Development that will be worth billions of dollars once completed. The city held an entire meeting on December 17 prior to the new council members being sworn in. East Palo Alto is a general law city. Our election procedures must comply with state law. Other general law cities around the Bay all completed their reorganizations well before EPA and complied with state law. Charter cities by Palo Alto, Redwood City, San Francisco and Sunnyville were under no such obligation and followed their own city's rules. So what does a California collection law says? I'm going to read the statutes and James I'll have to be put this to be put in the minutes. The vote shall be counted. The results of the vote shall be posted. The supplies and records of the election shall be returned to city election officials. And shall be disposed of by him or her in accordance with the provisions of this code governing elections so far as they may be applicable. I'm going to skip, there's a lot in the election code, but the highlights include, except as a provision subdivision B, the canvas shall be completed by the election officials, no later than the fourth Friday after the election. Upon completion of the canvas, the election officials shall certify the results of the governing body, which shall, no later than the fourth Friday after the election, comply with the applicable provisions of Section 10263. For a consolidated election, the city officials upon receipt of the results of the election from the elections official, conducting the election, shall certify the results of the governing body, which shall no later than the next regularly scheduled city council meeting following the presentation of the 28 day canvas canvas or at a special meeting called for this person, comply with the applicable provisions of Section 10263. 10263. Upon the completion of the canvas and before the installation of new officers, the governing bar shall adopt a resolution reciting the facts of the election and the other matters that are enumerated in section 10264. The governing body shall declare elected the persons for whom the highest number of votes were cast for each office. A, except for provided in subdivision B, the governing body shall meet at its usual place of meeting no later than the fourth Friday at the election to declare the results and install newly elected officers. For consolidated election, the governing body shall meet at its usual place of meeting the later than the next regularly scheduled city council meeting, following the presentation of the 28 day canvas of the returns, or at a special meeting called for this purpose to declare the results and install newly elected officers. As soon as the result of the election is declared, the election official of the governing body shall enter on its record to statement the result. The statement shall show the whole number of votes cast in the city, the names of the persons voted for, the measures voted for, for what each office each person was voted for, the number of votes given at each person, each person, and for four and against each measure, the number of votes given in the city to each person and for and each against each measure. 10265, the election officer shall immediately sign and deliver each person elected a certificate of election. He or she shall also administer to each person elected the oath of office prescribed in the California Constitution. I want to emphasize immediately, my election was certified by our election officer on December 5th, 2024. Myself, Webster Lincoln and Carlos Merrill should have been sworn in immediately upon the commencement of any City Council meeting after the state. East Powell to City staff and council clearly disregarded the laws and the Constitution of the state of California by extending the term of office for three City Council members. These members were sworn in on December 8th, 2020, and their term of office for three city council members. These members were sworn in on December 8, 2020 and their term of office was not valid for four years and nine days later when they voted on the RBD specific plan. These members had no authority to vote on anything and no longer had legal standing as members of the council when they voted. Inspired all to voters deserve a city that respects the rule of law and the statutes which govern our city. Our communities should know that they have a council and city staff which follow election laws and all laws including conflict of interest rules by the FBPC even when it's inconvenient to staff and city council's agenda. I believe that all votes taken on December 17th prior to the new council being sworn in are illegitimate. The RBD plan is not a minor issue. An EPA resident should know that development decisions are made in broad daylight with transparency and honesty. With that in mind, I ask the city manager agenda is the discussion of the repeal of the Ravenswood Business District specific plan as soon as possible. Thank you. The chair if I may. So, you know, over the years, I have seen several instances where the outgoing council, you know, two or three people, where there were meetings that combined business of the city and the reorganization. And each time I remember asking if it was legal or not, and the response was always that it was legal. So, you know, given that, you know, Vice Mayor Dynan is citing a lot of legal codes that in fact it was an illegal meeting. I think before putting anything on the agenda, the city attorney and the attorney general of the state of California and Mr. Church who runs the elections in the county should let us know if in fact it was or was not an illegal meeting. Because I don't think it's fair to one, Mr Lopez and the Vice Mayor Ms. Varagon, and a legal meeting by having the agenda before the outgoing Mr Lopez and Ms Lisa Gochelle and the rest of us. I don't think that's what happened. But as long as that idea is out there, that's where I do feel that it does slander the entire council and individuals and also the staff. As though the staff didn't know what they were doing. So first of all, I think it's important to clarify and to have an