I'm going to start the meeting. Please make your way to your seats. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to put it on the top right corner. I'm going to put it on the top right corner. I'm going to put it on the top right corner. I'm going to put it on the top right corner. I'm going to put it on the top right corner. I'm going to put it on the top right corner. I'm going to put it on the top right corner. I'm going to put it on the top right corner. I'm going to put it on the top right corner. Councillor Member Kaplan. Councillor Member Dickinson. Vice Mayor Talamontas. Councillor Member Pluckybomb. Councillor Member Maple. Mayor Pro Tem Guerra. Councillor Member Jennings. Councillor Member Vang. Mayor McCarty. Here. You have a quorum. Thank you. Councillor Member Tallah Montes, can you please leave some land acknowledgements? Please rise for the the acknowledgements on our Sacramento's indigenous people and tribal lands. To the original people of this land, the Nissan on people, the southern Mayu, Valley and Plains, Meewak, Patwin, Win-Tonepoples, and the people of the Bolton Rancheria, Sacramento's only federally recognized tribe. Then we acknowledge and honor the native people who came before us and still walked beside us today on these ancestral lands by choosing to gather together today in the active practice of acknowledgement and appreciation for Sacramento's Indigenous Peoples history, contributions and lives. Thank you. Salute, pledge. I pledge that you will excuse us by the United States of mayor and to the mayor and to the mayor and to the mayor and to the to the mayor and to the mayor and to the mayor and to the mayor and to the mayor and to the to the mayor and to the mayor and to the mayor and to the mayor and to the mayor and to the to the mayor and to the mayor and to the mayor and of Visibility, presented by Council Members Kaplan and Plucky-Bom. Thank you, Mayor. Friends. Sorry, I'm having technological difficulties. So I'd like to call up our organizations and individuals to stand up here at the Dias, Stonewall, LGBTQ community center, our advocates. As I talk about visibility, I think it's important that we see you. Because today we gather and honor to celebrate transgender day of visibility, which we know is officially on Caesar's Chavez Day next Monday, but I'm glad that we got to raise the flag and are able to keep it up for an entire week. Because this day is not just a day on the calendar, it is a powerful reminder of the courage and resilience of our transgender and gender non-binary individuals who walk among us. each one of you here today plays a vital role in creating a world where every person can express their true selves without fear or without shame. We know that visibility is a crucial part of the journey towards acceptance and equality. It's about shining a light on stories of transgender individuals. It's about listening to your voices and embracing their experiences. When we acknowledge their existence and celebrate their lives, we empower them to live authentically, unapologetically and proudly. But remember, visibility goes beyond being seen. It requires us to cultivate empathy and understanding. So let us stand together as leaders and educate ourselves about the challenges faced by the transgender community. Let us be allies who uplift and amplify their voices. Let us help fight for you. When we advocate for your rights, we create an environment where everyone in the City of Sacramento can thrive. Today, so let's not just celebrate the visibility, but also commit ourselves to action. In the city of Sacramento, numerous organizations and activists have been at the forefront of supporting our transgender community. Notable among them is the Sacramento LGBT Community Center, the Gender Health Center in nonprofit working tirelessly to advocate for the rights of trans people, specifically trans black and indigenous individuals, as well as our own personal advocate in the transgender community of a Michael Mitten and many others that stood beside us this morning at the press conference. Thank you. But let us challenge as we move forward discrimination and combat prejudice wherever we see it, no matter the form. Let us foster conversations that promote acceptance and love because every small act of kindness matters. As we honor this day, let us stand in solidarity with our transgender friends and family. Let us remind them that you are seen and you are valued and you are loved because together when we work together we can change the world and we change the community and you are a valued part of it. I'd now like to turn it over to my fellow congressmen. Councilmember Phil Plucky-Bombe to say a couple of words in any of my other colleagues. I only want to say Sacramento is committed to being a sanctuary city now and forever. We will continue to protect and defend the civil rights of people no matter how or where they were born. We are not going to negotiate on this. I thank you all for continuing to stand with us in this effort as we move towards justice. I know we, you know, it is a long road and we have a long ways to go yet. But we will be here with you supporting you all through the way. Thank you. We have our colleagues there. Yeah, thank you, Council members, for bringing this resolution once again to the city of Sacramento. And certainly proud that we raised the flag out there. And I was noted that some cities are not doing it this year. And so you can count on this city this year and every year we'll raise the flag until next Monday but it's not just one day. It's about every day of the year recognizing our entire community so certainly please that our city is leaning in and standing with our trans community. Councillor Member Vain. Thanks. I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank Councilwoman Kaplan and Councilmember Palkybom for bringing this resolution to the Council to consider. I just really want to thank all the advocates for the many years and decades of work that you've done in this community. And yeah, it was a really beautiful and powerful moment earlier today when we had an opportunity to raise the flag. And I just wanted to share with folks that, you know, a couple of years ago, the Pew Research Pool came out and said that about 65% of Americans believed that they had never personally met someone who was transgender. And I just want to remind folks that trans folks are our neighbors. You know, there are colleagues, there are co-workers, there are your nieces, your nephews, your cousins, your friends, right? And so today, it's definitely visibility for our transgender community, but it's really about human dignity, right? And the ability to live freely and love freely, right? And so I just want to say, just thank you and want to center all of you for the incredible work that you've done in the community. And I know that these are really tough times, especially with the federal administration and what we're seeing, the fear and anxiety from our diverse communities. And just thank you so much for all the work that you do, the labor of love that you do each day to protect and to provide for our diverse community. So I just want to say thank you from the bottom of my heart. I too want to thank council members, Kaplan and Pluckybaum for this resolution. In some of the darker corners of our nation we know that there are those who spread misinformation, who miss, who miss gender, who intentionally stir the emotions of hate and rejection, who seek to scapegoat those who they believe are other. And this is an important moment for all of us. And I hope that not only do we recognize this occasion tonight with this resolution by the raising of the flag, by what we do at each and every day to live accepting all in our community. But we also inspire others to whether in government or outside government to stand up as well. and reject the gospel of hate to reject the effort to single out people who reject the efforts to divide us because we are stronger united than those who seek the opposite will ever be. And I'm proud to be here with all of you this evening and throughout our community life. We know that together as human beings, as human beings, we will prevail. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. And I align myself with my colleagues and I'm grateful not only for Council members Kaplan and Plucky Bonn for bringing this forward and for the organizations, for all the work that you do on the ground every day. Also our city employees who are also part of this work and every day, one thing that really struck me as a standing out there and thinking about where we're at right now is one that I'm really proud, proud to be on this council, proud that we were the first city to do, to protect our residents and to say that we're a sanctuary city for transgender individuals, but also that we're continuing forward. That we're not shutting up. We're not going to shy away when things get tough. And I think that when you look around the world and history, when there's a decline into fascism, what happens is people get more comfortable. The first thing gets taken away and they say, oh, well, you know, I don't want to lose my federal funding. And I don't want this next thing to happen. So I won't say anything or maybe I won't put the flag up or maybe we won't use that terminology when we're submitting our Grand applications but then the next thing becomes the next thing want this next thing to happen. So I won't say anything, or maybe I won't put the flag up. Or maybe we won't use that terminology when we're submitting our grant applications. But then the next thing becomes the next thing, becomes the next thing, and before you know it, people's rights are taken away. And I think that the best way to guard against that is to speak out, to be loud, to speak out often, and to reaffirm the commitments that we've made and where we're at as a council and so I'm really proud that this is here tonight. I think it's very appropriate timing and just really grateful. Thank you. Thank you. You are loved and supported here in Sacramento and I'm proud to be an ally. Thank you. I mean it would said it's been so eloquently but I just want to remind folks that while we are here to say we see you, I see all the work that you do for everyone else. And I see everyone here who has gone out there and volunteered for the needs of other people, others individuals, others kids, and I appreciate you. If you'd like to say a couple words. A little mayor again for this proclamation and recognizing transgender day of visibility at a time when transgender rights are under attack. Right? I think we are cognizant that other cities have pulled back their support and not done flagraising and the city of Sacramento has stood strong in the face of the current environment. I always like to use transgender day availability to highlight some of the issues that the community faces, transgender people are more likely to face housing and. The city of Sacramento goes above and beyond to create funding streams to fund shelters that are inclusive of all identities, such as the ones at the Sacramento LGBT community center. Transgender people are more likely to face employment discrimination, more likely to face harassment, more likely to face violence, and a litany of other issues. But I think the work that we all do as advocates, the work that the community does and the work that all of you do in your respective seats helps to hopefully stem some of the some of the flow of that. So just again thank you for all of all that you do for your city. I think earlier today we were in a press conference and the thing that I said was transgender people make up less than 1% of the population. So at a time when transgender rights are under attack, we need the 99%. We need everyone else, everyone who's in this council of chambers, we need folks like yourselves, folks in the audience and the folks behind me that show up for the trans community and help protect us, especially in times like this. Thank you. Mayor, would you like to join us? I'd like to call in, even our city employees, or within the LGBTQ community, come on up. We'll take a picture. Mayor, I'd like to have a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little Sorry. Our next presentation is for Cesar Chavez Day presented by Mayor Pro Tem Guerra. Thank you, Madam Clerk. very honored to present and recognize Cesar Chavez-Dé, Cesar Chavez-Dé, for a person who inspired a movement, an movement who inspired people to make change. Cesar Chavez-Dé is actually California holiday, as well as the city holiday. But it's Saddhachavas Day of Service. I think Saddhachavas himself would have rejected a name, a day name being named after him. And that movement that he inspired, inspired so many individuals. And I'm going to ask them to come up here who have done the work on behalf of the movement of the not just farm workers, but equality and the rights of individuals. Our own district six commissioners, Manuel Buenroestro, Isaac González, Victoria Vasquez, with her daughters as well as well her commissioners here, from the low writer commission, Francine Matta and Natalie Luna, as well the low riders and back when Bishop Gallego was here, the low riders were advocating for the farm workers because many of them were farm workers themselves. Ed Perez, who is with RD1000 and a member of the City's Filipino American community and Roma Cristobal, who also with SCIU, they'll give us a little more details about the annual Cesar Chavez march that SCIU is supporting the past. And the efforts that Papa have done to recognize the work of foreign workers, those specifically with the leadership of Filovir Cruz and Larry Yitliong. Marbella Salas, our major U-commissioner in the Gardaland neighborhood association. We're doing their own. That's right. Thank you. Thank you. We're doing their own gardening themselves out there in Northgate Garden Land as well. Anthony Oriba, the Parks Commissioner for in our county, but also working for Congressman Ami Vera there, former intern over there as well from our office. Javier also in district two with the Latino Latinx Young Dems of Sacramento and they've been doing this work of recognizing the movement to support those of the struggling workers and ensuring that our young folks in the future remember those efforts from the Latino Democratic Club as well double header here Manuel Buenroestro, Maida Arce Moreno, Director of Programs from La Familia Counseling Center. La Familia Counseling Center, they were out here in Sacramento helping out farm workers, giving vaccines and health care in the fields everyone. They've been going out to the fields here directly from Sacramento. Richard Alcalá, who veteran himself, thank you for your service, VFW Post 67. but has been not only supporting the arts community, but also in Southside Park building a mural of all of our leaders, including Cezada Chavez, and who have done the work to recognize their efforts on the new mural of the Southside Park. We heard a little bit about that during the budget hearing today. Caroline Gavillas, who here was involved in our own work, not only with the Latino economic council and helping us with our efforts on hiring and recruitment, but she's on the steering committee for the CESA de Chavez Youth Leadership Conference that started by Sacramento and Sierra Nouns become the largest CESA de Chavez youth conference in California, giving young people a chance in leadership from the fuel network. Those are attorneys who have been helping out our farm workers who, by the way, if you go out into the rural area, there's not a lot of housing out there. So many of them live in Sacramento and they commute to the farmlands. And those that are helping them out with legal services here is the field network, Marcus Tang and Claudia Rios Manso, as well as them doing that across. On the far end over there, my sister, my fellow Hornet, my carnal over here, Ruthie Barra, from North Cal Resist, both of us, who we started off in the college's migrant program, both kids who worked in the fields ourselves and then have committed ourselves to making sure that people are not food and secure providing food at the George S. Center and throughout this area for families who need food in assistance. Roberto Alvarado here, our local photographer documenting and bringing sure that all of these issues are. When we think about the farm worker movement, the Royal Chicano Air Force, through art, they documented and advocated. Let's give her a big round of applause. Yeah, González is well here who have been with the Mexican American Cultural Center and the Latino Economic Council, working with so many of our, with their history and form working, but making sure that traditions and cultures aren't lost, as we do work, we sing with joy and continue that. And that was part of a big thing in this fight here. So Cesar Chavez came back after the war and realized after serving his country in the U.S. Navy that he was not being respected for his work. He was not being respected for the labor that he was providing and wanted equal recognition and dignity. And he came to Sacramento here and met many Sacramento leaders, our mayor, former mayor Joe Surnah. Sessar Chavez along with the Lotus Lotus, Weta, Philip Veracruz, and Larry Itliom came here. And Sacramento itself, why we recognize it in Sacramento, is because here in our city, we gave them the opportunity to voice our concerns at the state capital to make change, not only here, but for the entire country. And since 1993, the city of Sacramento has recognized March 31st SS a city holiday continuing this movement that continues to say about it's not about an individual, it's about the fight for individual recognition of human dignity and honor of their work. And so to discuss that is Mark Grossman who worked hand in in hand with Cessna Tachava as our own city of Sacramento resident from Curtis Park. Mark Grossman, let's give him a big round of applause. What do you think of our work? Thank you, Mayor and members on behalf of the United Farm Workers. We want to express our gratitude to Council member Gera for this honor. Caesar had a little known application. He sometimes had trouble keeping secretaries or office workers. When he spotted young people with talent, especially if they came from a farm worker or a working class family, he would convince them that they could be something more. You know, a accountant's administrators, attorneys, negotiators. Sure, he wanted results in the office, but he saw the greater good of helping people fulfill their dreams. Dream some of them didn't even know they had at the time. He literally gave hundreds of young women and men opportunities. No one would have given Caesar Chavez when he was a young migrant worker with an eighth grade education. And wasn't that what he wanted for farm workers too? The chance to be able to sit across the bargaining table from their employers as equals so they wouldn't just have to take orders all their lives. His mission was really about empowerment. And just an observation, I think it's very fitting that the first two items on your agenda follow each other, because Caesar unequivocally supported what was called gay rights back in the 1970s long before it was popular. I met Harvey Milth, a company in Caesar to events in San Francisco in the mid 1970s. So for that, thank you so much Councilmember. We were very grateful. Thank you very much Mark. Thank He has a long, consistent effort and work for our community here from Sacramento, from our own Curtis Park district. No, it's seven, I may say. And then also here to make some remarks about the actual, some of the work done today from the fuel network. I'd like to bring up Marcus Tang as well as Carole Cynthia, I think it is from the fuel network here because of their commitment and their work that they've been doing for our city here for the last eight years, making sure that people have access to legal rights. The laws aren't good if they can't defend themselves with them. Yeah, thank you Councilmember. It's Claudia. Claudia. It's fine. We just want to express our gratitude to the city of Sacramento for this meaningful recognition and honor of Cesar Chavez, whose legacy continues to inspire the fight for dignity, equity, and justice for farm workers, working families and immigrants. fuel or the Sacramento fuel, so the Sacramento family unity and education and legal network for immigrants carries the spirit forward every day, standing alongside immigrants, farm workers, and underserved communities through legal advocacy, education, and organizing. We work alongside amazing partners, many of whom are here today, who already provide these services to the community and our experts in the field. Fuel seeks to uplift ongoing community efforts and identify needs that arise. Thank you to our partners for providing services with dignity and respect to the community they serve. As we celebrate this resolution, we also remember that the work to which Cesar Chavez dedicated his life is far from over. Many farm workers and immigrants continue to face unsafe conditions, barriers to basic rights, and the ongoing threat of family separation. Fuel remains committed to building a future where every worker and every immigrant is seen, valued, and protected. Thank you for standing with us. Thank you very much. I appreciate that for all the hard worker fuel. Give them a big round of applause. Would not be, would be something that probably says that I wouldn't say, well, why are we doing this? You have to have some action and to talk a little bit about you can do. What can people do is Ed Betis to talk here, SCIU has been a constant supporter of ensuring that the says that Ch Chavez march happens every year. Ed, how can people, Ed, our RD-1000 local elected member, how can the public participate in this effort? Thank you, Mayor Pro Tem, Gata for the invitation. And it's great to see the community behind here to help us celebrate Cesar Chavez-Day. Speaking about action, that's one thing Cesar and the movement really was really pushing for is the issue is about not just thinking about what we're talking about what to do but actually taking action.. So we actually do have the assessor's chavis march coming up on March 29th, it begins at Southside Park. So if you want to show support for what assessor and movements to the floor, that would be one opportunity to do that. But I did want to mention it because I know we're going to hear a lot about all the historic work that Cesar did. But I just want to remind folks that behind every successful community organizer, just a community that helps support it. And I want to mention three specific things. Number one, you know, already mentioned Pilibeira Cruz and La and all the Philippine menonges that stood side by side with SESA and the United Fine War. You already mentioned Pilibe de Cruz and La Di Clio'n and all the Filipino mononks that stood side by side with Cezaa and the United Fine Workers on that struggle. And also they had a lot of mentors and one of them is actually somebody to passed away recently. But there were a lot of people that supported Cesar along the way, but I also wanted to thank SEIU, particularly SEIU local month thousands of state employees union. Because 25 years ago, a lot of members of SEIU stood together along with other proponents of the bill that created the Cesar Chavez holiday. Believe it or not, I was 25 years ago. And I see a few of them here. We have Rudy Bada, Roman Cristobal, Rudy Amada. I think I saw him earlier, and a few other folks. And that's it Mayor was working in the legislature at that time when it was introduced? Yes, we still remember the 25,000 postcards and petitions that we had to deliver to Governor Davis at the time. So, but I did want to mention one final thing regarding the intersection of issues, regarding LGBT rights, transgender rights, workers rights, farm workers rights, you know, with all the stuff happening in Washington, DC, you know, in Spanish, all data is called La Lucha, the struggle. And here we are 25 years later. La Lucha is continuing. So Viva La Lucha, Viva Cesar Chavez. Thank you very much. As the four I passed it over here to our mayor, you know, I wanted to just, you know, many people forget that the city of Sacramento is in Sydney. If you can look up their rows, their crop rows, you know. And those don't get picked by themselves. So it is our history, and it's one that we should continue to support. So with that, thank you very much, Mr. Mayor for this opportunity. Councillor Mourn. Vang, first. Thank you, Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem, Garrett did an amazing job. So I'll keep my comments short. I really just want to take this moment to thank Mayor Pro Tem, Garrett, for bringing this resolution to honor. Cesar Chavez's life and legacy. You know, one of my favorite quotes from Cesar Chavez is, if you really want to make a a friend, go to someone's house and eat with them. The people who give you their food, give you their heart. And I share that. Shavviz is if you really want to make a friend, go to someone's house and eat with them. The people who give you their food, give you their heart. And I share that quote, because one of my favorite quotes from him is because all of you right now, because you're being recognized for the great work that you do, is that you give your heart to community, day in and day out. And I want to say thank you for that, right? workers rides to immigrant rides everything that you all do you're really at the forefront where elected officials up here but really we follow your lead in terms of the work that you do so thank you for continuing his legacy and I know he's looking down just really really proud of our community in Sacramento so thank you. Thank you Council member and thank you Mayor Pro Tem. I know that our former late Mayor Joseph Sernna and Cesar Chavez would would be both be proud but perplexed by this attention to them all these years later. But as Ed said, you know, you know, we have a lot of work to do. And so this is the culmination of not just 25 years of the holiday of remembering, but 50 plus years of working on behalf of people without a voice. And that's what we do every day. We have fancy titles titles and I'm always reflected that when you look about history of our society, it's not people up here who are on the diast, who we see in the community, you call us honorable and assembly member and council member and mayor. It's people without a title who have made the biggest difference. Says our chavis, Mahatma Gandhi, you know, across the globe, people who really stepped up Rosa Parks and so parks. And so, you know, for those people in the community to remember today, it's not all of us. It's you that can continue the work to make sure we make a difference here in Sacramento and these trying times across our nation. So Sacramento has stepped up and honored Cesar Chavez and the farm workers, as Councilmember said, for decades. And when the farm workers came up here in March, it was our community. And even a few years ago, me and you and Supervisor Phil Cerna raised money for farm workers to get burritos when they wanted to make sure they had food to stay out there in March, from stocked into Sacramento to get the governor signed a bill to bring economic justice to our workers who work in the field. So the work continues, but Sacramento is a special place in the heart of this movement. So I'm certainly proud that we honor Cessar Chavez-Day and thank you, Councilmember for bringing this resolution. I sat near same seat and honored the Chavez family for a decade here doing the same thing so the work continues. Thank you. And the real way to do a clap for this, everybody knows. I want to see Mr. Mayor of Utah, my joining us here is down with everyone. you you you you you I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. Mark. Thank you so much to everyone that joined us today for these really important resolutions to embrace inclusivity and make sure that everyone can call Sacramento home safely. We are moving along to the consent calendar. Are there any members that would like to pull some items? Councillor Member Kaplan. To speak briefly on item 7. Councillor Remabel. Two. Oh. And then I erase whoever punched up. Anyone else? It goes rockers. Councillor Emmer, Dickinson. Comments on item 14. Item 14. Sending anyone else? Okay. Well then let's get started. We'll do item number two. Thank you, Madame Vice-Mayer. Just really quickly, I just want to uplift that, you know, this is an addendum to the Florent Road Vision Zero Safety Project, but obviously there's been a lot of conversation in recent months and years about vision zero and pedestrian safety on our streets and so this is just one of the many projects that our incredible city staff has not only gone out, done the hard work, gotten grants, pulled all the money together and is actually doing real world improvements to one of the most dangerous corridors in our city which is Floreorent Road. But now this new adendum is going to make sure that there are improved signal, improved signaling, and also will extend it to Franklin Boulevard, which is so necessary. And so I'm really excited about this. I just want to take, I know that we all do this and we should just take every opportunity to uplift the work that the staff does on this because these things don't happen overnight and they don't happen by chance they happen because of the hard work and dedication of our team. So thank you. Thank you so much, council member. Moving along, Council member Capelão, item number seven. Thank you, Vice Mayor. I just want to highlight and thank our fire department for the work. They are just one of three agency statewide to receive an additional amount of funding for the California Opportunity Youth Apprenticeship Program. With this funding and additional 60 youth between the ages of 18 and 24, we're looking to enter and pursue career and fire and emergency medical services. We'll be supported by receiving stipends and for training, equipment, uniform and whatnot. In light of the shortage, we know we're experiencing with our EMTs and paramedics in the region. It's so important that we invest in this next generation and support the programs that are creating those career pathways. So again, thank you for our fire department and city staff for securing this funding. Congratulations. Great comments. And council member Dickinson on item 14. Thank you, vice mayor. In 1965, the Good Neighbors Child Development Center began a remarkable history. teaching 52 children in preschool at the Alameda Army Church in Del Paso Heights. In 1989, the Sacramento Housing and Redevelopment Agency made a loan to what I call the good, I have always called the Good Neighbors Club to construct a facility just off of Grand Avenue and Depaso Heights where the Good Neighbors Child Development Center has been located ever since. And over the years, the number of children who have enjoyed the benefits of the Good Neighbors club services are too numerous to count. But tonight we have with us Dr. Oli Mack and board members from the Good Neighbors Club I would like to ask them to rise and be recognized this evening if they would for their wonderful community service. to be conscious for their wonderful community service and for their wonderful community service and contributions over many decades. And I'm not sure I think Dr. Macmay have been the board president since the beginning. I'm not totally not quite, not quite. But in any case, we're forgiving a loan here, but this loan has been repaid so many times over to our community that it is only right and appropriate that we take this action tonight. I want to also especially recognize Lesley Fritchie. Lesley bow too. Leslie Fritchie of our staff who has been instrumental again for many, many years in helping the Good Neighbors Club, helping all of us throughout the city, but especially in Deppasso Heights and District 2 generally. So it is a real pleasure to be able to do this and this will lay the foundation for potential expansion of the child development center as well to do even more good work in the years ahead. So thanks so much. Thank you, thank you. Thank you, Vice-President. Thank you so much. All right, I'm looking for a motion in a second. So it's in second? Oh, that's right. All right, we'll give a motion in a second and we'll do public comment. We have eight public speakers. Our first three are Michael Bevin's, K. Crabb, and Isaac Gonzalez. If you can please line up in the aisle? I don't know if I'm speaking on two items, two or 21. Am I speaking on just one? It's you get two minutes. Two minutes for either one of those? Or both count. Okay. Well, items one through 16 is the consent calendar. Okay, the number, all right. The number two is the activation, transportation commission, the transportation commission has a work plan. And my goal here today is like I think most of us agree that it's awesome. Now that it comes to you, you got the big, it's always decision of whether or not to fund it. Have a great plan, but if it's on the side, it doesn't really help us much. I know there's many decisions you have to make in terms of what to spend the money on. But for what it's worth, my lesson to them. It's, I just say road safety, road violence should be kind of up at the top. And this is a plan to help mitigate that. So, please, please fund it. Thank you. Thank you. Our next speaker is Kay Crumb. Hi, my name is. Crumb. I'm one of the leaders of strong sack town. I'm speaking on item one. I just asked the city council to support and agendas the act of transportation commissions annual report and work plan. Thank you very much. Our next speaker is Isaac Gonzales. Good evening mayor and council members.. My name is Isaac Gonzales and I serve as the vice chair of the Active Transportation Commission. I'm here tonight to voice my strong support for the Commission's recommendations and work plan and respectfully request that you prioritize its funding in the coming fiscal year. And I recognize that we're facing difficult choices due to a challenging budget. But investments in active transportation are not optional. They are foundational. The work plan we put together is in a wish list. It's a strategy grounded in equity, safety, and long-term fiscal responsibility. These recommendations represent hundreds of hours of volunteer work, community feedback, and expert review. and the align directly with the city's adopted. We have a lot of work to do with the community. We have a lot of work to do with the community. We have a lot of work to do with the community. We have a lot of work to do with the community. We have a lot of work to do with the community. We have a lot of work to do with the community. We have a lot of work to. Funding this work plan means safer routes to schools for our children, more independence for our seniors, and better options for residents who rely on walking and biking and transit every single day. So in these tight budget years, it's even more important to invest in solutions that provide the highest return. Active transportation does exactly that. So I urge you, fund this year's work plan. Let's build a city where every resident, regardless of age, income, class, creed can move safely and freely. Thank you for your time and for your continued leadership. Our next three speakers, Garrett Sheen for item one, Alyssa Lee for item one, and then Mack Worthy for item five. If you could please line up in the aisle. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very much. My name is Garrett Sheen. I at least believe I'm speaking to you on the pedestrian safety matter. Is that correct? All right. I am old enough to have witnessed. I'm sorry, sir. What item are you speaking on? Parted me. Are you speaking on the consent calendar? We're going through the consent. Are you looking to talk about the act of transportation item? I thought I had an understanding I was going to be speaking about safety for pedestrians. Wonderful. So that's item 21 if you like. We can put you in that group. We can put you in that group for act of transportation. I can defer to others to get other work done. We'll put you in the item that you want to speak on. So that'll come up later. Okay. May I ask how late much later? Actually. Camille, let's just reset the clock and please give your comments. Okay. You could stay. please stay. I don't want you. I'm sorry. Just resume your comments. Your comments apply to one of the items on the consent calendar. All right. Well, I'm obviously confused, but I'm prepared to go ahead. Okay, please go ahead and my apologies. Okay. Okay. I'm old enough and it had been driving in California long enough to see the cultural changes occurring with regard to driving in transportation and automobiles in metropolitan areas. I think what has happened is that California drivers have developed an impatience as well as an inattentiveness that affects the safety of all of us who are on the road. I want to distinguish now between pedestrians and cars and cars and cars. So with regard to pedestrians and cars, what do the data reveal about injury and death and what can be done to lower the accident rate. The data and regulations with regard to workers in dangerous traffic lanes is informative. Visibility is the key to fewer accidents. Calocha mandates that employees exposed to vehicular traffic hazards where, especially during the hours of darkness, where high visibility, safety, apparel, meeting, ANSI standards, and that includes vest jackets or shirts that have retro-reflective material visible to a thousand feet. All right? Dark clothing, especially when it blends with the background colors, or at night, is the pedestrian equivalent to the driver's not wearing seatbelt. It's a matter of luck. If visibility is a key to pedestrian safety, then we should, I believe, allow pedestrians, if they wish to get reflective vests or clothing. So that fire stations in the metropolitan area. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your comment. Your time is complete. I'm sorry. Your time is complete. Your time is up. Sorry. We do two minutes for every single person. You can sign up again and we can speak on the last one. Your comments are complete. Your time is up. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for coming to the council chamber. Thank you. Your time is complete. Thank you. after Alyssa we have Mac Worthy, Nick Gollung and Keon Bliss. Hello my name is Alyssa Lee. I live in District 4 and I'm speaking on item 1. I first repeat everything that Isaac Gonzalez said about the value of this Active Transportation Commission report. I would also like to see this agendaized. I support all commission reports being agendized as a default measure. These commissions meet every month. They are appointed by council members and mayors. They have staff reports that go, that's been multiple meeting times and hours to create them. They deserve to be discussed, especially when the report includes recommendations that really relate to funding that is needed in order to make the reports valuable and serve actual outcomes. So please agendaize the item and make that a practice for future meetings. Thank you. Macworthy? We heard a lot about Canvas. Nobody brought up the real thing that would help the police department. Do you realize that you can't smoke your weed? How about you brought it up? Tell the people the truth. Now, who do you, and the design and the one that you tell the people, you can't smoke your money and water that? Nobody said that. I have a friend, his mom was behind City College. She had to go outside smoke her junk. Now, somebody's gonna pay the pipe here. Your police department up to their neck. How many times that you get a call for smoking in a joint that it becomes a penalty? How about I say that? All those regulations you put in there, but you don't know where you are in the middle capacity of business and safety for the people of drugs. America used the most drugs in any country, in a world, that's being chained and sent it to Mexico to come here. If I was in another country, I'd get my drugs in that community. I spoke years ago, a pill to get up and a pill to lay down. That would be a visible soldier. That would be an invisible soldier, number nine. Coat, King didn't it? You can't have had a church in the synagogue number. So your years off target here by educating people. You educate them in a way that they can't use it. Just speak common old knowledge. Look, you can't smoke you shit here, you gotta go somewhere else. A lot of these people is the second and third generation, I'm smoking. I don't say don't because I drink Coney Egg, I don't get loaded. And where am I going to dance, I don't be drunk and dry. I don't stop wanting to bring them out of the church. I want Every DNA in any area and I'll bet you $100 in my pocket you won't find. I'll go right here right across the street. Thank you for your time, your comment. Thank you for your comment, your time is complete. Nick Golling and then Keon Bliss. Welcome back. Thank you so much. I was just thinking it's been a minute since I've been at this podium. Good to see everybody again. Nick Golland, chief program officer with the gathering in. We are the cities previously and hopefully continually. Selected emergency shelter provider at the North 5th emergency shelter program. the wanted to start out with gratitude for the city. DCR, Rolf is back there. He's been a fantastic partner for us, providing great customer service and a lot of support as we've been there in that program since November 1st of just last year. Our mission statement at the gathering end is to meet people where they are, inspire hope, and walk alongside them on their journey to sustainable housing. Over the last few months, what does that look like? We have a mental health clinician that's working on site, providing group and individual clinical therapy for our guests. We're hosting employment and budgeting classes for our guests. They've been so well attended we've had to add additional days throughout the week because so many people are interested in getting back on their feet. We have a partnership with local INTECH college. They are providing their nursing students multiple times a week in our program to help tend to medical needs, basic medical needs that might come up for our guests. Sacramento County heart teams have been on site also twice a week in rolling people in behavioral health services. As a force multiplier during inclement weather, when the National Weather Service has determined that there'd be a warning or some other type of caution in place for weather events, we have surged for an additional 20 people to come in and get some safety and some stability and some care and some support. We've provided a total of more than 600 bed nights since November for that additional service. My favorite number to report is that to date 65 people have moved into improved housing destinations out of that shelter program and nearly half of those went directly to permanent housing. These are people that are no longer- Thank you for your comment. Your time is complete. Thank you so much for the partnership. Thank you. Thank you. Keon Bliss. I just want to echo the comments that were spoken to item one but I'm really here to speak to item 16 specifically for the reason the confusion that you just experienced with the previous speaker who wanted to speak on item one and 21. You have an opportunity with making amendments to the council rules of procedure where any single one as our duly elected representatives can make changes to council rules of procedures and make additional amendments besides the poultry one around standardizing the planning commissions and time. because honestly, I've been coming to these meetings more like very often as a community member since 2016, and I have seen the council rules change significantly. Most prominently starting after black community members came out in force during the stuff on Clark protests that were happening in 2018. And I have seen the public off agenda matters be moved to the end of the meeting, the beginning of the meeting, then back to the end. I have seen comment times reduced from three minutes to two minutes. And I have seen the Decorum officer be appointed as the city clerk who really cuts people off after exactly two minutes regardless of who you are. I can tell you 100%. If you don't like attitudes, speakers like me or other community members, I have one phrase for you. Attitude is a reflection of leadership. And frankly, there is nothing respectful or polite about cutting somebody off on their microphone and living in their comments to two minutes. There are many things you can do such as extend our time limits or bring matters not on the agenda back to the beginning so that you can actually let people who, like rather than having them wait for two hours until the end of the meeting to actually participate. Thank you for your time. Thank you for your comment. Your time is complete. You have exceeded your speaking time. Please take your seat. Thank you. By continuing to speak, you are disrupting the orderly conduct of the meeting and our inviolation of chapter five of the City Council rules of procedure. Thank you, Keon. If you do not stop, you will be ordered to leave the meeting. I suggest the council will proceed to meet the council. Thank you. Thank you, Keon. Okay. We have a motion and we have a second. Can we please do a roll call vote? I want to confirm that the motion was made by councilmember Maple and then seconded by councilmember Kaplan. Yes. I have a vote. I have a vote. I have a vote. I have a vote. I have a vote. I have a vote. I have a vote. I have a vote. I have a vote. I have a vote. I have a vote. I have a vote. I have a vote. I have a vote. I have a vote. I have a vote. Yes. Vice Mayor Chalamontes. Yes. Motion motion carries and we're moving along to public hearings item number 17 wood spring sweet hotel rezone And we have Jose Quintanilla and Garrett to. Good evening. Vice Mayor Talamantes, members of the City Council. My name is Jose Quintanilla. We need quiet in the council chambers. We have staff presenting. Thank you. My name is Jose Quintanilla. I'm a associate planner with the Department of Community Development, the item before us P204013, which is a request to develop a four-story 122-room hotel at 2270 Del Paso Road within the Natomas Crossing Plan Unit Development in North Natomas. Staff recommends approval of the following entitlements for this project, a reason of the property, from EC50PUD to C2PUD. A schematic plan amendment to the Natalmas crossing PUD to allow for hotels and site plan and design review to construct the hotel and associated side improvements. Thank you. This concludes my presentation. Staff and the applicant team are here if you have any questions. Thank you. Thank you so much. Madam Clerk, is there any public comment on this item? One public speaker, Mr. Mcworthy. And Mr. Mcworthy, we're speaking about this item only. Your comments have to pertain to this. I have to tell me that. I've been here. You're just going to keep that. I say you speak out of terms. You got no thought of telling me what to say. I'm've been here when you were born. So keep it as I say. You speak out of tongues as you got, you got no one thought of telling me what to say here. I'm going to free those. See, I said what the hell I want to say. OK, you have two minutes. People on with that being a hotel, are you changing the name of it and putting people in there? But you're still using the TOT tax status. What's on you doing? See if that's what you're doing that's illegal. Whatever you do. For the hotels to have the TOT tax and you got homeless people in there. They could not survive as a hotel but you kept the name of it and put the homeless people in there. See, these are the things that I wanna tell the Trump people when they come. Thug is them here, ask the kid of New City. Thug is no professional at all. Thug is them here, that. Thug is them. You know you don't supposed to be using that hotel, T-O-T tax. When you take home as money to house them there, that man's supposed to go back to a house in the home this whole. That's the need of a private audit to come in and get you under oath of how that money been spent. And those that lie, put have the developers attorney here but we don't need to hear from attorneys. I just want to thank city staff because this is a construction of a brand new hotel. It will bring the 11th hotel coming to North Natomas and an additional 122 rooms that will contribute to TOT so that we can bring increased tourism to not only North Natomas but the city of Sacramento. And what I love about this is this is on the corner of a really busy intersection that's tucked away behind a commercial development. It's currently grassland. Nothing has been there as long as I have lived in Sacramento. And I think this is a great use because it's looked at employment area to change it and zone it for a hotel because not only with the construction of this hotel, it's the closest hotel to our North and the Chalmers Regional Park intercom for baseball and whatever else. So we're very excited to have them come join our city so I'd like to open and close this public hearing. and I will second that. And you're moving the atom as well. Moving the atom was all on my staff around. Okay, and I'll second that too. Madam Clerk, please call theone. Councillor Member Maple. Councillor Member Gara. I. Councillor Member Jennings. Yes. Councillor Vangang. Yes. Vice Mayor Talimentes. Yes. I have Councilmember sorry Mayor McCarty and Councilmember Maple absent. All right and now we're going to move along to item number 18, our city manager executive recruitment process. And I'm going to hand it off to councilmember Jennings, who is going to kick us off. Thank you. Thank you very much, Vice Mayor. Good evening, everyone. Tonight, our executive recruitment firm and consultant Pam Derby from CPS HR will be presenting to us three items. Item number one will be updating us on her conversations with all of us here on the dius on what characteristics, skill sets and attributes we want to see in our next city manager. Number two, Pam will be updating us on what community engagement and outreach we want to see happen based on her conversations with each one of us. And then finally, number three, Pam will be updating us on the total compensation survey that her firm completed for this hiring process. Throughout this process, we have focused on making sure that these conversations are happening in public. Sharing our process includes dates and times for when we would be meeting to discuss this process. The recommendation from CPS HR continue this process. They have been presented in a clear-cut schedule and outreach. As a mayor and council, we have asked them to review the market for total compensation related to a city manager's search. I appreciate how they have included our past compensation practices that included a recommendation for us to consider focused on bringing our our conversation package in alignment with what others are providing. We have not shied away from having all the information in our past compensation packages reviewed and included