opinion by the city attorney. And I think he gave that, so the city attorney and the attorney general and Mr. Church. I think are the officials that can clarify this for us before anything gets put back on the agenda. Because there were several things included in that agenda. But I question really is the allegation that it was an illegal meeting. I don't think it was an illegal meeting. And so I think for the sake of clearing things up, we need that opinion to be stated openly and clearly. I'm not an attorney. I've read those things. You know, I think the reporter, the quoted Mr. Dynand also included the fact that there's also another part of the code that states that until people are qualified meeting when they're sworn in, then they take authorities or they take their full power. So anyway, I just want to respond to that and I'm not in support of bringing anything any item on the agenda until that gets cleared up. Thank you. This is extremely clear. Excuse me, Madam Chair. I would like to be recognized. Thank you. So I concur with my fellow council member, Kruebrenabrikaya and I also reach out to Mr. Lincoln to say as he said in his letter, he posted his objections. let's just let's leave me gog's lie let's move forward the the vice mayor today wants to play jailhouse lawyer you are not an attorney and say that this was an illegal act I agree I think the city attorney should opine and that what you were doing today is casting dispersions, not just casting dispersions, but actually casting, I think, claims of incompetence on both our city manager and our city attorney by making these allegations. So you admit that you are. So I don't think that this is collegial, but again, as council member Abedica says, I think we should just move forward Not agendize this as you would do you in laterally, but rather have you know definitive legal memo on this issue I Wholeheartedly agree that the state of California and the attorney general should weigh in on this. This is a huge deal. It is a billion dollar specific plan, or a specific specific plan for billions of dollars in development. The law is extremely clear here. There's no way you can read the law and in any way interpret that you have the right to have a meeting on December 17th. You did not have a right to have a meeting on December 17th. There's a reason why multiple city mayors were shocked, outraged, and offended by the procedures of December 17th. There's a reason why all the other cities were doing, they're swearing in, previous to East Powell, also and EPA was very late for general law cities. I wholeheartedly agreed, let's take this up the chain. Let's have a state judge opine on it. Let's have the attorney general opine on it. I think East Powell Auto, something like this is a very important issue. This is a development plan that will affect us for decades. It was put on the consent calendar and passed without discussion. There's a lot of other things we can say about having a full meeting when you're doing a reorganization, which if there was business in prior meetings, it was probably illegal, but also it was done in five minutes and done with. I wanna be very clear that we should be following the law. We should be not inventing an ordinance that says that if we need to get something done, if we missed a meeting in October and we really need to get this thing done, that we can, you know, literally extend the terms of certain council members and take away time from my term of office from Webster's term office from Carlos from Arrows terms office. I don't know what to say. I think that if people on East Palo Alto were very aware of this, as this being a huge development plan, they'd be shocked and outraged, that something like this was done. And again, yeah, let's take it up the chain. Because my reading of the law, and this was on the state of California, there's no wiggle room there. We had to be sworn in before any action was taken. Manager, if I funny for the record. We spent four entire years developing this big plan. We had countless numbers of meetings. We had countless points of intervention by the public as a matter of fact, Mr. Vice Mayor. You have already prejudiced yourself on this issue by specifically saying in public in written fashion that you want a particular developer removed from the RBD. I wonder if by any chance, and I'm not implying this, but I wonder if by any chance maybe the motivations there not to imply might be that indeed you may want to do some bidding for someone else. Yet you're specifically on record, right? You had the opportunity as well as everybody in the community over the last four years to fashion that plan. a plan and it was after many, many, many hundreds of hours of deliberation and community input that the plan was approved. It was on consent precisely because we had done the type of public meeting outreach that we needed to do. So you again, misrepresent the truth here in employ to put forward this fiction that indeed this was illegal. I support the city attorney providing us a memo on the legality of this. I do not support or bringing in the attorney general. And that is why we have a city attorney. This is why we rely on him and if necessary, we have co-council or we have outside counsel that can help. So again, I don't think this is necessary to go beyond that. And once again, you are inditing our staff is basically being incompetent again I'm not no offense to you but I'm not going to rely on a jailhouse lawyers opinion which is what you're providing us. This is the state of California the oath I swore when I was sworn in on December 17th was to uphold the laws of the state of California the Constitution of California the Constitution of the United States and the laws of the United States the Constitution and the laws of California are really clear on this and I did bring this up with the city manager. I did bring this up with the city attorney We spoke about this beforehand before the meeting. I let them both know I was very concerned about this that you can't have state of California defines terms as four years. You can't have a meeting with four years and nine