in this analysis. I am grateful to each of my colleagues for taking the interview process with Pam seriously and with that without further ado I'd like to welcome our CPS HR consultant Pam Derby to the podium. Good evening, Council and Council. Vice Mayor, I don't see my, there we go. So this evening, as Councilmember Jennings mentioned, since I've the last time I was here, I've met with each one of you, some in person, some via Zoom, to talk about the characteristics that you're looking for in the next city manager, the engagement process that you are looking for with the community and stakeholders, and also we did do a very extensive salary survey in conjunction with your HR department. So the things we'll be talking about, again, the IDLE Canada Attributes, stakeholder engagement, the recruitment timeline as well, and the salary study results. So when I spoke with each of you, you talked about the attributes you were looking for in the next city manager. And I can summarize them in these seven categories, but I'll give you a little bit more. You did receive a very extensive packet in your agenda that talked about that summarized all of it. I don't want to, it will be a very long meeting if I go over all of it. But the first was fairness, transparency, and council relations, which is treating all council members equally, fostering trust and transparency, building strong relationships, adapt your communication styles, and securing consensus. The second is leadership in organizational culture, which you agreed was setting a culture of efficiency, collaboration and customer service, and leading by example, empowering the staff and valuing innovation. We also talked a lot about public engagement and community connection, and you all actively support engaging with the residents, businesses and diverse communities. You'd like to see the next city manager do all of those things. You want the next city manager to listen to public concerns and prioritize inclusive decision making with all of you. You want someone with experience and strategic vision. So an experienced leader with California's specific expertise, knowledgeable in governance, public safety, finance, and infrastructure. You want someone with good decision-making skills, good governance skills, so they're skilled in policy implementation, labor relations, and data driven decisions. You want to have them ensure that they're an effective project follow-through and operational excellence with staff. You want a visionary leader who believes in innovation, so uniting the council and staff under a shared vision and tackling key issues like homelessness, housing, and modernization. And last but not least, of course, is integrity and professionalism. You want someone who respects the governance structure, acts with integrity, and avoids political entanglements. You want some committed to leaving Sacramento in a better state. So in total, you're looking for a strategic, adaptable leader who fosters teamwork, drives results, and strengthens public trust. The next thing we talked about was all the community engagement stakeholder engagement. There were very many, pardon me, there were several different, I need to go back Several of you had different ideas regarding engagement. So, but you do want, most of you do want to expand community engagement as a whole, and certainly had different ideas though about how we would do that in this process. So you want to increase outreach to diverse communities, especially in North and South Sacramento. You'd like to see partnering with nonprofits to engage underrepresented groups and gathering community and staff input in this process early to help shape your decision making. You want to have a structured but efficient process, community engagement, stakeholder engagement for this process. So you want to balance community input with efficiency. So some council members do prefer meetings, others do not. You want us to use structured interactive stakeholder meetings instead of open mic sessions, meaning that if we do town hall meetings, that they have a structure to them. They have two to three different questions that we're asking and that we stick to those questions. Your preferred methods were surveys, breakout sessions, and virtual town halls. You also talked about key stakeholder groups to engage. These would include community groups, business and economic leaders, labor organizations, obviously staff, charter officers, department heads, et cetera. So staff and leadership input, we're looking at speaking with the charter officers, certainly having a survey that the department heads and staff, an online survey that they can participate in. And then, so we would get those internal perspectives to help you identify what their leadership priorities are. So you're really prioritizing a balanced, efficient engagement process, ensuring diverse input. You favor structured stakeholder discussion surveys and targeted outreach. You want early input from staff, business, labor, and community groups, and you believe that's essential for trust and informed decision making. And obviously, it helps with the transparency. So the timeline for this, and again, there was a much more robust timeline in your agenda. But so between the last time we spoke on February 28th and today, it's been a planning and preparation period. I've spoken with all of you. Some of you have started to send me community groups that you'd like us to speak with. And we have already started to schedule some of those interactions, those are Zoom meetings, et cetera, talking to different groups. We believe that with the engagement activities that we are suggesting, which is a combination of online survey, virtual town hall meetings, and in-person town hall meetings, obviously all of those conversations with community groups. We expect we'd be hearing from working with your chiefs of staff to identify some of those groups, that that would last until April 21st. After that period, we'd be putting together all the recruitment materials that would include the marketing brochure, placing the ads, et cetera. The active recruitment period, we are suggesting that this posts on May 5th and that we have a final filing date or an open-tell-filled date with the first resume review date of June 9th. So that's a five-week period that this would be posted. We'd be out there doing aggressive outreach and looking for candidates. Selection activities, which would include a CPSHR doing comprehensive screening interviews with those candidates that meet the minimum qualifications, the council doing at least two sets of interviews with those candidates, and we would anticipate that wrapping up by the end of July, after you've identified a candidate, then we would do reference checks. Actually, we tend to do reference checks on your final candidates on all of them, so if you have two to three finalists you want to speak with, we do our comprehensive reference checks on all of those finalists. And then when you have identified a candidate and we help negotiate the employment agreement with you, et cetera, and do the final background check. In California, we cannot do a criminal background check until a job offer is on the table because of ban the box. But certainly that would take place at that point. But I would assure you also that any candidates that we recommend that you speak with, we will have already done a significant media check on those individuals that will have gone through the firm that we use, we do it in-house and a firm that we use to do all of those media checks. So any candidate that we recommend to you, all of that will have been done ahead of time. So the salary study was, there was a salary study done, I believe, a year to 18 months ago or so. The P and P.E. committee did ask us to do another supplemental study. We did expand the organizations that we looked at that were not included in that previous study. But I will say that our findings were not that dissimilar from what was identified in the report in the salary study that was done by the HR department. And so one of the things that we did, we conducted this comprehensive analysis and we included actual salary and total compensation. We also incorporated cost of living adjustments and compared data with multiple agencies to assess competitiveness. We evaluated total compensation elements, including base salary, deferred compensation, car phone allowances, longevity, other paid incentives, and value of both leave and employer paid health benefits. Now one of the things that you have heard repeatedly in the media, et cetera, is that Mr. Chan was the highest paid city manager in the state of California, which we found is not to be true. There are obviously factors that weigh into that. Obviously, some of the places that they look for that information, they don't, it's not the same as it is if you look at, say, the state controller's office and the way that it's reported. One of the things that skewed Mr. Chans salary was that there was a supplemental leave incentive that was provided to him of 2,320 hours. There was a payout with that of $200,000. So that significantly inflated the total compensation, which then distorted your market comparison somewhat. I would anticipate that that's not something that you would be negotiating with the next city manager. It's not the norm, and so that would not play into your negotiations. But we do want to be transparent about the fact that it was there and that did help inflate what your total compensation package looks like. When we do the assessment and we look at all of these surrounding cities, we looked at other cities in the state with comparable populations, et cetera, the salary only is actually 3% behind the market average. When we look at the total compensation, if you included that leave incentive, it's 47% above the market. But the reality is that I assume you wouldn't be negotiating that. So the total compensation is 5% behind the market average. So we are recommending that you reduce obviously or eliminate that supplemental leave incentive. You are going to be negotiating anything that you do with the city manager. Obviously we would suggest that you're doing performance evaluations every year, that you're sitting down with the city manager coming up with those goals and objectives So that you can be looking at that salary on an annual basis looking at what those incentives are they should be looking at those things with you We suggest aligning the severance severance with standard practices right now that's about that six to 12 months of of severance for most city managers in this state. New city managers, if it's their first city manager appointment, you know they've been an assistant city manager most of them are getting a starting of six months. And then we recommend increasing possibly deferred compensation and then modifying the minimum of a maximum salary range. So right now what we are suggesting is the 10% minimum range would be 273 311 and the top of the range would be 426 84. Now obviously I defer to the city attorney because I'm sure that that's something that would need to be voted on to extend that salary range. But those are our recommendations at this point. So it questions and comments. I am done. My apologies, Mayor. Thanks, Pam. Just a few things. Thank you so much for taking the time to meet with all of us individually to get our and just feedback on what want to see. So, several things. One, the first piece is around the recruitment process, but let me do that part last since you just talked about the salary. So, the range that you're providing, you said 273,000 at the low range to 420. Is that the entire compensation packet? Or is that just a salary? That's just base salary. That's just base salary. So this is an include. So the 420,000 in terms of your recommendation does not include like health or anything. This is just the base salary. OK, so that's important to know. I think just because I, and PMP, I was the one who asked for that, that analysis and comparisons. I appreciate the chart in the packet as well in comparison to the similar size city. So I really appreciate that. So yeah that that that will be up for debate and discussion among my colleagues so looking forward to that conversation and then I I just had a question regarding the recruitment process. I review the timeline that you presented and saw that community and careholders. Can we go back to the timeline if you can go back to the timeline real quick? That community and careholders were part of the early process of the timeline. So when I looked on the timeline, it was around late March, April, the engagement activities. And I'm assuming if you can reconfirm that, the engagement activities, really the purpose of that is to get community feedback in order to shape the qualities and the application. Correct. Correct. We would be having that conversation in those town hall meetings, in the conversations with the organizations that you would provide to us. It's always what are the attributes that you're looking for for the city manager to be successful? We certainly are curious about what they'd like to see the city manager working on in the first year to two years. What are their priorities? And we think all of this information helps you. It helps you come up with the questions that we ask them. It helps us come up with the questions, it helps us look for the right types of candidates in the active recruitment. And then also, you know, we're certainly curious about anything else that they might like to add. But we do want to keep it to two to three standard questions, give a half hour or so for each question to let people provide that feedback. We would provide you with a report regarding that. We've done this in many, for many organizations and then provided a very comprehensive feedback in the other person that it's really important for as the new city manager because it provides them with some early feedback about some of the things that the community and NGOs, CBOs, etc. have been talking about. Okay, great. Yeah, now I appreciate that you heard from my colleagues and I that community and careholders participation is really critical to the process. So really great to see the engagement activities. But I did notice that as we move through the timeline that we didn't have any community involvement in the semi-final stage, which, you know, every elected might have their own perspective of like, should we include community as part of the process? So I just want to put on record that I'm one of the council members that would like to see community be part of that process. And I say that because at the end of the day for me, I understand that mayor and council ultimately, at the end of the day, we decide, we decide, we do the hiring, right? But for me, seeing community participate in some kind of ways, whether that's NDA or like a panel, I would love to see that be part of this in my final round. my colleagues may not agree with me, but I just want to put that on record that that's really important for me. But I just wanted to ask you, because I didn't see that as part of the timeline, but wanted to ask you a few questions. One, are there best practices that we've seen during semi-finalist rounds in other city? If it hasn't been done, would love to hear from you given the mini city manager process that you've been part of. What are the pros and cons of that? Because I would like to see it. I've heard from my own constituent. Yes, council member, you are, you and the mayor and the council is the ultimate decision-maker in terms of the hiring, but we would love to engage throughout the process, not just shaping the applications and the quality, right? So we'll have to hear a little bit from you because I didn't see that on the timeline. Certainly. So one of the things I will say about California is that that is not a typical process. There are other states that always have some type of a meet and greet possibly some type of community engagement. But here in California for the most part, councils or boards of supervisors tend to do the interviews themselves. It certainly can be done and we have done it in the past. I do believe that it has a dampening effect on your active recruitment. There are, especially for those candidates who are happy in their current jobs, and they're considering this, you know, where I've seen it happen is, you know, the candidates are not employed, and, or they're running away from something, frankly, you know, they're not happy, they're employed, but they're not happy in their current position. They're all willing to do this because they want the next job. But those passive candidates who, those are the candidates you really want us to engage in and engage with to try and encourage them to apply. Doing those public processes, if they're, if they're with the council that, you know, they're happy in their position, we don't want to jeopardize their current employment and many of them will see that as if they have to do something public and their name gets out there before they're ready to announce it to their to their board They could decide not to apply it because in in states like Colorado they do it all the time. And Arizona. But we don't typically do it in California. Not that we haven't done it. If it happened, if this council decided that something they wanted to happen, I would suggest that it has to be a very tightly managed process. But anyone who is not part of the council has to sign an NDA, that it's a small group. Each council member maybe picks one person to sit on some type of community panel. The other thing about that is then how do you decide who that person is in a city of almost 600,000 people. It just can raise a lot of concerns, but it's possible to be done, and we have done it. Okay. And then the other question I'm asking is that, is the reason why that's not on the timelines because when you were interviewing all of us, that wasn't a consensus? Correct. Okay, just want to put down a record. Okay, thank you, those are all my questions. Appreciate it. I'll see you guys in a moment. Thanks, Mayor. I thought I had raised my microphone, so. The protocol, different protocol. I just wanted to ask whether it is typical to specify in the solicitation or in the announcement of salary range or instead use salary negotiate based on experience qualifications that kind of language. So in California it is now illegal not to have a salary stated. So you have to state a range or up to a top number but there has to be some type of salary number in there. Okay. Okay. I didn't know that that applied to this kind of- It applies to across the board. Okay. That answers that question. As to the earlier exchange with council member Vang, I certainly would based on my experience urge that while we do active outreach and engagement of community members at the stage that you were describing earlier in the process as we come down to the selection that be the council. So thanks Mayor. Thank you. Councillor Member of the Jennings. Thank you Mayor. Just from a standpoint of performance evaluation, can you speak to what works well or what you have used in the past? Certainly. So and we've even helped do some of these onboarding processes at times, but you know a good city manager and you know who has skilled at city management has come up in the profession, they're going to want to sit down with all of you and set goals and expectations. I mean, I ask every candidate when I'm doing a screening interview, what do you need from the council to be successful? And nine times out of ten, they're going to say, I need clear expectations, I need communication. And those are the top two answers. And so, so that that the, you know, there's nine of you so that you can try, the city manager can try and keep the ship moving in the same direction that everyone is looking for. If you can sit down with everyone and at least get a top four or five things you're looking for for the city manager to accomplish during a year, then you have something to evaluate them on, and you ensure that number one, the salary stays with market, that you know what their performance is. It's like any employee. They're your only employee. So the nine of you then have to come together and decide what that performance evaluation is going to look like. There are many consulting firms that help with those evaluations for councils. We've been doing it at CPS for 20 plus years. My final question is from July 29th to August 8th, you say those are the final steps and I just want to know what's in those final steps and I think more importantly what I what I'm trying to get to is when should the first day on the job be? So I would anticipate if everything is done by August 8th and you approve, if you approve an employment agreement in the first part of August, that someone would be starting no the first part of October. That's usually, you know, some city managers have very long resignation timeframes in their agreements. But that's something, you know, you don't want someone who would give their current employer less than 30 days in a job like this. So you're looking at at least 30 days probably, and if they have toate etc. Some places will start a soft start as we call it so that someone's coming in as they're doing their relocation. But usually you're looking at 30 to 45 days, maybe 60 on the outside. We'd be talking about September October. Okay. I know there was some talk of even the end of the year. I don't think that's going to be, you know, we've built in a lot of time in this timeline. Thank you, Council Member, Councillor. I just want to thank Council Member Rick Jennings for his leadership on this. Kelly Jar, thank you for interviewing all of us. I too, as I stated, having done this a lot, believe the robust up front public process, it just gets a little murky. When we go towards the end of having people sign in India's and keeping things confidential, typically doesn't happen, not that I don't trust my colleagues. I just say let's keep it with us when we make the final decision because ultimately it's us who hire and fire. Everybody else, but I support the direction. I support the timeline timeline I'm looking to see if councilmember Jennings needs anything added to this if he'd like to make the motion of which I'd gladly second Please I heard councilmember Jennings make the motion to approve direction on Cal HR and the process for the timeline and I'll second that. Motion? Motion ma, second. Second. Yeah, the motion is second. I just wanted to reiterate this was the only topic we discussed for the first eight council members council meetings that I was I was mayor and funny thing it all got smoothed out once we gave you the ball so yeah less the ball analogy less than to be learned so yes we we asked you to take the lead on this and here we are and certainly we're confident that the firm that we hired is going to you know find us the best fit for the city of Sacramento. It's a tough job. I know there's one unicorn out there that's right to step up and do this position so thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. I think this is we just finished water forum executive director a few days ago and the The panel said that all the candidates they interviewed were excellent and asked us how we had done that so. Okay. A plug from the water. Yeah. Well thank you. Thank you. So with that we have a motion a second. All those in favor. Oh, sorry. We had two. We didn't reverse this time. We did two public comments. Two public comments. The first one is Mac Worthy and the second one's for Alisa Lee. That's on you. You really, sir? OK. OK. Now, some things here. Last time, she mentioned the Brown Act. She didn't mention that about the Brown Act. Now, she skipped all the way to Chan. I don't think she would hide to depend Chan. I think that's out of her territory. That's out of her territory. Now you had five city managers. Is this going to be the lead city manager? Were a Chan the lead city manager? That woman that's supposed to go. Because she knew. Now, here, where the loan led, Sharon, she always said, I'm attorney. Just when I hear, could he identify who broke the brown hat? What did you hear in that meeting? See, these are the things you're going to have to do here. People, community groups, see, community groups is the people who vote these people in People like me they're not going by me to talk to nobody because I'm gonna ask the real questions Where did you manage a city this size before ask the question? Well, how many people had regenters interviewed? I choose to have a job in number because it never been in the bed But you put him in a position to choose a woman, here, go back and go refer to the attorney. Then the attorney don't say a word. We ain't going to look at your criminal records that after we say we're going to hire you. Now, you go on a job before saying they're going to do it. It's going to your criminal record down. Why is the privilege here? That's not equal justice. That's not equal justice, people. How many people that you know that have managed to sit at this side have been involved in any government, management, the size of Sacramento? Ain't that? Your community groups are the people that you're gonna do is to vote and go get a couple dollars. That was your nonprofit. That's being IRS told me you got 3000 nonprofits. So how can we really bring the truth in and we don't go to court and put them on a Wednesday? We never will. This will be a whole house government app dumb didn't go because that woman now is supposed to be out of here. we're adding it. Hi, my name is Alisa Lee. I live in district four. It would have been nice if comments were taken before the questions because I did have a few. One was, I appreciate the transparency on the timeline. And I notice engagement activity starts tomorrow. I feel like it's possible they may take longer than given that there's time needed to alert the community and plan those events. So just I hope there's room in that schedule for flexibility though I'm sure none of us want to drag out the process any longer. I also want to point out that Council and commissions are on recess for July 7th or 18th during the selection activities portion. I wonder if that's going to be affected. And I bring up the commissions because I'd like to urge that the commissions are part of both the selection activities and the engagement activities sections. I think that there would be fantastic groups to have be part of the process, to talk about what their experience has been and how they would like to, you know, support. And finally, I think one of the big challenges for the city manager entering the next year is to really contend with our structural deficit. So while I know this is mostly about process, but I think looking for candidates who are not going to be afraid of really tackling that head on and trying new creative things looking at the ways other cities are taking on public financial transparency dashboards. I know we're not LA, but it's been really impressive to see what LA City Controller Kenneth Mahia has been doing to educate the community on the state of LA's finances. So I think really looking at how are they not just gonna be great supervisors, great bosses, great team players, but also people who really are not afraid to take on the challenge of our deficit. Thank you. Okay. We do have a motion and a second. I have a motion from councilmember Jennings and a second from councilmember Copeland. Please call the roll. I'm sorry. All those in favor, please aye aye He knows or abstentions sing none See Roger the whole call the roll the like up you can Confusing me on those old I know yes 9-0 Okay. Next item item 19. The. Okay. Next item item 19 the fiscal fiscal year 2324 risk management annual report for your review and discussion. I would be happy to answer any questions you may have regarding the report. Additionally we thought this was a good time to provide counsel with information regarding the increasing insurance costs, the city and public entities in California and nationwide have been experiencing. So we have two guest speakers who are experts in the field. We have Rick Brush, Chief Members Service Officer of Prism. There's Rick and we have Kevin Bibler, Senior Vice President and Align Insurance Services.. Alliance is the city's insurance broker and also the broker for prism as well. So with that, I'll turn it over to Rick. Let's see at presentation. That's Dan. That thank you very much. Mayor and members of council, thank you so much for the time on the agenda this evening. We will be brief. We understand you've had a lot on your agenda and there's more to come. But I want to start off with a little bit of an overview of who is prism. So if I could. Prism is a joint powers authority. Prism was established back in 1979 and Prism exists for one reason and one reason only. We are here to provide the best coverage at the best rate and to help you manage your risk and to help you manage your claims. This is business critical type of stuff. What you did earlier in the agenda this evening, those were heartfelt issues, those were those were social grace. That was outstanding and I'm glad I witnessed all of your public service and everything you do. This is business-critical type of information and that's why we want to bring this into focus right now. So the City of Sacramento joined Prism back in 2005. As I said, we started in, but some of the information you can see here on your screen is that we've grown over time. We have about 70% of the cities in the state. We have 54 of the counties. Overall, we have about 2,100 public entities that are members of prison. And why do they come to prison? So that they can get get coverage. When you're not insurance, we are a pool. So they come to us to have coverage for property, liability, workers' compensation, medical malpractice, crime, cyber, all of these different areas. And tonight what we're going to do is give you a brief overview of what's going on in the market for general liability and for workers' compensation to critical coverages that you are involved with us for. So, as I say, prism is not traditional insurance. The reason that we are here is we bring together the contributions of all of these members to do a couple of very basic things. We need to bring in enough money from every member at an equitable and inequitable way in order to pay claims. In order to purchase re-insurance that attaches above your own individual self-insured retention. We also use our economies of scale so that not only when we go to the re-insurance market, we are able to get you the best price, but when we put together the service offerings for you, we are able to negotiate on behalf of 2100 public agencies. So yes, we get the best service at the best price on behalf of all of our members. The other things that we do is we have the administration and that's who prism is. We're handling the administration of the joint powers authority. Gavin who's going to be up in a moment is going to talk about what the consultants do for us in terms of getting reinsurance and in terms of giving a consulting on market updates and such just like we're going to do tonight. One of the ways that we offset all of these expense is through the investment opportunities that we have. I'll talk a little bit more about that, but one of the things that you see here is that contributions are based on an annual budget. Our members very much value the fact that at our core we want to do things to create stable pricing. We want contributions to be equitable. And we want to make sure that you have all of the information that you need so that you can budget. We were before your budget committee earlier today at 11 and thank you all for the time then. A few of the cost drivers that affect all of the members of Prism are these. One of the things that we do is we need to determine the right rates for the right members So we use what are called exposure basis things such as for workers compensation You based on payroll so if your payroll grows than your exposure grows and our actuaries are the ones that are going to be Determining what is the proper price for each member to be working along the way so that we can do the actuarial estimates for the layers within the pool. The next thing is that above those layers in the pool is we go out to the insurance markets. I can tell you in a very quick story three weeks ago we were back in Chicago we went with 11 markets over the course of two days and the relationships that we have there are huge. We've been working with a lot of these reinsurance providers for up to 25 years. So at a time when the markets are really, really hard, those relationships matter. So I'm going to turn it over to Kevin right now. He's going to talk a little bit about these market updates for work, content, for general liability. Thank you, Rick. Mayor, members of the council. Good evening. Thank you for your time. As has been mentioned, this is a very hard insurance market and costs are up. We see that in our personal insurance at home. We see that as business owners. We see that as public entities. The point of today is to give a little background a little bit of reasoning of why that is. I'm going to go ahead and start with the Workers' Compensation Program. You all self-insure to a very high level, $2 million per worker's compensation claims. Then you go to Prism for excess coverage above that for the catastrophic claims. The workers' compensation market of all of them is relatively stable. Frequency, so the number of claims that are happening has been pretty flat. The severity of claims is going up, but not anywhere near as they are in the liability side, so it's been fairly stable across the board and also here at the city. However, underwriters are paid to worry, and so they are looking at things to keep an eye on trends and one of the trends is the rapidly rising costs for catastrophic claims. We're seeing that survivability is up. Medical technology has caused people to survive things that otherwise they wouldn't have in the past and so there's also an increased life expectancy among our injured and ill workers. That's great from our human standpoint. We'd love to see that. It's expensive from the fiscal standpoint and so that is definitely causing the cost of the work and compensation program and system to go up. We also live in a state where it is expensive to provide health care and so just our health care costs compared to other states are significantly higher. We wanted to go ahead and take a look at the city's performance, your loss history, against your peer group. So if we look at the slide, the top three dials is the city's data, and the bottom three are the other members of the Prism WorkComp program that are in the high safety category. So where they have police and fire. If you look all the way to the right that's the loss frequency and it shows that your loss frequency is about on par with the subject group but if you look all the way to the left your average cost per claims is half what the other group is doing. So you're doing very well at controlling your cost. So we would applaud you that, and we would ask you to keep doing that. The loss rate reflects the amount of dollars paid per $1,000 a payroll. And yours is 3.01. The peer group is 5.5. So again, you're doing a tremendous job of controlling and managing your costs in the work of Copparena. And we applaud that. move on to the general liability. Things are not so rosy there. The GL market is what we would call terribly hard. We're seeing in a just incredible change in loss experience over the last 10 to 12 years. Something fundamentally happening around 2013, 2014 where claims that used to cost two to five million dollars now come in 15, 20, 20, and even higher. And there's explanations, there's reason for it, but it's causing the cost of insurance, the cost of risk to go up dramatically. Unfortunately, this started here in California. We started this negative trend, and it's now across the country, and it's impacting insurance companies sort of across the board. So why is this happening? Well, there's two main catch phrases, social inflation. Social inflation is when the cost of insurance claims outpaces normal inflation that we're seeing, and that has certainly happened over the last decade. The reason for that, jury awards. That's the main culprit. We see these astronomical jury awards that are beginning out and it shifts and change the economics of claims. We call those nuclear verdicts. Technically, a nuclear verdict is anything over $10 million. These days, sometimes we feel lucky to have a $10 million verdict. We're seeing in 2030, 60, $85 million verdicts, and it definitely is shaping the market. Another thing that's coming into play is called litigation funding. This is not as well known as some of the other things we've talked about, litigation funding is when a third party comes in and actually invests in the plaintiff's side of a claim. They allow the claims to keep on going where maybe they would have otherwise had to settle. They pour money into the plaintiff's side. And the problem is, this is a virtually unregulated field. And so these speculators, because that's really what they are, are able to do this without even the ability for the jury to know that it's happening. So in other states and here in California, there has been legislation that has been proposed to at least make it something that the juries are told, but there's still a long way to go. This is a billion dollar industry and it's becoming more and more prevalent in impacting the cost of these claims. Another thing that's having a significant impact is the plaintiff's bar. The plaintiff's bar is very good at increasing the cost of these claims. They're very good at finding claimants. You can see here over $3.4 billion of spent in 2023 in plaintiff bar advertising. So they're out there finding the claims, convincing people to bring lawsuits. And then when they win and they drive up a higher claim, that's good news for the rest of the plan as far because when their next claim is gonna go up and up and up. So that's something that we're keeping an eye on. In closing, the City of Sacramento, your benchmark here, we compared your results to the other 12 to 13 cities that are in this GL2 program. You can see there that your average cost for claim are a little bit higher, 25,000 per claim versus the 23 for the control group. Your frequency is much better. So you're doing something right in terms of controlling the losses, and now we just need to work together to try and control the dollars of those losses when they happen. So that might actually lead you to believe, well, what is Prism doing to try and control these losses along with its membership? And I'll turn it back over to Mr. Brush to talk more about that. Awesome. Thank you, Kevin. Mr. Brush, that was very formal. All right. So you're now armed with all this information of what's going on with the market, right? So what is Prism doing about it? That should be the next question. And if you look at this, we break this down into many different elements. So from an underwriting standpoint, what we're doing is we're working with the membership, right? I don't know if you saw on some of these slides, but we are very much member driven. We're member directed. It's 150 employees of our members that staff all of our committees are bored in our executive committee. So, our members are working with our underwriting committee and saying basically, do we have the right structures in place? Are we charging people the right amount? Is this an equitable amount for the members? And what are we doing to help members? But one of the things is looking at each of the individual members' self-insured retention. I know that this is Pat has been working with us and with your actuaries on as well. The other thing that I need to say very quickly is that as I say we are member directed, I need to give thanks to your staff. Pat is a member of our claims review committee as well as our general liability and our churnio back in the back of the room is a member of our risk control and member services committee. So thank you to them because all of this work does not happen without them. The next thing we do is we help all of our members in terms of managing the claims. We have overall about 35 people in our claims department that sit by your side helping members every day in terms of what are the best things that we can do and what are the strategies that we can put in place to best manage these claims. And I'm saying this in the way of, we want to pay people what they are due. We don't want to be paying people nuclear verdicts if that is not reasonable. So those are the things we're doing on that side. We have data and analytics that helps your risk management folks slice and dice these data in so many different ways so that they can look at trends and they can say these are the risks that are affecting us and now we know what best to manage. We have a team of 14 people that handle our loss control and member services department. One of the biggest things that we do is we have a legislative committee made up of all of our members that is doing things such as Kevin talked about but we're working with an industry trade association called Kajapa to look at based on everything that's going on. Can we be looking and working with a legislature on items such as tort reform? Is that appropriate? Because it's not only cities and counties that this is affecting, school districts are going bankrupt. So how is it that we can be armed with information in find ways to work with a legislature to make sure that these things are done appropriately and that these nuclear verdicts don't put public entities out of business. Those are a lot of the things that we're doing. The last thing you'll see here on this slide is we've done some very creative things in terms of our investments and I mean creative in a good way. We've built a captive insurance company that helps us have much greater investment return and the last point I want to make on this is it's not only about investments, but we have about a billion dollars within our captive. And what that does is when we go to the reinsurance community and they say we're going to charge you X, we can say we have enough money within our wallet to be able to self-insure this if we think it's you're charging us too much. so it gives us a little bit more control over the market. Those are some of the things that we're doing. So what are the things that our members can do is stay current. Again, you have people that are involved. You have Pat, you have Sean Neal that are serving on committees. They know what to do in terms of maintenance inspections and trainings. One of the things is considering to take on more risks. Does it make sense to increase your self-insured retention? Knowing that all at the same time, if you do that, you're going to have to put aside additional funds to fund that self-insured retention. Defend claims that are defensible. We thankfully have been very successful, especially in the area of law enforcement, when jury verdicts over the past four or five years were immediately giving monies away. Now they are doing a much better job of looking at the particulars of the claim, the particulars of the trial, and we're actually winning court cases that we should win. So when you've got a good claims pattern, don't be afraid to defend those claims. That's what I have Kevin, I think you're going to wrap up just a couple. Yeah just real quickly another thing is to make sure your data is good. I mean data is king in terms of when we go out and we're negotiating with underwriters if we can show them good data statistical evidence it helps a whole lot so investing in data and making sure that it's up to date and easily transferable is really strong. Consider purchasing additional coverage over time. Yes, the insurance salesman is saying you should buy more coverage. But really, these verdicts and settlements are going up at such a rate that you buy $40 million of coverage right now in the liability side. And that's probably enough, but at some point it won't be. And so it's just something to keep in mind in tough budget times, it's hard to do that. That's understandable enough but at some point it won't be and so it's just something to keep in mind in tough budget times it's hard to do that that's understandable but at some point you might consider doing that in the future. Support legislative change that are beneficial to the defendants it might not surprise anyone here that the plain is lobby is pretty strong and so we need to be out there talking to the legislature as well for things like you know the investments that folks are doing in terms of claim investments. And then finally help educate the public. Rick mentioned that we want to pay what's fair and reasonable when we've injured or damaged something and that's the economic loss. A lot of times these nuclear verdicts happen because of the non-economic loss, the pain and suffering. And that's where the numbers get really, really big and juries feel sympathetic. And they give out tens of millions of dollars. We just need to remind the folks that that dollar is actually taxpayer dollar and we just have to be careful with it. And that's all we have for you today, but we would love to answer any questions that you might have. Thank you for your presentation there, Madam Clerk, members for the public signed up to speak. We have one speaker, Keon Bliss. It's Keon Bliss here. Mr. Bliss, okay. The speaker's not here so Madam Clerk, we'll move on to members of the council. I'll go with council member Kaplan and then council member Dickinson and then I'll put you up to speak after that. Council member Kaplan. Thank you Mayor Pro Tem. You know I know that this was given at BNA today of which I quasi listen to thank you for presenting this. It's a lot of information and sometimes overwhelming but I think it just highlights as we look at our $44 million deficit. Some of the tangible but untangible things that are also hampering the city's ability to stay and have a balanced budget. But I will call out a couple of good things because amid admits to all of the the doom and gloom offense that you presented. A worker claims are down. So I want to thank city staff because a lot of that I think has to go to training Programs and how we educate our employees that puts us at 18% below the average Which I know goes into effect. Well it doesn great that we're paying more. We're not paying as much more as we could be paying. And I do want to call out that this is the little things. Chief Lester said to us a couple of years ago, we have a lot of young officers who might be getting into a couple more accidents, because they hadn't been driving a lot. So she instituted more training for our younger officers who are doing patrol, which will have an effect because then we lower the accident rate because they have more training because I can tell you having done a couple ride alongs, it's a lot to pay attention to everything and serve at the same time. But I think this also gives us a chance to maybe take a step back and have a little bit of a deep dive policy conversation of what is the effect if we increase our coverage or increase what the city pays out first. What's the cost benefit of that? Because I heard the suggestions, but I think the next step for me, if we were to take that, what does that look like? What, how does that all bear out? So I'm open to having staff come back, give information to BNA, and how they may want to look at that. I think that is important. And again, I will echo the data is important. So thank you to all city staff who are managing keeping that data because it's important that we have it because it comes to this of how we actually pay out what we're paying out. And I support the being vigorous in defending what the city does to make sure that we don't have those nuclear payouts. So thank you. Great. Thank you, Member. Thank you, Council Member Kaplan. Council Member Dickinson. Thank you. I won't ask you all the same question. Go through the same thing. I went through this morning. Actually, but you're comment about nuclear verdicts triggered a question for me, which is there's been a fair amount of press lately, particularly related to school districts, and you mentioned school districts in your comments, related to now litigation, they find themselves involved in regarding sexual harassment or sexual abuse. And a significant increase in claims or allegations and litigation and it appears a significant increase in either settlements or verdicts. So it just may be wonder wonder the extent to which that's driving at least a portion of this increase in what we're seeing in terms of verdict results. Yeah, I think that's a very astute observation and that has had a huge impact on the cost and the increase in claims and claim values. the Reviver statutes that were put in place in 2020-ish, which opened up the window for folks to bring lawsuits where maybe they had been timed out previously. It also expanded the age from 27 to 40 years of age when you can bring these. And so that in and of itself created this scenario where we got a lot more volume of claims. A lot of those claims are so long ago now because of that change that there's really no evidence. There's really nothing to base anything upon. And so yeah, and sometimes it's very difficult even to find people who are around when it happened. And so yes, not only here in California, but that's happening in 30 states across the union. So yes, that is at a very big impact. I would only say that there is evidence, there may not be evidence that's helpful to defend those claims still. But certainly the plaintiff can provide evidence. But that aside, is it worth doing an analysis of claims and litigation evolving the city and exclude that type of litigate? I'm not aware that we're seeing a significant increase on that aspect of litigation. Would it adjust potentially your assessment of where things are going from a liability standpoint, general liability standpoint for the city if you excluded that aspect of litigation we're seeing. Yeah, it doesn't tend to be the cities and counties that are hit so much with that particular exposure. It's more the schools. That's exactly my point. So within And so within prism and within other carriers who are rating the city versus the, there are different rating groups. And so your rates are going to be determined upon your sort of more homogeneous members. So other cities, other counties, and not as impacted by the loss experience from the schools. OK. So that in terms of our actual rates and coverage options, but in your presentation you obviously are emphasizing the growth in inverted results for plaintiffs and I just wonder if that picture would be a little bit better if you excluded what's happening with largely with schools and we'd see something different to look at. Yeah, it could be, but on the other hand, and we remind our schools, or excuse me, our cities and counties, they've got law enforcement, they've got road design, they've got dangerous condition claims, all very, very large verdict potential type claims and drivers of the law's experience as