days. The law here, which I will include in the minutes, is very clear. Anyone can find it on a website? It's pretty much black and white. And if there is a concern about this, then yeah, let's have outside people look on it. But I absolutely was not planning on bringing this up, but thank you Ruben and Brika for bringing this up. And we have a lot of work to do as a city. Personally, I don't think the specific plan, I don't think anything is going to be built just based on economic conditions in the next five years. If this was not a high priority for me, but with council member Abrika bringing this up and writing a letter on this, let's look at it. Let's look at that meeting and let's get clear legal resolution on this. If I'm wrong, I will freely admit it, but I encourage everybody to read the law. Read what's written in the state of California's law. It's out there. I will provide a link. You can look at it and you can try to interpret it and say, yeah, there's a way for us to do this on December 17th. No, there isn't. There's no way for you to have a full meeting before swearing in new members. I think I've said everything I want. No, I don't have any prejudice on the RBD plan other than we should follow the law. Thank you. You are in the record stating that you want to take other things to have. Let's make that very clear. Yes, but I was a decision. Okay. Thank you. I wanted to say something. I don't know if we need to go to public comment after this as well or not. But I just wanted to say that I think given the whole situation and the fact that we're now in the present we should focus and stay in the present and I think just to clarify the air maybe we should have some kind of follow-up city attorney and, I think that we need to be here in the spirit of collaboration and just from now on, move on in that spirit and, you know, focus on what, what's next, right? And what's coming up. So I think that that would be a good idea. Um, Mr. City Attorney, sure. If I may, um, so I was not provided the materials beforehand. I know that it's already been mentioned that, you know, our office has a pine on this. I'm happy to share those materials. And what I'm hearing from you, Mayor, is probably sort of, it's not clear me if you want us to come back. I don't relish the idea of, you know, sharing a legal opinion in an open public meeting, but I'm happy to share that with the vice mayor in addition to keeping an open mind and reviewing any legal authorities that he has provided. But, you know, our office has not, office has not reviewed anything or heard anything that sort of changes our opinion, but we keep an open line. So I'm happy to review what it is the ice mayor is pointing to and happy to circle back. Okay, thank you very much. Can I comment? So, even looking back to 2022, there was a special, I'm looking at the agenda right now. There was a special meeting, completely separate from any council business that we had on that agenda. This is in December. Uh, it's a special meeting on December 13th, um, 2022. Um, on that special agenda, there was a consent calendar item. And it was just a proclamation, you know, for the soccer team and, um, for somebody else. But on the policy and action, there was only certifying the election results, honoring outgoing councilman to remember Regina Wallace-Dones, administering the out-of-office selection of Mayor, Vice Mayor, and then outgoing Mayor Rubin and Brica. That was it. That was really the whole agenda. There was maybe a few consent calendars with proclamations. And that was it. It was a special meeting. So I felt that everything that was done on that evening, you know, the closed sessions and everything else probably could have been, I mean, I think it's done, been done a meeting beforehand, you know, but I think it's just as a practice, we should try and limit, especially when it comes to honoring and doing the out of office and having people's families here. I mean, some people's families are here for multiple hours, you know, and that's disrespectful. But I think that we should take note of this moving forward. And whenever we have a new council coming in, we stick, we have a special meeting specifically for swearing in and selecting mayor and vice mayor. And that's it. All the other agenda items can wait for a future meeting or you guys need to plan in advance. You know, it's just not fair to the new councils to go through this. And then now we're getting into legal issues and all this other stuff but that's the only common I have and I have some other council reports that I want to talk about so I'm kind of done with this. Okay. Thank you for your suggestion council Lincoln and I appreciate your comment because maybe that could be something that we could discuss for the future just to provide consistency and so that we can have a better handle as how this is done in the near future when we have future elections. go back and look at the agenda. That's the last 15 years, let's say, I think what your, what customer member Lincoln is saying is true. We have always tried to separate the business part from the just reorganization. That is the practice. But there have been a few times for whatever reason that things accumulated and then they ended up being joined. So there's like a business part in the reorganization. So I think it is good practice to separate them. But the times that that has happened, I feel, yeah, that one was proclamations. But if you go back in time, there's gonna be other times when there were some business that took some time in discussion and you know yeah it did I don't think it was illegal no you know it was not illegal I don't think it's illegal but it's not the preferred way I agree and thank you with that council Lincoln would you like to share any other council reports? Yeah so I'm under this we got on a promise walk at Cesar Chavez School. I was able to observe the teachers, the math, the science and the teachers really engaging with the students but also Monday was what they call a day without immigrants. And so I went into one classroom that, you know, typically has about 18 students engaged in that class, but