well. And so I think it evens out to extent, but I do hear your point that if we separated that out and just looked at city exposure, which kind of is what we were looking at in those examples. The benchmarking were only against other cities in the program. Yeah, and that seemed to be somewhat a different picture than the verdict information you were showing. Thanks. Thank you very much, Councilmember Dickinson. Fair point, I think we should disaggregate at least the risk. I do acknowledge that it's juries that are looking at this, so the condition of what a jury sees in a picture is the point I think that's there. I'm not at my desk, so I'm going to go off my head here. One of the reasons we have this is I ask that we do this workshop. Now, I will say I'm a little frustrated. It was done in today's budget and not in hearing because it was a very tight budget hearing. But I'd like to make sure that we set this again, particularly maybe in the early fall when budget and not it has a different workload. Because the purpose of what I hope to get out of bringing this to the council and the budget and not a committee was, oh, thank you very much. is to dive into some of these issues. I'll for one I'll start off with some of the claims on strain. And what I was pleased to see both Councilmember Wang and I sit on the Sacramento Employment Training Agency and our insurance costs came way down. 80% of the operations for that agency is child care centers. And when you're dealing with kids, as you mentioned earlier, those are high risk situations. But yet our insurance rate came down because of some of the conditions that were changed and the overall Head Start programs to say, hey, we are taking active I'm sorry. But our insurance rate came down because of some of the conditions that were changed in the overall head start programs to say, hey, we are taking active action and so the adjuster noticed that. So my hope for this process here, and so I hope that this is the first of future processes that we dive into, where how we can make these adjustments. And I'll start off on a couple ones here one What I noticed here on was on general claims 78% of them were were actually non-police and fire At least in the staff report here Now when it comes to fire they have an affirmative presumption for good reason in under the state law And because of what we've seen, firefighters, they later on get there, see that they have issues in life that have to do with their work when they were on the force here. But if you exclude that, then what are the things that we can be doing at the other pool that are non-police and fire, where 78% of the general claims are. Can we be looking at those, are they, and they tend to be all strain claims it looks like. So are they in particular departments, are they in, with our arborists, are they, you know, in public works or utilities. So I think, you know, and I know our staff have been doing that in some sense, but I'd like to dive in deeper because given the fact that you would do have an affirmative presumption on, say, fire, we still see a larger chunk in this area. So the second piece I'd like to highlight here is on our auto liability, even no matter which way you cut it, more than 50% are also non-police and fire. Now, the biggest chunk of the others is police, and obviously that has to do with, there are more vehicles in that route, but both police and fire have the most vehicles, but the majority of our auto claims are coming in non-those departments. So one, we talked about the benefit that the city is now doing on evoc, where even if you're in the parks department or if you're in solid waste, you're doing evoc training and the roadway training. So I'd like to identify, okay, well, if we see that the majority of our insurance issues are happening in areas where they should be normal driving conditions that aren't in emergency situations where their speeding are going through and have to go through an intersection, then are there things that we need to be doing more in the majority of that section on auto claims to bring our risks down? So those are a couple thoughts that I'd like to just throw out and say, well, what are the things we could do so that maybe we can replicate? And again, the employment training agency is a different joint powers authority, much smaller one than the city, to change the conditions or insurance rates. Maybe don't go down, but at least don't continue to rise. So that's a question. Yeah. So you currently the city provides data on a monthly basis to prism. So ground up data uncapped, we've got a ton of data. So we can certainly help with slicing, dicing that data into department level results and find out where the losses are happening. And then Rick and his team, Rick is part of the 14 employee team at prison that handles loss control and risk management and they have all kinds of services that can be applied and can be available to the city. So I think there's definitely something there in terms of analysis and follow-up training. Okay, good. That sets up the, oh, go ahead, can you please. Yeah, I can, some of those things that we are doing, we have a vehicle review committee that Ryan Moore chairs, maybe two times a year, and we provide lots of data to the departments on auto accidents, whether it's size wives, whether it's trending, with rear end accidents. So that's the auto side. We also have RISTS team meetings with departments every fall, usually in October and November. And those meetings, we provide them a lot of information, workers' conversation claims, we provide them nine or 10 different charts, on different kinds of injuries, what's driving everything. So what I would suggest is, and we get our next actuary report will be in, in September, October. That time frame, we can present those findings along with our RIS team meeting presentations. They give you a ton of data on auto accidents, liability claims, and workers comp. And I'll give you a really good start to dive into it and ask us questions what you want us to look at and work on. Perfect. As an interim assistant city manager, interim city manager, Leni Milstein. Thank you. Too many titles, right? Because I'm that too. Yes, that former fire chief too. So there you go. I think Patrick, it would be good too, is to be able to share in the fall, how it is we advise departments based on that information and what types of trainings we offer based on the information that we see and how departments are taking advantage of that in order to reduce their experience and exposure. Because it's something we're engaged in all the time. Yeah, and it's one thing I will add is about two years ago, three years ago, we noticed our auto claims are going up. And we made a very concerned effort to last two or three years that every meeting discussed that. If I had more data to the departments and just been stressing that for two or three years now, I will be happy to say a little good news. Our claims are down, our auto claims are down for the first eight months of this year, probably 20 to 25% from prior years. So, you know, hopefully that's the reason that's a result of all the work you've been doing on that. So we're doing a lot of, we're looking at these things, but we'd be happy to have a good detailed discovery session in the fall with a lot of information that you guys would find interesting. Great. So that's he's up to point that, you know, the issue of general condition claims. And our next item on the city council here will be about how we are making tactical changes to reduce impacts and liability. One of the first, you know, what do you call it? One of the first litigations that I remember when I first came on the council was a garbage truck that hit a cyclist off of J Street. And that was a very tragic situation. But if the city of Sacramento, this is where I'm putting it on the insurance company, you guys want us to buy a higher coverage. All right, but then at the same time, we're making improvements to reduce our risks. So where is the tradeoff here on reducing the insurance costs and the insurance premium? If now the city's taking action on things like making intersection safer, looking at areas where there can be less vehicle fatalities or vehicle to pedestrian fatalities or particular things with our equipment, same striping or lighting. There are different things, right? Obviously in the childcare zone, we talked about trip areas for kids, right? That's a big one. They're running all the time. They're tripping, right? So, you know, and that reduced some of the claims. So, maybe that's a question for prison here. Like, if the city was to begin doing this, hypothetically, and you don't have to, but if we think through this, how is it that all of a sudden now where 53% of our non-police and fire, which go through intersection, but this is a normal traffic? How can we use this as an opportunity to readjust and reevaluate our effort? While we also, as mentioned, Councillor Dicconston didn't repeat what he said in budget and not it, but look at the actuarial of where does it make sense to increase our premium, I think there's two main areas where your good work, you know, avoiding losses will result in lower costs for the city. The first you just mentioned was the self-insured retention. So currently you're responsible for the first $2 million of every liability claim. So to the extent you don't have them, you save that money. And I think the number we arrived at earlier today was about $11.8 million in the current year in the actual wear-ill study, so that's some money to save. The second point is that if your loss experience improves, you will get credit within the prism actuarial, or excuse me, allocation system. So it's not just a rate versus payroll, that's the basis of the allocation and then positive or negative loss experience impacts premiums up or down. So there would be an impact in improving the experience. Okay, thank you. So I'd like to for September we've got some time. Let's figure out how we improve the experience. Let's put it that way. And so one obviously we want to save lives. We don't want our employees to get injured. We want to make sure that people have a lifelong healthy living experience. But at the same time, we want to look at reducing our insurance costs for the city. So I don't see any other council members punch up to speak. Thank you again for your time. This is a receive and file. And you know, we'll see you in September. Thank you very much. Madam Clerk. So for the record, our next item item number 20, budgetary adjustments for old Sac Revitalization Improvement Project has been continued to April 1st, 2025 per staff direction. So we'll now be going to item 21, the Transportation Safety Initiative, established positions, established quick build capital improvement project, and suspend competitive bidding and approve an alternate procurement process to install signing and stripping and quick build improvements. All righty, welcome Matt. Thank you. Last on the agenda. Yes. Sighting most exciting one. It is everybody's been waiting. Good evening, Vice Mayor Tilemante's Council members and community advocates, Madam Irman, Director of Public Works. Thank you for the opportunity to speak about an important step forward for our city. In enhancing how public work delivers safer and more efficient streets to all Sacraments. Sacraments roads have continuously evolved for decades. For decades our streets were designed primarily to move cars quickly. Reflecting an error when speed and vehicle throughput were dominant priorities. Today we recognize that our transportation network must do more. It must serve everyone, whether they're walking, biking, taking transit or driving. With 3,100 lane miles, 850 signalized intersections and a dedicated team of over 750 public works employees, we have a vast infrastructure to manage. But we also have an opportunity to be more nimble, responsive, and innovative in how we move our streets. We are already making significant investments in safety and mobility to our Vision Zero initiatives. Some of our key accomplishments include reducing speed limits to 15 miles an hour on 225 streets and school zones, updating the city's pedestrian crossing guidelines, adopting a comprehensive complete streets policy, installing pedestrian safety quick build improvements at more than 30 intersections, delivering targeted quick build projects on the Paso Boulevard near Hagenwood Elementary, at 34th and Broadway near Sacramento High School, and at Broadway and Martin Luther King, Junior Boulevard near low income senior housing. Developing a corridor plan for six of the top 10 vision zero priority areas with strong community support. We are also moving forward with major corridor and mobility projects including Broadway complete streets and vision Broadway, stocked in Boulevard complete street and safety improvements, central city mobility plan, Franklin Boulevard complete streets. These large projects will transform how people move through our city, but they take years to plan, fund and construct. We cannot wait that long to make Sacramento streets safer. That's why Public Works is committed to expanding our in-house resources and services to deliver quick, data-driven, and community-informed improvements that enhance safety, accessibility, and efficiency across all modes of transportation. By strengthening our internal capabilities, we will be able to design, implement, and maintain improvements more efficiently, reducing our reliance on outside contractors, and accelerating project timelines, whether it's protected bike lanes, pedestrian safety enhancements, transportation priority treatments, or other high impact interventions, we are focused on moving from planning to action what the urgency are our streets demand. This work would not be possible without the dedication of our community advocates. Your voices and persistent efforts have helped us shape how we prioritize street improvements and we remain committed to working alongside you to make Sacramento Street safer and more connected. I also want to express my appreciation to Council Member Maple for her leadership and commitment to mobility and safety. Her support has been instrumental in advancing these initiatives. Additionally, I would like to thank Council Member Kaplan. Following two tragic incidents on Club Center Drive, just months apart at the same intersection, she brought city staff and the communities together and public works responded swiftly. In response to the community concerns, we implemented quick build safety improvements and the results have been highly successful. This effort demonstrates exactly why we must continue to improve and expand our ability to deliver rapid targeted street safety enhancements when and where our community needs the most. To provide more details on how public works is structuring and scaling these efforts, I'd like to introduce Megan Carter, our city traffic engineer. Megan has been a driving force in advancing Sacramento's street safety and mobility initiatives, and she will walk us through our proposal and the next step in improving our transportation network. Megan? Hello, everyone. Good evening, Mayor and council members. My name is Megan Carter and I am the city traffic engineer and transportation division manager for public works. I'm here today to present a new initiative to do as Matt described, adjust our approach to transportation safety treatments and scale up our efforts to respond to tragic traffic fatalities and serious injuries with quick response, data driven, and community informed focused with a quick response, data driven, and community informed, focused with a quick response data driven and community informed, focused team. The public works team heard from community and council through the discussion around a state of emergency that there are several key goals. Identify, fund, and implement, quick build, tactical urbanist solutions, be more responsive and innovative to reduce traffic fatalities, engage with the community in the development of project locations and the solutions. Be transparent, communicate the timeline, design decisions, and progress, and expedite projects in high-risk areas. The city's current safety response efforts within public works reside in three divisions, mobility and sustainability, transportation, and engineering services. Mobility and sustainability manages the planning, programming, and policy support while transportation and engineering services implements infrastructure components within staffing and funding capacities. This proposal would establish the Vision Zero Sacramento Transportation Safety Team, a better name to be determined. Within the Transportation Division to lead and implement Swift, data-driven safety improvements across Sacramento's high-endering network that are integrated with other public works transportation safety planning programs and initiatives. The transportation safety team's mission is to reduce traffic fatalities and serious injuries through quick, proactive interventions aligned with the city's vision zero goals. In addition, resources would be redirected to deliver interim quick build improvements on critical corridors such as the vision zero top 10 high injury network corridors were feasible. If approved, the fiscal year 2526 budget will include the funding framework to implement these new initiatives. The Transportation Safety Team is Sacramento's commitment to creating a city where every resident feels safe on our streets. Together we can ensure that Sacramento's streets are safer for everyone. So the key to delivering on this vision to be more nimble, responsive, and innovative is staff resources. Public Works is already delivering quick build low cost improvements through the traffic investigations team and maintenance crews within the Transportation Division. But the scale of the work is limited by workload capacity and often pulls maintenance crews away from their primary responsibility to repair existing infrastructure. Thus, this Transportation Safety Initiative requires a dedicated transportation safety team made up of a supervising engineer that will oversee this team and the traffic investigators leading the greater vision and cross-departmental collaboration with the police department and council offices and share safety and consistency and by supporting innovation. A senior engineer that will lead the community engagement, oversee the younger engineers, and guide the design and project delivery progress. Two assistant engineers that will be integral and providing the promised responsiveness to all communities throughout Sacramento. And experience traffic investigators skilled in field measurement, on-site evaluation, document research, and customer service. As I said, we already have a traffic investigations teams, but as we scale up the severed, as we want to do more, we need more staff because they are tapped out. Lastly, this team will need administrative support to manage the constant flow of construction contracts to construct the quick build treatments. Here is an example that Matt talked about at Club Center Drive and Bamfield Drive in District 1 following the two tragic fatalities last year. We implemented this which we consider a great example of some of our quick build treatments. So we turned a standard white crosswalk into a high visibility yellow crosswalk because there is a school adjacent to this this location, and we also implemented quick build pedestrian islands to add protection to the wider crossing. So with new dedicated staffing and resources, the city will implement quick cost effective solutions that can be implemented within months to address high risk areas. The specialized team would focus on rapid response traffic safety improvements at intersections, pedestrian crossings, and high-risk roadway locations. We are calling these Tier 1 projects. Tier 1 project locations would be community informed. The transportation safety team will combine real-time crash data with community input to identify locations throughout our neighborhoods that create barriers to the public feeling safe to choose walking, biking, scooting, transit, or even driving to places they need to be. School, work, home, and all the places in between. The team will engage with City council members to address district specific needs focusing on the most vulnerable populations, community organizations, advocacy groups, neighborhood associations, to align projects with local goals and identify locations that may not yet show up in crash data, but hinder communities feeling of safety. They will also coordinate with the police department to react to current crash trends and recent fatal and serious injury crash locations and use real-time crash data to direct the interventions, meaning based on what kinds of crashes are happening that's directs the type of treatment that we would implement. Other ways the transportation safety team will engage in, where engage is through feedback and follow up with the community organizations that helped identify project locations. We will develop a map based project dashboard to show the locations that are in planning, design, and construction. This will allow the community to follow along with the safety improvements most important to them. The Transportation Safety Team will also provide an annual report to document how resources were used, the safety outcomes that were achieved, and the communities that were touched. One of the other key goals in the state of emergency discussion was to expedite projects in high-risk areas and we are calling these Tier 2 projects. The city will implement one to three projects that are interim or quick build solutions to situations that may later require more engineering design intensive solution. These Tier 2 projects are solutions that can be implemented within a year, focusing on major high engineering network corridors and vision zero priorities. Many of these will be interim solutions while staff pursues grant funding for full complete streets investments. As Matt mentioned, those can take us years to get enough funding for. Design improvements might include lane reductions, pedestrian islands, medians, and enhanced crossings consistent with future capital project improvements that can be installed near term using temporary treatments such as just striping or temporary barriers. Those projects, these tier two projects will be delivered by the engineering services division in collaboration with the transportation safety team for review and coordination of city traffic standards and operations. Some example locations that are already sort of in the works are Mary'sville Boulevard Vision Zero. That is the greater corridor project but we are looking at a quick build solution to that project. Broadway at Stockton, that's the Vision Zero top five location. Let's see Northgate Boulevard Vision Zero which is one of the top ten high-endry network corridors and for its road improvements. Another... the top 10 high injury network corridors and for it to road improvements. Another important key to delivering traffic safety quickly is contracting readiness. To avoid having to procure improvement separately through low bid process and slow responsiveness, this resolution would suspend competitive bid and allow an alternative request for proposal or request for qualifications process to select contractors that can be called on to construct the necessary improvements. The city will request qualifications and proposals from contractors to provide services such as installation and maintenance of road signs, lane striping, bike lane treatments, markings such as crosswalk. Essentially, all of the quick build treatments that we would want to install with this program, we want to get on call contractors that can do that work. And again, that allows our maintenance crews for traffic signs and markings to continue to focus on the maintenance responsibility that we have for maintaining the rest of the city's roadways. So through this process, the city will be able to utilize contractors to provide the needed services within short notice through the on-call agreement or master services agreement. This process will allow the city to select qualified contractors providing various services, providing more options to complete projects quickly with established scope, schedule and budget. Consistent with city code requirements, approval of master services agreements and any agreement that exceeds 250,000 per contract will return to city council for approval. Transportation safety team will execute task orders on these on-call contracts to deliver smaller projects in multiple locations city wide to keep costs low and achieve similar safety improvements in many neighbourhoods and communities. So that just means that we would bundle similar treatments that are going to be done in multiple council districts and to ideally into the same contract so that on call contractor can execute those kind of at the same time or pretty quickly at the same time so communities throughout the city will experience the same safety improvements. So we think this approach will allow us to deliver critical projects to truly impact community safety in a matter of months rather than years. Now how will the team and these projects be funded? Understanding the city's budget situation, staffed analyze the city's ongoing annual revenue for dedicated transportation funds, which is primarily gas tax and measure countywide transportation sales tax, looked at a five-year revenue and spending projections and identified opportunities to repurpose and take opportunities of cash flow to fund staff positions and contracts on an ongoing basis without affecting the city budget deficit. The new team will rely on a 2.6, thank you. The new team will rely on a 2.6 Thank you The new team will rely on a 2.6 million dollar safety program to To be established with the new fiscal year 2526 capital improvement program with the upcoming budget process As well as existing programs that we already have funding for such as the real real-wave quiet. For some reason that's a mouthful. Pedestrian Safety Envision Zero. City staff has been identifying potential to tier two projects, as I mentioned. Quick build options as interim solutions for major corridor improvements. Establishing a new Quick Build CIP by transferring $2 million from the road maintenance and rehabilitation and major street construction funds will allow staff to begin steps for implementing implementation of these actions. There is available funding in the Transportation Quarter Program to support the transfer. And just to reiterate, the Transportation Safety Initiative is in addition to continued efforts of the mobility and sustainability and engineering services and transportation divisions, delivering the larger capital improvement projects, including the top 10 Vision Zero Quarter projects, efforts to obtain grant funding and finalized project approval and design will not pause. To strengthen its approach, the city is updating the Vision Zero Action Plan to integrate new traffic safety data and ensure continued eligibility for competitive grant funding. The updated plan will designate safety corridors as defined by the state of California, and align with the Safe Streets for All Discretionary Federal Program, and identify high priority areas for targeted infrastructure and policy interventions. And it's the end of the night. So in conclusion, the Transportation Safety Initiative presented today for approval will address the need to change our approach to transportation safety and scale up our efforts to respond to traffic fatalities, to be more responsive, innovative, and nimble, to focus attention on the issues most critical to Sacramento through staff resources and funding within the existing available budgets. To expedite quick build projects in our highest risk areas on our top 10 high injury net recorders, to respond with efficiency and schedule the ongoing delivery of small low cost projects in three to six months turnaround using an established on-call list with contracting authority. Most of the program funding will begin with the new fiscal year. With City Council action today, we can begin recruitment for new positions and soliciting contractors so that we'll be in place and funded with the new fiscal year. It takes time to hire people. As we saw with the city manager recruitment. If we're proved tonight, our next steps will be to outreach to coalition partners that helped seek this framework to establish a program and team name. It's mission vision and values, a brand and a marketing campaign to weave throughout every effort the Transportation Safety Initiative is involved in. These efforts will advance the city's commitment to safer streets and help accelerate progress towards eliminating traffic fatalities through strategic investments, data driven solutions, and policy updates. This concludes my presentation. Applause. Thank you. I guess my first ever standing ovation for a staff presentation. Well, this is a big topic. Hence we have 27 speakers. About an hour public comment, so come up and share your perspective and wisdom. If you're inspired by the speaker before you, you can just come up and do a couple of finger snap and then get back down. And then quite a few council members would like to weigh in on this as well. So let's begin with public comment. We're going to start with the first five speakers. If you can line up in the aisle so we can try to get through this. Mark Harmon, Michael Bevens, Michael Andrew Barnbaum, Kay Crumb, and Alex Bink. Hello, I've been speaking most of these city council meetings about this. My name is Mark Harman and I am in the live and land park and Jenny district district. Seven and I fully support the creation of the active transportation safety team and approve funding to carry out quick bill projects high risk locations across the city the places that we all know too well and I've seen repeated instances of preventable traffic violence As everyone knows this is public safety issue, and that's basically the highest priority in everyone's priority list. The city of Sacramento is far too dangerous for pedestrians, cyclists, and motorists. And I just wanna say thank you for your time. Next speaker, Michael Beavins. Hello, Council, Michael Beavins, I mentioned that earlier. I really don't know what to say. I come up here. Usually come up here to question something or complain about something. Or hey, you guys aren't looking at this. In this case, I just want to say thanks. Thank you thing, there's something down the road. I'm sure the activation, the active team, whatever that might be is going to have a backlog of things to do. I only suggestion is to kind of split the time between the high obvious recent fatalities. Look at that, fix it, and then the other half of the time do the easy picking stuff, painting sharrows on the road where they actually need to be, not where they are, maybe have a bigger racer and erase some of the sharrows that are out there now that are in dangerous places. Stuff like that, change a stop sign to a yield sign, if appropriate of course, but take the big important stuff that is happening using different penalties and then mix it also with easy stuff. Also, thank you. Michael Barmbom. Good evening Mayor and Council Commissioner Barmbom from the Disability Advisory Commission but I'm not here this evening to necessarily speak on anything from our commission, but I'm going to step outside my comfort zone and congratulate the staff on this presentation, but also fellow commissioners on other boards and commissions, specifically those that have worked harder and smarter to bring this item before you today from the active transportation commission that are in the council chambers this evening. Thank you to all of you that have done the yeoman's work to bring what is before the council on tonight's agenda. And with that, I would like to thank council member Maple for numerous times mentioning the emergency that's in place of a vigil that was held on January 2nd, which also my own very council member Dickinson attended as well and spoke. And with that, I would like to, if the time and words allow, would like to make an advisory motion to approve the staff recommendation as listed in the agenda for this evening on item 21, especially emphasizing the focus during a $44 million deficit that the hiring of six full-time equivalent positions is critical to public safety moving forward. And directing staff in a 90-day window, let's say Tuesday, June 24th, to come back because you need time to hire, and report to council at 5 p.m. June 24th of the six new people that have been hired for this position, so we know what it's like going into the new fiscal year. Thank you. Okay, Crum. Hi, my name is Kay Crum. I'm a to try to keep this brief. Just some statistics according to the city crime statistics from 2013 to 2017, 185 people died from homicide. And that same time, 238 pedestrians died from traffic violence. We adopted Vision Zero in 2017. And from 2018 to 2022, 170 people died in homicide. And in that same time, 162 pedestrians died from traffic violence. According to Smart Growth Americas, 2024, dangerous by by Design Report, our area is ranked in the top 20 for pedestrian deaths out of 101 US metro areas. And in 2024, 30-cute pedestrians died on our street. So homicide rates are dropping over the last couple of years, which is really inspiring, but people are dying just because they dared to walk or bike on our streets. And that's not dropping. don't feel safe on our streets and as a pedestrian, I don't feel safe on our streets. So, SACPD is allocated $251 million or 17% of our 24, 25 annual budget to combat homicides and crimes. And that item or this item is the first item that we're investing in pedestrian safety. So I want to say thank you very much for this first step. And I sincerely hope that we will see much more funding in the future to protect our neighbors who dare to walk or bike in Sacramento. Thank you for making this a priority. Our next five speakers after Alex are going to be Ben Raiderstorf, Isaac Gonzalez, Alisa Lee, Wesley Allen, and Morgan Murphy if you can please line up. Hi, I'm from District 4 and I just want to say that Sacramento is in the midst of a street safety crisis. There are dozens of traffic fatalities every year, often outnumbering murders. Yet street safety gets a tiny fraction of the attention funding. I urge the council to take the actions needed to end this crisis and protect the safety of our community. Local road safety has been systematically undermined by a century of failed street design, and it will take a substantial transformation of our streets to solve this. In spite of the city's 2017 pledge to end traffic violence, the numbers show essentially no progress to date. This speaks to the failure of the city to take substantial action to solve this crisis. Meanwhile, other world cities have cut traffic deaths dramatically. The solutions are now well known. It simply takes courage and funding. Please pass this initiative and grant our city an operating budget to deal with this pressing issue But further bold actions are needed to adequately solve this problem Council will need to work with the community the active transportation Commission and city staff recent city plans are promising but we'll need much greater funding to be implemented within our lifetimes Or if the city cannot locate the required funds then it should consider allowing a community to fund and make street improvements ourselves. Thank you. Ben? Ben here? Oh, Ben's going. Isaac? Not a King's game. Good evening, Mayor and Council members. My name is Isaac Gonzalez, and I'm the founder of Slowdown Sacramento, a community-driven initiative focused on traffic safety and preventing crashes before there happened. It's an item here to express my strong support for the creation of a dedicated transportation safety team within our city. This is not just a bureaucratic adjustment. It's a signal that Sacramento takes the safety of its residents seriously and is ready to line its staffing with its vision zero commitments. I want to recognize the role all of our community members and all of our advocacy here today has been playing to bring in this conversation forward. For just us, Slade down Sacramento, besides the many other groups we have here, since August 2023, we've been trying to educate residents, elevating lived experiences and advocating for more coordinated and accountable approaches to street safety and quick build and tactile urbanism has been on the top of our list since the very beginning. I'm proud to say it's the number one policy priority on our 2025 policy priority list. This proposal tonight is a result of consistent community rooted advocacy and it reflects with the parents, families, and neighbors I've been talking to all across the city have been calling for. Right now, families in our communities live in daily fear. Fear that simply crossing the street or biking to school get in tragedy. We see this in the data, but more importantly, we hear it from our neighbors. A transportation safety team gives us the structure we need to proactively address problem areas, respond faster to community concerns, and implement these proven data-driven safety solutions. This team can be the connective issue between departments, advocates and residents, essentialized group focused solely on saving lives. And by housing this work under one roof, we can move faster, be more accountable and avoid the siloed approach that too often slows down progress. This is smart, timely, and a life-saving move. It shows that our city is ready to lead, not just in words, but in action. So I urge you all, please, support the creation of this team, fund it accordingly, and give it the authority and resources it needs to make a real difference. Thank you. Alisa? Hi everyone, my name is Alisa. I live in District 4, and I've so fired up after Megan's presentation. I'm going to go ahead and get the staff. Hi, everyone. My name is Alisa. I live in district 4. I'm so fired up after Megan's presentation. I'm in strong support of this agenda item and as council to please approve it in full. I just want to also highlight Megan, respecting and honoring that there has been input, there has been engagement on this. So really, truly, thank you. And I want to also point out that this item got 120 e-comments and literally over 99% were in support. I think when there's leadership and real response to community demands, Sacramento really shows up and this is proof of that. And so we're just really grateful to see this on the agenda. It's a great proposal by the traffic engineering team, recognizing that QuickBills can and should be our number one priority to address the fatality crisis on our roads in a cheap, quick way. And to really listen, an act, as you said, with the urgency, the crisis demands. And it's a really creative way to do this in the face of our deficit. So I just really want to thank going outside the box to do something different because we need it. In addition to asking you all to approving this initiative in full and getting those funds redirected immediately to get this initiative fully funded, I also ask that the team works with the Active Transportation Commission for implementation and make sure they receive those quarterly progress reports. We also think that we can aim bigger and hope that we can go for more than one to three tier or two projects. I know it's a new initiative, new team, but it'd be awesome to see us go bigger than that. And hopefully the website can also include clear definitions and visual examples of what tier one and tier two projects or quick builds within those projects can look like. And lastly, please work with me groups like us to help you. Thank you for your comment. Wesley? Hello. I'm Wesley Allen. Sorry, hold on one second. Okay. I'm Wesley Allen. I'm the resident of district two. I'm in support of this measure. I just want to kind of speak from a driver's perspective, because a similar type of thing has been built on 16th and R, some of the, I think, tier one type of quick builds. And that's part of my daily commute. And I used to drive through that pretty fast, and even though there's a crosswalk, it was kind of just assumed that pedestrians wouldn't try to cross. But of course they do sometimes want to cross and that was always a stressful thing. And now it's very natural to slow down and then as you're slowing down want to stop for pedestrians. So I just think you know the road shapes the driver more than the other way around. So I support this. Thank you. Our next speaker is Morgan. Our next five speakers after Morgan are going to be Rob, Crowell, Deb Banks, Keon Bliss, Sonia Hendren, and Tomahawk. Good evening everyone. Thank you so much for your time and attention. Hi, my name is Morgan Murphy. I'm a registered nurse and I have the privilege of working with the Sacramento community. I believe that prioritizing our community's public health and safety is absolutely vital and that there is a great opportunity to do that today by approving this item in full. I also believe that in order for these projects to best serve the community, the community that walks and bikes these streets daily must be involved in the process. I encourage the transportation safety team to collaborate with community groups to design and review these initiatives. I'm excited to see what we're capable of when we combine our knowledge and resources. Please approve this item in full. Thank you. Rob Crowell? Hi, I'm Rob Crowell and I'm in District 4. I'm just speaking today in support of creating the Transportation Safety Team. I live in a one car household which means I walk a lot and if you did take that walk with me we might see some things on the road we might see an Amazon van parked in a bike lane we might find ourselves in an intersection that has port visibility, maybe a hard to see crosswalk, maybe an excessively wide street and maybe for some reason that that we can't quite put our finger on we just don't feel safe. But I know one thing, if you walk with me, even for just 10 minutes, you're going to see 15 or 20 of these blue signs in every yard, every parking strip, every roundabout that we go. You can barely be on a block without seeing a sign. So I think support for this is not just academic or hypothetical or the result of a study, but it's real, it's tangible, it's in the room. I know for a fact that my neighborhood wants this, my neighbors, they're all asking for change and we're all ready to try some new things. And I think if the council supports this, the city will be behind you and I encourage you to support it. Thank you. Deb Banks? Try to walk fast to speed things up. Good evening everybody. I'm Deb Banks, executive director of Sabah and active transportation commissioner. I was riding my bike to the office today and to come here and I was thinking about how important this traffic safety initiative is. And I saw a lot of near misses. I saw cars driving down the wrong way, have a one way street. I saw a driver make a right hand on red, putting a cyclist at risk. I saw another other people working down the street and shuffling families off to the middle of an island so they could have some safe spaces they were trying to get across the road. Just in a five mile ride here. So, you know, near misses are really common. So are severe injuries and sadly, so are death. So is death as a result of the Hicular Violence. And here's my point. We are all vulnerable users. We're all vulnerable users. Everybody in this room, as soon as you go outside, you get near a sidewalk and a road, you become a vulnerable user. So it's really important that we have this Traffic Safety Initiative. Major kudos to Katie Maple, enter team for bringing this to fruition. Kudos to Katie Valenzuela for starting some of this momentum over a year ago. Mass of kudos to these folks for all of the work that they done, and to all the advocates behind us that have kept bringing this forward to you guys. It will make a difference. There's upwards to 40% change for people that have used Quick Build. It's brought down injury and death up to 40%. That's a pretty substantial savings in lives. And so I highly encourage you all to pass this tonight. Thank you. Zonia. As a cycling instructor, I'm doing my part to get Sacramento kids on bikes. My students are riding their bikes to school and to extra curriculars. Because my students are biking, my students friends are starting to bike with them to school activities and to socialize. My scouts are starting to use bikes as transportation to scouting events. The more experienced cyclists are even acting as ride leaders, leading their fellow scouts by bike. I'm doing my part but I can't do anything about the people driving cars in the city. I appreciate your prioritizing the city doing its part to quickly make our roads and intersections safer so that my students and their friends can continue to bike and others can join them. I'm doing my part to get kids on bikes, but I can't do it alone. When we're all doing our part, including the city, we work towards our city goals for mode-chair, climate, and vision zero. I urge you to approve item 21 in full and thank you for your time. Our next speaker is Tomahawk. After Tomahawk, our next five speakers will be Peter Sausserman. This one doesn't have a name on there, but the email is eShallWig. Julia Jackson Oil, Kiara, and Simon Hyatt. All right, Mayor, members of council. Hello. My name is Tomahaw Kendran. I'm a cyclist from district 4. Almost two years ago I stood here in front of you and asked you to adopt the active transportation commissions recommendations for biking and walking safety. Two months ago I was hit by a car. Luckily I'm fine. I blamed the collision on lack of daylighting. The driver and I couldn't see each other through parked cars. So I am excited to hear about the quick build program and the transportation safety team. They will be able to quickly fix dangerous intersections so the same thing will happen to others in the future. I urge you to approve this item in full and continue with further active transportation and vision zero initiatives. Thank you for your time. Is Peter here? The unnamed speaker? I was just too excited. My name is Elise Hellwig. I am a, I live in district four and I've also been hit by a car. And it is, I am so happy to hear that the city Council is hearing and potentially approving these quick builds because it is really as both a driver and a pedestrian and a bicyclist, the way that the road feels has such a strong impact on how we drive and how we drive has such a strong impact on the outcomes of these interactions. I was really lucky, the person who I was hit by was stopped at a stop sign. And so I only quote unquote had to go through surgery and two years of physical therapy. But for if there wasn't a stop sign, if it wasn't as open, or if the person was maybe a little bit more hasty, I could have been in a lot worse situation. Additionally, I've been in so many near misses that could have been much worse, that I think, you know, I strongly approve, I strongly encourage you to approve all of this. I think that as you do outreach to communities, it's so, that part is so important because it lets you know where the near misses are happening so they don't become fatalities, which is something you can't get from a police report. Thank you. Thank you for your comments Julia. Good evening my name is Julia Jackson Oil and I'm a resident of District 4 and a pedestrian encyclist. I also work with Civic Thread, a nonprofit working in the center health equity in the built environment. We're here today to strongly support the Transportation Safety Initiative as we have advocated for quick builds to be prioritized as a top solution to prevent further traffic fatalities and serious injuries. I live in Midtown, a neighbourhood that is much more walkable than other areas of the city, and still I am constantly forced to dodge drivers traveling at high speeds. This truth is only exacerbated in disadvantaged Sacramento communities that do not have accessible infrastructure and are historically under-invested in. I urge the council to adopt this resolution because the proposed transportation safety team has potential to make roadway design changes within months. Improved street design is an effective way to slow drivers down and make streets safer for people walking, biking and rolling. This is one step in the right direction and public work staff has been nimble in finding funds to redirect towards this program. City-funded plans such as the Vision Zero Action Plan and the Active Transportation Plan once it's adopted contain community input on where traffic calming is most needed, which should guide the transportation safety team's of Quick Build projects. Again, I urge you all to adopt this resolution as a first step in taking action to make Sacramento's streets safer. Thank you for your consideration. Thank you for your comments, Kiara, then Simon Hyatt. Good evening, Mayor McCarty and Council Members. My name is Kiar Reed. I'm a resident of District 5. I'm also car-free, so pedestrian for life never owned a car. And I'm also the executive director of Civic Thread. My organization has led active transportation planning, Safe Rouse School programming, and pedestrian advocacy efforts for the past two decades in and around the Sacramento region. First, I'd like to applaud the Public Works Department. Thank y'all. It's really important that we establish a transportation safety team for quick build improvement projects, and I'd also like to urge all of you to support that initiative. Even though we have adopted a Vision Zero Action Plan in 2018, fatalities have continued to be on the rise. And as you heard earlier, Sacramento is now top 20, most dangerous places for pedestrians and cyclists. And every time I get up here, I'm gonna remind us that most of those fatalities are occurring in low income communities of color with black people sholdering that burden. In addition to the advocates that are in the room, we also need to make sure those voices are included in this process. Research also overwhelmingly points to roadway design as the most effective measure to reduce fatalities and serious injuries resulting from traffic collision. And that's why I'm so grateful to see this proposal come before y'all. I was joking earlier that I don't think I've ever been in the chambers and been this happy, usually I'm pretty upset when I get up here. Quick builds are fast, affordable, and they're effective. They offer a real opportunity to address systemic issues and design flaws in a matter of months opposed to waiting several years to maybe see improvements. These are especially needed along high injury networks and in low income communities of color. This is the type of action advocates like myself and those behind me have been waiting for and it's a huge step in Addressing safety on our streets again We applaud staff and council and we look forward to continuing to advance this work alongside Joe Thank you so much for considering my comments. Thanks for your comments Simon Hyatt then Ryan Foster Michael Hutnik Allie Dewey Westbrook. Greetings council, Mr. Mayor. Good