I noticed that only three of them were there that day. You know, and I just wanted to, I wanted to bring that up because, you know, we are in times where people are anxious. People are, there's a lot of uncertainty. And I just want to make sure that we keep that in our heads. There's a lot of people that probably need support in these times and not to be so much focused on yourself, but to think about others. You know and yeah I just thought I'd just you know highlight that that you know it's unfortunate because these kids are six graders you know they've started their educational journey in the middle of a pandemic and now they're dealing with ice enforcement and so I'm not sure what we can do as a city, but I think we should support our residents and make sure that our at least our children are safe. You know, while they're at school, I think that should be a place that's off limits, but you know, you know, with our current administration, you never know how far they're going to go. You know, so that's all I just have to say about our, in terms of council reports. Thank you, council Lincoln and also thank you for bringing that to, to us. We are living some very trying moments. And so like you said, you know, I know that we're really good as a community. We have a lot of nonprofits that are always trying to put those safeguards for our most vulnerable residents. So thank you again for reminding us that we need to have that empathy and sympathy for our neighbor, because literally it could be our neighbor. So thank you very much. So with that, I'm going to, I don't, yes. Sure. So with that, I'm going to, I don't, yes, sure. The report, yeah, I was, no. So actually, on that point, I did get a chance to go to a family night at Tessar Chavez also, and they had quite a few people, but I know that some people were staying away. But I do want to make an announcement, because I think several organizations have been doing, you know, no you rights training and I know the schools also are trying to do that. But I want to make a specific announcement that on February 26th, it's doing the lunch hour between 12 and 130 at the community room of the YMCA in the back to the city room. We are organizing a meeting specifically directed at nonprofits, community organizations, businesses, churches, schools, and the director from community legal services has agreed to make a presentation on the latest information in terms of, you know, government offices for that matter. If the Migra were to show up, what to do and how to train your employees, et cetera. So I just want to make that announcement. They'll be a little flyer coming out, but if we could pass the word for that. So she was kind enough to agree to do that. And the lawyer writes his one approach, but this other one have people who are managing others or have even businesses to be well informed. Yeah, so yeah, thank you. Yes, thank you. And actually, I also wanted to highlight that this past weekend, I briefly met up with Mora from the YCS, and I was able also to meet with Ms. Grant briefly to deliver some of the red cards. So they are available at the Senior Center, which is why I'd make that announcement. And Ms. Mora with the YCS is also just keeping track of where she is hand delivering those red cards. So please be on the lookout community. We are trying to do the best to inform you so that you know what your rights are. So I don't know if we have any more comments. Yeah, I'll just mention it since you mentioned the red cards. Most of the legal resource organizations are out of them. They've been at about 7 million over the life of this card. So, Doreben and I and some other folks are going to try to put in about 20,000 of these. It's going to cost about $400 to get them done. And so, we're looking for donations. This is a matter of fact, if we can get more, we may do 30,000, but certainly they go very quickly. And so we planned to actually try to get them printed over the weekend if we can, because we thank you and more, thanks you actually for dropping off the ones that you did, because they were quite valuable. So yeah, thanks. Thank you, yes. So any little bit that we put into helping our neighbors, it's well-seeing, so thank you. So I think we've that. Sorry, we did have one more speaker from the skill workers. Sure. It's okay. We'll hear from our number one citizen. Missouri loves company, okay? You say you don't squabble. Under the bait, You say you don't squabble. And to debate, you said you don't squabble. That's how come we get stuff through all five of us together. You were squabbling. Okay. Now let me tell you the perception of that night was bad. I got a lot of calls and they were wondering why you guys were trying to squish out the new people and that's a perception. I ran because I am sick of going to Redwood City, Fallon Papers and they treat me like dirt. Oh, you're from East Palo Alto? Well, well, Wes. That's what it looked like that night. People, families came from Sacramento dragon in here. Not just Webster's family. There were other people here and they wanted to see them sworn in and they thought you guys are rushing the hide something. That's what it looked like. It's like a, that old saying, crooks, cronies, clicks and clowns. And then they reflect back to Lopez when you guys had wanted to meet with them or something like that. What Walford was involved. The one who was signing everybody's name and accused me of threatening him, I had to go hire a damn attorney. It's a politics mix for strange bedfellows. They said if you go to Washington DC, you want a friend, get a dog. So I said all it to say is, I'm not gonna say it that way. They say, your stuff don't stay, okay? You let somebody else bring to me in a meeting code of ethics. I don't kiss nobody's ring or their rarions, all right? Everybody has problems. And that day of that swearing in it shouldn't happen that long you guys were trying to get away with something sneaky thank you thank you miss Wilkerson well we're gonna adjourn this meeting at 1024 thank you everyone for your participation and for hanging on this long with us thank you till next time.