to see you all. Simon Hyatt, the newest active transportation commissioner. And I thank you all and for, because I have my community behind me, which is really wonderful. shout out to Strong Sacktown who's doing some amazing organizing on this issue. Just to give some clarity to the public that may be watching online or also media, the Active Transportation annual report came out that was item one on the consent calendar today. Here's some statistics and data. Deaths by vehicle collisions outnumber those by 40, but outnumber those by homicide by 45% in Sacramento. Since 2014, fatalities and auto collisions outnumbered homicides in Sacramento for eight of the last 10 years. According to the California Office of Public Safety, Sacramento ranks number one as the most dangerous city for traffic collisions compared to pure cities in California. Sacramento's disadvantaged communities face a disproportionate amount of traffic violence. The city of Sacramento adopted Vision Zero in January 2017 to eliminate traffic fatalities and reduce serious injuries by 2027. Yet, we have not seen any reduction. All road users in Sacramento have not seen a change in serious collisions since adoption of Vision Zero, which by the way, Vision Zero comes up in two years, 2027. And for any members of the public that might not know what Vision Zero is, it's a vision to have zero fatalities on Sacramento streets. All Sacramento neighborhoods have experienced vehicles colliding with pedestrians and cyclists. However, it's concentrated in many historically disadvantaged communities. Please adopt this. I would like to see this go what, 9-0 would be wonderful. Thank you so much and let's get this done. Thank you for your comments. Ryan, then Michael, then Ali. Hey, I'm Ryan. I'm represented by Karina. And I live off of Northgate. It's a really big road. I'm sure you will have driven it and you see some pretty erratic driving behavior. And so I'm super excited by this project to maybe do somethings to address that and get people just to, yeah, like have design help them drive safer and stuff like that. I'm super privileged to have Ninius Parkway and have you guys invest in stuff like that. So I can avoid Northgate most of the time. And I've seen like the traffic islands that have been installed recently around that area. And it makes it so much safer getting home especially at night when it's like dark out. So I'd be super excited to see a cheap program that can get more things out there and get other people to see those good changes that I've been able to experience in my, in some areas of my neighborhood. And I also really like this program because it allows things to be done a lot faster so that communities actually see things get done in their, in their community. And I feel like seeing that, that happen makes them feel seen. And then also if a design oversight happens, then since it's so cheap and quick, that can be adjusted or changed and make the community have more of a feedback in that way and still be fast and efficient. So thank you guys. Thank you for your comments. Michael and Allie. Good evening, Mayor and Council. Michael Hednick district 5. Yeah, so I was, as I understand, we needed two-thirds majority to pass this item, which means that I've been kind of trying to count some votes here. And so based on her truck's bridge vote reasoning, I would expect that Lisa's ES on this one. And then based on her Trucksle Bridge vote reasoning, I would expect that Lisa's ES on this one. And then based on his presidents at numerous events around the city based on cycling and safety and his own travel habits, Eric, I'm assuming that you're a yes as well. Based on the fact that she introduced the society and the fact that she came to my neighborhood association, Traffic Safety Forum last week, I would guess that Katie is a yes. And also at that forum was JDW from the city staff, so thank you very much both for being out there. And based on the fact that he was invited to said forum and either attended nor sent a staff member. I can only hope that Commissioner Jennings is a yes on this one. And based on Kevin and Phil purporting to be cycling together, cycling friends, I can only hope that they recognize that they are as well vulnerable as the rest of us are, and at the very least vote in their own self interest, if not for the greater interest, which I expect. So I hope this passes because the alternatives are bad. The alternatives are more deaths, right? Or another option is that based on what I've seen in other places, that when the formal structures aren't doing what they need to do, then the public will have to come and take care of itself. And if the news is full of stories of people being arrested for painting crosswalks or creating roundabouts with tractor tires, how do you think that's going to reflect on you? So a vote is a yes vote is going to eliminate all those bad possibilities. So I hope you guys are on board. And assuming a yes vote, I really employ that this is implemented in an equitable manner. Thank you very much. Thank you for your comments. Allie, do your westbrook. Jesse Cohn. Marbella. Good evening. That's very hard to follow. But I'm, yeah, I am, anyways, good evening Mayor and Council members. My name is Alidar Westbrook. I'm a resident of District 4, active transportation professional and past chair of the Active Transportation Commission. I strongly support this item in urge, immediate approval. Sacramento continues to rank among the worst cities in the country for people walking and biking. We have a dedicated team of city staff here today that have listened to community members and have put together a fantastic proposal. Which I just, I can't stress that enough. The staff sitting behind us here really listened to the recommendations of the Active Transportation Commission, of the numerous advocacy organizations in our city. And it just feels really great to feel like the city is listening to our demands and acting accordingly. So thank you for that. I urge you to move on this interim measure and also to fund the recommendations listed in the active transportation latest report, our active transportation commissions latest report which you approved earlier today. Thank you for your time. Two thumbs up. Thank you for your comments. I have five more speakers. Jesse Cohn, our Vaisala, Theresa Elena Ortega and Jeannie Wald Ward-Waller. streets are deadly. Children are afraid to play outside. Dogs hide from the roar of mechanical beasts. The smell of death is everywhere. These machines run on the dead bones of dinosaurs, fossil fuels power these creatures, metal-hoking behemoths that mow down all in their path. They demand that all surrender to their horse power, and we do their bidding with glee. We pave paradise for our masters, ancient trees, feld, meandering streams dredged, priceless habitat destroyed, no prices too great for pavement. Even maintaining it bankrupts our city. Black tar spreads through every neighborhood. We warn children not to play ball in the street, but we never consider asking the machines to play somewhere else. The freeways stretch across our landscape like a seam-in octopus grasping for life. But there's nothing free about the freeway. What happened to the freedom to enjoy the silence of the night? The freedom to cross the street without risk of being murdered by a machine? The freedom to let your child play outside without worry. Children used to walk to the American River to enjoy nature's playground, but the American dream is dead. We built a wall to separate nature from the neighborhoods. The I-5 Strangle Sacramento from its river. Instead of hearing the sound of children at play, you only hear the somber sound of traffic congestion, the roar of mechanical beasts, the horns of agony, the screech of breaks, our planet is dying before our very eyes. We suffocate mother nature with our fossil fuels. Car crashes are the leading cause of death for American children. And Sacramento is especially deadly. We adopted a vision zero plan, but it's had zero impact on our city's traffic fatalities. So I urge you, support the staff's quick bill of proposal. We have the opportunity to save lives. Will you take it? Thank you. Thank you for your comments, Marbella. Thank you. Okay. Good evening. And kudos to all of you for still being here and allowing us to make comments. First of all, I'm Marbella. I'm from Garland, Northgate neighborhood association. I'm here to thank Vice Mayor Kalamantis for getting $1.9 million just from Saecock, which was a big win for our Northgate mobility plan. But that's just a little drop in the bucket. We need 100 million for that vision to become a reality. So this program, this transportation safety program, and the quick build will be an interim as your staff look for grants and we can get the money to build this change Northgate as we know it. So the quick build program on Northgate right now just this past Saturday, they were racing at one o'clock in the morning down Northgate Fortunately, there no one crashed into anyone's backyard or No one was hurt, but I could hear them racing down and if we had traffic calming Things on Northgate that would avoid that at least three, four times a year someone crashes into a neighbor's fence because they're speeding, they lose control. The other thing and things to Vice Mayor Talimantis on San Juan, we had fatality where six people died. And prior to that, we had been asking for these quick, quick build programs because we knew it was dangerous and it didn't happen until these fatalities occurred and then vice mayor of Telemontis ensured. So having a program like this that's funded and designated to do this for the communities will eliminate these fatalities and make our neighborhood safer. So thank you very much. Thank you for your comments. Theresa? Hello, I'm Theresa. I'm a resident of District 6. We've heard a lot tonight about the benefits of quick builds to cyclists and pedestrians, which is hugely important since they're so exposed to traffic danger. And I count myself among them. I have had some close calls while walking or running and have witnessed some close calls of cars nearly may mean or killing people who are walking or biking. But I want to speak to you from the perspective of a driver because I have a car and when I don't have time to take light rail or the bus, where I live from where I live in district six to other parts of the city, I have also seen close calls and have had close calls with other cars that are going way way too fast. Fortunately, I myself have not had a close call or worse with a pedestrian or cyclist. I really try to be safe, but a nightmare of mine would be hurting someone while I'm driving not because I'm not being careful but because our streets prioritize car speed over human life. In fact, we have a huge problem with traffic fatalities of pedestrians and cyclists but also of those who are in cars that is people in cars dying in car crashes. So I just want to make it really really really clear that quick builds do not pit cyclists and pedestrians against driver. It really does not. This is something that is good for all of the above. So many drivers want safer streets for both those inside and outside cars. So please address our traffic injury and fatality crisis by fully approving this item and adopting an operating budget to fully fund this necessary public safety work going forward. And please work with community groups to support outreach and community education. I also want to say that we should aim for greater than 1-3 tier 2 projects a year. Thank you so much. Next speaker is Jeannie Ward-Waller and then I have a no name again. Rebecca Sandeball, maybe? evening. Mayor and council, I'm a resident of district four. I'm a past active transportation commissioner. I'm also the parent of a high school student who rides her bike often to McClatchy. She has had an incident where a car hit her at an intersection. Luckily she was fine. But as you've heard from many speakers, those of us that walk and bike in the city have all experienced traffic safety and the issues on our streets. I'll be brief because I think all the speakers have gone before me have made really important points about this. But I just want to emphasize that we have a tragedy on our streets in Sacramento. We really are facing a crisis of pedestrian safety. And this is a first step tonight. I really urge you to move this forward quickly and charge your staff. You have brilliant staff. I want to give really big kudos to the staff because I love them. I worked with them in a professional capacity. They're incredible. But they need more funding, they need more resources. We need to move more than just quick build, we need to make permanent changes to our streets, particularly on that high injury network that's prioritized through Vision Zero. So I urge you to focus on that and find real funding to make permanent changes. This one is quick and easy, let's get it done. Let's make quick improvements, but let's focus on how do we make permanent changes to make our streets safe. Thank you. Thank you for your comments. And my final speaker had no name, but I think it's Missandeval. I'm encouraged that Northgate Boulevard has been identified as a priority of the Transportation Safety Initiative. I'm in District 3, lived in Northgate on my life. Northgate Boulevard is sandwiched between 160 Arden Garden Connector and I-80 with cars traveling at 70 miles per hour with two elementary schools on Northgate Boulevard. Teachers cars are plowed into by speeding cars while they're working and children have been killed by speeding cars. Truncated dome pads are on the sidewalks to alert blind and side impaired people with other disabilities when they're moving from a pedestrian only space such as leaving a sidewalk tenor street. However, the pads are useless because there are utility poles in the middle of the sidewalk approximately every six feet. In addition, there are other poles in utility boxes for the impeding accessibility along the boulevard. Small children assisting their elders and wheelchairs move onto the street with great struggle as they cannot continue on the sidewalk because the poles force them to the street as cars are speeding. It is dangerous to cross Northgate Boulevard on foot, which impacts foot traffic to our local businesses. We used to walk to restaurants. Now you gotta drive. It is extremely dangerous to ride a bicycle on Northgate. There are four traffic lanes and one suicide lane on Northgate with a few inches to maneuver off the sidewalk. The community is forced to travel through the neighborhood as they cannot travel safely on Northgate. Our community has lost loved ones on Northgate when walking. I myself lost a brother. Yesterday, there were two major accidents, which occurred on Northgate Boulevard during the rush hour and a pedestrian died last night from a hit and run accident on Northgate Boulevard. Our community has been waiting for many years for North Gate Boulevard to once again be safe to walk and bicycle as we used to. It used to be a great place to walk around with your family name. Thank you for your comments. Your time is complete. Mayor, I have no more speakers on this agenda item. Okay, thank you. Start off with council member Maple. Thank you mayor. And I just want to say thank you so much to our incredible staff. Thank you to Matt, the key to Megan. Thank you to Jennifer for all your work and your heart that's gone into this. This is really truly an amazing effort just just listening to the community and implementing, not one your expertise, but also hearing from others who are experts and being willing to listen and implement that. So thank you so very much. I also want to upload one of the other speakers said this, but I think it's important to call out that Councillor Gauvin's Willa really started this effort. And so this is built upon her advocacy efforts So I guess it takes two katties but we got there. So just really want to make sure I call that out. And then also just all the advocacy organizations and individuals in the community, the Active Transportation Commission. And I know some of the members here are in the crowd. Civic thread. Gorsaba. Slow down Sacramento. Strong sat down. Yeah. I's all I have. And many, many others. I just think it's really important to call that out because this is really built on years and years and years of advocacy from community members. Nothing happens in a vacuum. It doesn't happen from accounts member or even our team. It happens from everybody working together and pushing towards one goal. So just really grateful for that. And I just, I had a whole speech time, but I'm not gonna read it. What I wanted to bring up was, I was on that transportation safety panel for Hollywood Park. And one of the panelists was a young girl who had been hit while on her bike when she was 12 years old on Cederville. Her name is Alina. And listening to her testimony about what she had gone through, but also her advocacy was really, was sabbiting inspiring. I was just like, wow, OK, here's this young person who has been through something so traumatic, like a whole month in the hospital in a coma, or not a coma the entire time, but in a hospital, imagine being that age and being hospitalized for that long. I can't imagine what that would feel like, but then to come out of that and to be a very fierce advocate and very well-spoken, my dad, on the need for a roundabout and these safety measures, I was very, very inspired. And so it got me thinking about my role and all of our roles here. And I can't say more than what many of the speakers have already said here. We are one of the most dangerous cities in the United States of America to be a pedestrian or cyclist. That's not just an opinion. That's what the data shows us. And so we have work to do. And I think this is a really, really important first step and a a really big one And I just want to call out that it's one that really builds on using data Like I love the public dashboard. I love the transparency working with community I love thinking outside the box, you know how using our budget that already exists within within your department To to create these positions and to do stuff that's that's forward thinking and maybe something won't work. We don't know. But being willing to take risks, I'm sure it will. But being willing to take those risks because it's more important to try to save lives than it is to only think within the box that we know and do the things that we know. And I think that's really important. I also really appreciate that we're doing a Senate a way that's equitable. I talked about that earlier in our budget, not at meeting. And by the way, thank you to everyone who's been here for many hours. Like we have me and Councillor Verbinge had breakfast really this morning and we're so at it. You know, we're not just talking about across the board though we do experience pedestrian safety and traffic safety issues all over the city. I'm sure my colleagues will speak to that. But we know that they're more pronounced in areas like South Sacramento and North Sacramento. We know that they're more pronounced in areas where we have low income communities and communities of color. And so we have to think about that when we're implementing our solutions too. Like we have to be thinking about everybody. And so this is step one. It's a big step. I hope that we're gonna move it forward today. But I also wanna say, I'm thinking forward, I'm sure some of my other colleagues will speak to this too. This is one step. Us also allocating more of our budget towards these types of activities is also a step. But that leads me to transportation ballot measure. We need a dedicated funding source for these projects. The city cannot do it on its own. There's no way we can do it. I just urge I know that my colleague, Councillor Vergara, through his role in the Sacramento Transportation Authority Board and others in the community are working on this, but so important that we get something passed in 2026. We really only have another one shot at the apple and I really am going to be pushing along with community members to make sure that that includes money for active transportation for these types of projects and for public transit in particular and less money for new roads, less money for highways or none. And so I are just to be very, very bold on that because to me that is the next step. That's where I'm putting my energy and I hope that you'll join me in that. So with that, I'm happy to move the item and thank you so much. Okay, motion is second. Council member Kaplan. Thank you mayor. don't have a lot more to add. What council member Maple added other than you guys know since 2018 I have been a gy walk to school volunteer. I am responsible for people's children. And for several of those years we were crossing Del Paso. And it was always having an adult in front and an adult in back and making sure that we all had eyes on people that were driving cars. So I come from this from a perspective of I love to ride my bike. When I first moved here I lived downtown I lived on 3 and P, and then I lived on 28th and D, and I loved walking and biking everywhere. I wanna thank City staff because Matt Ironman said it, we designed roads for speed. We didn't design them for people, and it's now, it's never too late, but we look at those pittly little stripes of bike lanes on the roads and cars are 10 times heavier. And they don't care what speed limits say. And they race through the lumps when they should slow down. And unfortunately, now we all know somebody who has lost a life. You know, there was somebody my husband lost who he just had lunch with and they went separate ways. And he was hit and killed downtown. A good friend of mine was walking his dog and a car ran through and ended up hitting and killing him. It affects every single one of us and we know that cars are heavier. So I look at how do we change when we talk about vision zero, it's almost like we have to change our philosophy and how we look at designing this city. It's now we have to say we're designing the roads for people and offer cars. And it's working to advocate at the state level that says we don't design speed for the 85th percentile because I gotta tell you, I wanna go trucks all north gate, del Paso, Stockton. And then that speed limit would be 50, 65, Natomas Park. And that's, that could be the 85th percentile. So how do we flip it? And I'll have to say, you know, this is always something that I've taken is very important. It shouldn't have taken losing two grandfathers, one of pedestrian, one on a bike at the same intersection within six weeks. To really highlight we got a move quicker but again I want to say Matt and Megan. You listen to me and I was like oh my god I know this is not an intersection but we got to move quicker and this is near our schools and I hear, here's a caution. Please y'all, get a hold of us, don't put it on next door. I see a next door all the time, information about dangerous intersections. And that brings up. We can do these quick builds. They're one step. But we have to change behavior. Because I did that quick build and thank you, Ma and Megan, for working quickly of highlighting and making it a highly visible reflective crosswalk and doing pedestrian safety. But I still see and get call outs at my office, people are running stop signs. There was almost a fight there at the other weekend because who had the right away and both were in the middle intersection. I can't get in everybody's car. We all can't get in everybody's car and tell them leave five minutes earlier, slow down, make it more important that people stay alive than we get somewhere quicker. It also is going to take behavior every morning. Ironman knows this because I send him videos. Parents are dropping off their kids and parking and red zones. They're dropping off their kids and blocking bike lanes. We have got to start holding each other accountable to be better because that matters. It's you are here. I know I am speaking to an audience that agrees with me. But how do we also talk to our friends and our neighbors to understand how important this is? Because we don't want to hear about, you know. My bang was a school board member. Talamante's, Rick Jennings, I always hated that call when a kid was hit. We get calls that kids are hit on their way to and from school. How do we stop that? I know this is not the answer, but it's one way to say while we don't have that funding, let's look at ways we can do it faster. And I'm in 100% alignment with Council Member Maple. We've got to be thoughtful and we've got to provide funding. You look at other cities and other areas. How are they able to do things? They have dedicated funding because guess what? Those dedicated bike lanes, we shouldn't just have them downtown. Why can't my neighborhood have them? Why can't the suburbs have them? Why can't we make it? Then we're getting parents to let their kids go to school because they know it's a dedicated bike lane. And then I'll have to worry about the safety of their child. So we still have a lot of work to do. I hope that my colleagues maybe look at what I've done with my North and the Thomas Transportation Management Association. I've done an education campaign. We're putting it in our schools so that May is bike month and walk and pedestrian and roll month. It's a three minute video that we use students in our community to educate the safety of wearing a helmet on a scooter, paying attention, dumping on your phone, and how to make it safer for everybody to get to school. I think that's something we can all do because the more we get that ownership, I think it'll make a change in our community. So again, thank you to staff. Thank you everybody for doing this. This is a great step forward. Thank you very much, Mayor. Appreciate this. forward. Thank you very much mayor appreciate this first of all big kudos to council member maple and all of our advocates who were involved in organizing in this and our engineering staff. I can't stop to recognize our engineers. In municipal services, you always hear a lot from fire, a lot from police. You always hear from the finance people because they're the ones that tell you no. But the people who are quietly in the background doing a lot of this work are engineers and I want to thank Megan and her team for putting something in genius here. And also, to bring it to the focus about how we need to act quickly and focusing it on lives over speed. speed and for some of us that went to through engineering school, you know, not even that long ago, it still was you were taught level of service was if you got a level of service A grade A meant as fast and unpeated vehicle movement and that was it that's the training that's happening so we also need a cultural shift happening you, in how we train our future engineers. And now moving to the issues of VMT, issues of safety are, is a, is a, and making sure that local governments said policies that say, hey, that's the priority and we want the schools to be teaching to that priority. I think we're setting the, the leadership to that point. This, again, I appreciate this quick build. Aspect. to be teaching to that priority. I think we're setting the leadership to that point. This, again, I appreciate this quick build aspect of it. I live in an area where it's wrapped from Old Highway 50 full of some boulevard. And Old Highway 99, Stockton Boulevard. And the community grew around it. And so it was designed as a cut through as a thoroughfare. And even after they built the freeways, people still continue to use that. And so it's necessary that we make those improvements. And if you go down to either Mary'sville or Northgate or Franklin that takes you to Franklin, the town of Franklin, because of those designs, it's necessary that we make those changes. So I'm excited about this piece here, but one thing that I want to mention that our current roads was brought over, we have a multi, multi million dollar backlog in just potholes. And I'm thinking about our youth commissioner who I remember when she was 12 years old, hit a pothole and really injured herself riding her bike. And most recently, now as a senior, she was doing a walk through with our public works team on 21st Avenue identifying where the dangerous points for cyclists to be at and working with their engineers to say, hey, we need to be able to make a change. And thinking about, okay, how we do that. And I remember that incident has sparked someone. So to looking at what is the future of our engineers, hopefully she thinks about becoming a traffic engineer in the future. But making sure that we address our current deferred maintenance is critical. And even with this little bit of money, it's not going to address the transformative change, even just fixing the safety of potels for cyclists. And as someone who rides with my kids, let me tell you, my kids remind me when there's a potel. They're like, they always say it's too bumpy, and they're complaining to me. And I'm like, hey, call the district line. You know, you can complain. You know, but, but, but they're in the back complaining about the potholes, and I know it, and I know it because I see those numbers underford maintenance, which brings me to the point, this is great that we get this money out, get it quick, get designs in, save some lives, but we need to pass a county-wide responsible and viable transportation measure. And I live in an area where it goes city, county, city, county. And my kid who wants to go and should want to go, right, is bike down 14th Avenue to his buddy that lives on the other side of 14th Avenue that quickly turns into the county, we should be able to be working accordingly to have safe streets for them to use, to be able to go to Luigi's Pizza and play pinball machine there in that area. And not have to risk that. Or go to the Velo ball right next door. And that's a plug-ins for those who want to sponsor the Velo ball. But without a viable transportation measure, there's never going to be a way for us to address traffic circles, to address pedestrian walking intersections, to look at the issues of guiding drivers. And I think the point was made, all of us even who are cyclists, many of us are also drivers. And we need to be able to have roadways that help guide us when we're maneuvering through difficult situations. Finally, I mean, I have, I think that if we had a county-wide transportation measure that was a viable and responsible one, and even if it included funding for safe routes to schools to address all of the planning that goes involved, it takes planning and work. But even imagine if we could fund training for a bike bus program where you see where there are, it becomes a culture that, in the morning, the priority is the bike bus going there and you have 150 kids biking together to school and same thing in the afternoon. Creating that culture to choose. I do think, but we can't do that as a one off.. This is where I would encourage as much as you advocate with us, that you advocate also in our unincorporated other areas because that's what we're going to be able to make the amount of movement in that issue. I know I'm committed to that, not only because it's the necessary for fatalities, but if If we're really really gonna address our air quality issues, we have to make it viable for people to have an option other than a car. And even if you get an electric car, okay? I know, when I ride my bike, I've gotten into our mayor backing out with his electric car out of the driveway. The vehicle still create congestion, you know? Vehicle still create congestion, all right? And so to that point, you know, we have to provide alternatives. Even if you rode your bike once a day and did the vehicle the other day, you're still making an impact. But if you don't feel safe, you're never going to take that one day. So with that, I just want to appreciate everyone's work on this. Thank you. Council Member Dickinson. Thanks, Mayor. I welcome this initiative, which I think represents the thinking outside the proverbial box. And so I certainly applaud the staff for that creativity and that initiative. I share the sentiments that have been expressed by my colleagues this evening and in light of the hour, I'll resist the temptation to repeat them all. But I did want to delve into it just a couple items. First of all, thinking about funding, it does seem to me that to the extent we can pursue it, SB1 offers some potential sources, obviously in the active transportation and the categorical grants, active transportation category and the local partnership category. So, you know, we not only need to take advantage of the funding you've been able to identify, but we need to go hunt for more clearly. Even in our maintenance allocation, under SB1, thinking from other gas tech sources, thinking about maintenance projects in the context of turning those into complete street projects. I think it's something that we ought to be doing. So I certainly take Councilmember Garis comments to heart about a local initiative and councilwoman maple as well. Been there a few times. I know we can succeed because we've done it before. We have to come up with the right formula and the right and the right mix. But I think we're also seeing what's considered that right formula evolved over time. And that gives me hope, you know, to just to pick up slightly on something that Council member, Gata was saying the touchstone of traffic engineers when I was working on these issues just a years ago, was throughput. It was how many cars you could get through a space and how little time with how little congestion. I think we are evolving and getting smarter about how we assess the purpose of transportation and think about it in terms of mobility of getting to places of place making in that context rather than driving by and how fast you can go. I could certainly easily riff on councilmember Kaplan's comments about getting to school as well but I will resist that temptation. I do have one question, I think it's fair to say about the waiver of competitive bidding and using RFP or RFQ. A number of years ago, we adopted an approach in the county which I cannot come up with in anybody. It was a form of contracting that actually allowed for competitive bidding but essentially pre-qualified bidders up to a certain amount. And so they were qualified to do the work that was necessary, then they were on a list and you could pick and choose. Now this has got the flavor of that but that was a competitive bidding approach. And so can you elaborate a little bit on that versus this process that you're proposing? Yeah, so we wanted to act quickly. So we put this in the initial. Our next round will be an on-call type of procurement where we will automatically qualify people and put a set amount and what type of work that they will do. So we will definitely use that methodology moving forward. And we do that in a lot of our areas today. just in order for us to launch this quickly and not go through a six-month process, we wanted to take the suspend competitive bid program with this. Okay, thanks, Matt. That makes it a little more clear that you're going to, as time goes on, use that approach, which certainly worked well because it gives you immediate access to contractors but it doesn't bypass competitive bidding either. But I now understand you want to take this action suspending the competitive bidding as an urgency feature of this. Okay. Well thank you for that clarification. I would just say in closing that this is a meaningful first step but it is, but it is as everybody has alluded to, certainly just that. And for many of us, it's a welcome, as I said earlier, but long overdue for stuff. Now, the test will be not whether we take this action to night, the test will be how we adjust what we're doing in terms of approaching transportation funding and programming as well as construction. I think in the years to come, whether we are really invested in making the kinds of changes in public behavior and attitude and approach with respect to mobility and transportation, whether we are truly invested in making sure that people have multiple forms of transportation as real choices, which does not exist for most people today. Those will be the tests of the future and it will not be the sole domain of the traffic engineers and the staff. That will be our responsibility. That will be the responsibility of our colleagues and other elective offices and jurisdictions, that will be the responsibility of state policy makers. It will become a true community responsibility if we are to see real lasting significant change. Thanks. Thank you. Councillor Plessy-Walken. I want to recognize the leadership of council members, Valenzuela, Maple and the act of transportation commission saw a civic thread strong town slow down Sacramento on our staff. As was reported, I will be supporting the recommendation here. But I also want to second the comments of the rest of the council here that after this we need to really double down and think about how to support another Measure A that has strong active transportation participation. For those of you that are active transportation purists recognize that we cannot sell Attacks measure without some you know something in there for the car drivers. But we will lean heavy to Put as much as we can in that bill for Transportation and transit and I also want to ask staff in the future if we can come back with the vulnerable users ordinance if there's something that we can look at to sort of change the The conversation that we're having with with drivers and Really shift some of the liability away from those of us without road cages. I think that would be time well spent. Thank you. That's very vague. Thanks mayor. Oh, it's exactly nine o'clock. Okay. Yeah, I just wanted to just make a few comments and not be a Debbie Downer. I think everyone is celebrating, which is really great. I'm like super excited that we're moving in this direction and I appreciate also just mentioning the hard work of Councilwoman Katie Valenzuela. I just really want to uplift that because in November of 2023, me and her, we actually submitted a Council proposal to look at the ATC's recommendation nine of them and the quick build was actually one of them. And there's a reason why when you look at the annual report now, there's actually a cost breakdown, it's because we requested for that, right? I see Ali nodding her head and so I'm really excited. I think I want to celebrate, like this is really great. It's a big first step and I echo my colleagues on, yes, we need a transportation measure, right? But I just also want to take a different angle. Is that, you know, we should prioritize our general funding. And I say that because that's my view on this is yes, yes. You know, we don't have a lot of money to go around. We're in a deficit, right? But the largest part of our budget is the police budget. And for me, active transportation is public safety, right? And until we actually have a steady revenue of source of funding, like a transportation measure, which I fully support, I echo Council member Roger Dickinson when he says that, if we're truly about investment in active transportation, it actually does fall on the policy makers because at the end of the day We're the one that allocates the budget and so if active transportation is a public safety issue that we talk a big game About then we have to make sure that we actually allocate our general funding for that so So for me so for me. Yeah, I'm like celebrating this is great. You know, it's been a long time coming to get to this moment. It's great, but again, like our, you know, if this is our priority, then we gotta make sure our reflects our budget. And so I just wanted to take that angle. I think that's really important. I just wanted to name that because yes, we don't have a lot of money to go around, but we do have priorities as a council. And if this is a priority, then we have to make sure that our budget reflects that. And so those are my comments. And just congratulations to the advocates, because it's a long time coming to get to this moment, but really the credit goes to the community. So. OK. OK. APPLAUSE Everybody spoke, right? We are. I have about 10 pages of prepared comments. No, look, this is something we all embrace. And literally I have never seen a staff presentation get a clapping standing ovation before we even started the presentation from the public and the council. As you know, I ran for mayor last year because you you know, I remember and I went to quite a few forums and debates and clearly the issues of the day, housing and homelessness and public safety. But right behind there was our streets and traffic safety and what can we do to step it up? And you know, as council member Gera remembers and then council member Harris, lucky bomb, twice in my career. I've had to go and hustle and get five million dollar earmarks to fix a road where somebody died and We shouldn't have to do it after the fact and so you know some of these quick fixes aren't five million dollars That's the thing here. We're looking at five million per year for multiple projects per year. And I guess that's the question is how many it depends on how big the project. So hopefully we can get multiple. But you know some of those fixes I've seen the one up in Atomis by the Atomis Park Clubhouse or the one on M.O.K. and Broadway and I told Councillor Maple that when I go down Broadway now turn right on M.O.K. I'm literally thinking like what's going on in this slow down and you're looking around. So those things get the public to do things differently, which was our goal, is to get people by design to slow down. And so I'm all in on this in support of, and lastly I do support going the voters with a transportation measure to fund our roads, fund public transportation. But I think that we should have a big segment on this because one is important, but two, I think the public would embrace the measure even more so for focusing on efforts like this. So with that, this is something we all embrace the entire council and the community, I believe, as well. And we have a motion in a second. All those in favor please say aye. Aye. You know those are abstentions. Hearing none, measure passes. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Okay. We have now. Move to council comments, ideas, questions, and AB123 reports? Do we always do that, I think? I have an AB123 report for, it's late. We've been here since 11. But I attended the Common Sense Summit on Kids and Families in San Francisco and got to connect with, I mean, research, traders, advocates to discuss technology and the impacts of AI in our community and how we're going to govern. And so it was a really interesting conversation. And I learned lot. Technology is advancing, governments behind, and we have to catch up. So that's my report. Yeah, it's my report, Plucky bomb. I have a request for staff to please investigate what could be done to provide ongoing funding for code enforcement's emergency home repair program, including but not limited to CDG BG funds Okay Thank you Public comment. It's Mary. I have five speakers Sally's to purell Mac worthy Devon stricker Rebecca sandival and Evan minton So please line up in the aisle. I know it's late, so some people have chosen to go home. Sally? I don't see Sally. Macworthy? People we observe, we listen to a choosener, a mayor mayor, city manager. Nobody said anything about the brown act. I don't trust what you're doing for city management. And I don't get a chance to speak out on it. And then all of a sudden, we had maybe five people. Now we get a whole crew. How many emails did you send out to people that come here that gets a check from the city? That's what we want. That's how you say you stack shit here that you will never change. You will never change no speed limit on a car. You could ask people, the little boy that put that out slowed down, I had to hospital a digital, when I was there for a sand sub to me, I'd align, they fired his ass too. You don't tell me where to sit. So she'd bring him in here and give him a few dollars and he'd come down here and agree. And this city comes over here. Now she's been been attorney everywhere. We don't want to hear what the hell you went on when you was riding a bike. You yaya, yaya, yaya, then we get you yaya, yaya. And we need to cut that bullshit out when we get to a special issue. No, you didn't go on that when we said, uh, high enough, said it a magic. We didn't sell who was the lead manager out of the five you have. Who should go out of that? You know, say, why? Where the corruption are in this city, the community don't know where they're asking the whole number. They can't come and hear a word, because they're tied to a little check from the district of the nonprofit organization is what you're saying. Well, we, we, what they're going to do, they're not going to post you call that check. Get cut off. You got cut. Of course, I said down. If you don't close that down, it's going to be a corruption going to always be in the city. Thank you for your comments, Devin. Thank you. Are we able to show photos on here? No, okay. You can pass it around. We can all see. Sure. All right. Well, thank you. It's been a long night. I'm Devon Strecker, Executive Director of the River District, also a resident of District 4. So just as a little refresher back in July 2021, the city banned camping near critical infrastructure. In August of 2022, the city amin the sidewalk code related to obstructions and pedestrian interference, basically banning encampments from blocking the sidewalk. In October of 2022, the city council voted unanimously to ban encampments within 500 feet of schools. in November November 2022, voters approved Measure O banning encampments on public property under certain conditions and requiring the city to identify an authorize hundreds of new shelter spaces. These are all measures that had a lot of public speakers come out to make comments, a lot of people voted, and yet a lot of these do not seem to be enforced in any way, at least not in the river district. Every day this year so far I've gotten at least one phone call, email or text message from an impassioned property or business owner or resident wanting to know why the city has forgotten about the area around 16th Street, specifically North B and North C Street. This is a message I received today from a property owner. The homeless situation is getting worse than I've ever seen it and I've been here a long time. It is shocking that the city lets the area deteriorate so dramatically. I know you're concerned and I encourage you to use these pictures to inspire the city to do something. I have a lot of compassion for the people in these pictures. It kills me that our society and Sacramento's government is so paralyzed. It is an embarrassment. Also, my tenants are very concerned and the people come to the building who drive there through North Beach Street are shocked. I ask you to please help us clean this area up and take care of our people. Thank you. Thank you for your comments. Rebecca? I'm Rebecca Sandwell, Trustee for 20th School District. Here to say it's concerning it often. There are those that spin my narrative when I speak publicly on behalf of the district or my community. Recently, there was an email that was sent that I requested the city do better for families residing in Motel shelter program off of Northgate Boulevard. Yes, that is true, but specifically I have expressed my concern that children residing in the motel are playing in the street and parking lot of local businesses. Some of these children attend Garden Valley Elementary School where they are provided a safe learning environment. Because their living space is provided by the city, I believe it is upon the city to provide a safe place for the families to congregate. was her own, it written that 21st University School District requested me with shelter service providers to partner with those running the program. Our district provides many services for over 1200 homeless students, which includes preschool, after-school program, breakfast lunch, sometimes supper, sports program art and music, counseling and behavior, intervention services, as well as an excellent education. Twinner vs. Proud and committed in doing our part in addressing the needs of our homeless students. I am hopeful to see will address a need for an open or green space for the homeless children residing in the motel program. On another issue, my narrative with Genn was spin. It has been communicated. I've been spreading information that Joshua House is a geriatric facility. I went to a meeting and Joshua House was described as a facility for seniors needing end of life care. I found that statement in disingenuous, as we all know, Joshua House is a hospice program for the homeless with no age limit. At no time to- Thank you for your comments. Your time is complete. Our final speaker is Evan Minton. Please proceed. Hi, my name is Evan Minton. My pronouns are they and he and I want to just think the council and the mayor for passing the transgender day of visibility resolution today. Councilmember Kaplan, thank you for the special friendship that we have and thank you for knowing at a cellular level how important visibility is. Councilmember Pleckibaum, thank you for co-authoring the resolution. Thank you for the consistent way in which you show up for the trans community that is really meaningful, especially in a time like this. I want to thank the mayor for your years of support to the trans community. You've done that even when it hasn't been easy and when the trans community has needed an ally, you've consistently shown up. Thank you for that. I was thinking about what I can say in this moment and I had words that that were flowery, but it just doesn't meet the moment. I wanted to just let you guys know, I don't stand here as a victim. I came out maybe around 15 years ago. And at that point, I asked everyone, hey, if you don't know a trans person, use me as a reference. And I'm so glad that in this day and age there are so many more reference points than just me. That's progress. And visibility wasn't always a political act that it is now. I think that folks know trans people have always existed. We have come from thousands and thousands of years. We've been on record. And in the state and age, unfortunately, it's seen as a political act. We can't reduce our humanity to make people more comfortable. That's something that no one should be asked to do. And so as long as it's unsafe to be visible. Thank you for your comments your time is complete. I'll just finish the statement. We appreciate your comments. Mayor you have no business to come before the council. Thank you for our community and thank you for your continued support and is there for the trans community here at the Mydol beyond. Thank you. Thank you for your continued support. It is a refuge for so many for the trans community. Here is that manual beyond. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Mary, you have no additional business to come before the council. Thank you. No adjournments in memory? No, with that we are adjourned. Thank you. Yeah. I'm sorry. Thank you.