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I'm going to go back to the place where I'm going to go. I'm going to go back to the place where I'm going to go. I'm going to go back to the place where I'm going to go. Thank you. you I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. Thank you. you you I'm going to do it. Thank you. . . . Good afternoon. The term now is 5. 07 on April April 28, 2025. I would like to start with a special meeting strategy planning workshop meeting. And I know that we have a couple of hours. Council are not here right now, but they are not there way, but we just go ahead and start it now Why don't we go ahead and take the roll call Thank you mayor win. I'm here vice mayor Monzo. I'm here district one councilwoman fan west District three councilmember win here district four councilmember win Mary give a quorum with District 1, Councilwoman Fan West and District 4, Council Member Wynne absent. All right, thank you very much and today's plan for elections will be by Vice Mayor Manzo and invocation will ask to see the attorneys, cut, putter is going to help with this Please stand. Ready begin. On the big digits to the flag, of America and to the Republic for which it stands for nation under God indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Please pray with me. Dear Creator God, thank you for the opportunity to be here. Please guide us as we try to make our city just a bit better. Please guide our decision makers and form us of how we can do the common good and we be inspired to make this world a better place. In your name we pray. Amen. Thank you so much. Thank you, Vice Mayor Manzo and Cedar Tony, the Porter. And this time let's go for oral communication. City Club, you please go ahead and greet the instruction in the record please. This is the time of the meeting that members of the public may address the city council regarding any items on the agenda. Unless otherwise extended by a majority vote of the city council, comment shall be limited to three minutes per speaker. Any person wishing to address the city council in person should complete a green speaker slip that is provided at the entrance to the council chambers and Submit the car to the city clerk when your name is called please step up to the podium at that time State your name and city of residence for the record. We have one speaker Terry rains the last strategic plan workshop was held on April 10, 2024, during which six month of objectives were developed for the goals covering the period of April 10, 2024, through November 1, 2024. The City Council was supposed to meet again in November for the final closeout and reported the first three strategic plan prior to the installation of the new council member, but that didn't happen probably because the two obstructionist not here an absent and late were busy disrupting city business. The one line agenda description strategic planning workshop facilitated by writer Smith of Tripetti Smith tells us nothing. the 2024 workshop agenda providing an actual outline of what would transpire during the workshop. So what are we going to see happen today? Close out the former three-year strategic plan or create a new three-year Plan if the latter you are skipping a very important step of accountability I did see the strategic plan interviews on your calendars earlier this month I assume those private interviews were to learn what each council member thinks the cities should be the city's priorities and new goals and or to discuss and create new SWAT lists, strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. But since these interviews were done behind closed doors, how is the public supposed to know? Very disappointing and wrong that the city chose to only publish the strengths generated at the last session. The public deserves to hear the staff and council's perspective on weaknesses, opportunities, and threats just as much as their perspective on strengths. If the city only had strengths, there wouldn't need a strategic plan. There are no documents or even a staff reporter outlined with today's agenda. The public has no idea what the plan is for today's session. Please consider this my formal request to immediately receive copies of any and all documents, including draft list that have been distributed to the council prior to or at the start of today's meeting. Furthermore, the city's website was never updated to include the objective set at the April 2024 workshop. The last updates were from two years ago from a workshop that took place on February 7, 2023. There was supposed to be a second workshop in 2023, but that never happened either. there's nothing on the website about the April 2024 session, nor is there an updated matrix reflecting the new objectives set then or the updated status of each. I found a copy of that matrix from a later city council meeting where the new objectives were formally adopted. At first glance, from the outside looking in, it appears that several objectives set last year have not been met yet. The most important aspects of a strategic plan are creating major objectives and frequently monitoring the progress of meeting those objectives with full and direct accountability. A specific plan without full and direct accountability, constant monitoring and regular follow-through, it's just words on paper and completely useless. If any of you are not prepared to take this exercise seriously and put in the work, Amy, you don't belong on this council and you should resign. We need critical thinking servant leaders to steer the ship, not grandstanding Ego Maniacs. As my sign says, which I didn't wear, but it says prioritize the budget, not the bull, you know what. And if there should be some penalty for not showing up on time for a strategic plan session, everybody else is here including staff. Thank you. That concludes our speakers, Mayor. All right. Thank you very much. And so today's strategic planning workshop facilitated by Ryder Smith and Tried Puppiesmith smith so with that I would like to open up and ask you to go ahead and present your presentation to the person. Thank you Mayor and you went. Christine, shall I start? Do you want to introduce your comments to me first before I get rolling? Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you for that. So our past strategic plan that we did three years, a little over three years ago, it was really our first, it was our first passive developing a strategic plan with the council and the organization. As with many things on first attempts, there's definitely a learning curve. And given the circumstances that transpired over those three years, there were objectives that were developed, there were goals that were developed objectives that went along with those goals. Many of which were met and others that were not met. This is part of that learning curve. There were many things that happened during that time as well that has now given us a perspective on how we want to move forward with the next three years. So the goal of today's strategic plan workshop is really closing out the previous strategic plan, but also taking those goals and objectives and morphing into the new three-year strategic plan. So we did have a different facilitator. That facilitator is no longer doing strategic plan workshops. And so we're excited to bring back writer and his team who helped us with the last strategic plan workshop. And the method that he's using is a little bit different, a little similar, but also different in other ways as well. Because we wanna make sure that we're catering the process to be digestible for our Council and staff as well as making sure that we're using the best method in order to develop achievable objectives. So with that, I will turn this over to Ryder and get started. Thank you very much, very much. I appreciate Mayor Sonarbi here. Thank you very much. Be vulnerable members of the City Council. It's good to be back in your chamber. Sorry, it's right. Before we get started, I had a question for our city manager. So, excuse me. The status of the, the status of the strategic plan that we had in place, do we know like, I don't, should we go on the list of what was crossed off, where we had, I mean, I know there was, I mean, we had, at one time we had a map of, you know, status and it would be updated every now and then, but do we know where we're at? So it's part of, yes. So as part of what we're going to go through in today's presentation is going through that list. Oh, it keeps that in. Yeah, we didn't provide. So we didn't provide information this time around as far as the council, you know, for anybody for that matter. So we didn't provide with an updated list in advance. We, you know, as mentioned, there were interviews that were conducted with each and one of every one of you, which was different from what was done previously. You know, we're allowing writers' team to use what has worked in some of his strategic plan methods. reason that we decided not to provide some of that information preliminarily as well is context is really important. And sometimes when you have some of these materials put out in advance, it gives room for narratives to be created in advance that really kind of muddies the process that we're trying to walk into. So as we're doing this today and you're all seeing things for the first time, that really helps with trying to keep this neutral from the get go. Yeah, I know it just was really excited and I was really looking forward to accomplishing some of the items that were on that list as far as the specific plans are concerned. Yes, and I have asked for Updates as far as we're at with that. I mean, that's hopefully that's yeah We haven't lost the focus on that Some of that will actually be part of today as well discussing some of those previous goals those previous goals in advancing those. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Please proceed. Thank you. Thank you, Christine, for your comments about the context for this and just really having a nice, hopefully open, pre-ranging discussion today about setting those goals and objectives. I will just, for clarification on process as well, just to make sure I bring the community up to speed on this too. Our standard process is to do some initial review of prior existing goals and objectives. Have a conversation with City Manager to get some more context for the city is at. Obviously we had the benefit of being here last year so we had some existing context. And then we really like to conduct one-on-one interviews with each of the council members to hear what their concerns and issues are as well as balance some other ideas off them to help float ideas to the top. I find this pre-work to be really helpful and I think it gets the juices flowing for you to think creatively too as we work through a process. We also had a survey form available or a quick feedback form for some concept to get some additional ideas to close some of that conversation. And really that was designed out spring some thoughts in your head and we reviewed those in our conversations that we had one on one. When they subsequently reviewed that with the city manager and this is the city manager and then we find ourselves here today. So you're all getting to see this equally for the first time and see what the content looks like. A couple notes I'll make too is some ideas were surfaced that there seemed to be a lot of consensus around and then some ideas were surfaced primarily because they might have been surfaced later in the interview process that we didn't have a chance to really surface with other council members for a possible consideration and getting some sense of feedback. So therefore they may not have consensus but that's not because necessarily there was objection to them and just we didn't have, we didn't go back and ask other council members what they thought. So it was just a timing issue and my objective today is to make sure I surface all the concepts that were surfaced in the conversations to give them all equal time and opportunity to be discussed in a healthy way. So that's how we flow this process. Today's is also a working session. So eventually, I'm going to transition off my laptop in this presentation deck. And we're going to turn it over to my good friend Abbey over here from Team Tripepi Smith, who will have a living, breathing Google document going that we will have up on the screen. And we're going to collaboratively work through that document hopefully come to both answering some of the questions that you were just raised by SMAIR, as well as talking through new objectives and goals that were surfaced through the conversations that we have. So that's the goal. My hope is that by doing some of those pre-interviews, it makes today's conversation efficient and effective and helps us really focus on some of the meat and potatoes in a collaborative fashion. All right, and I think I have a magical clicker that will allow me to click through. Or so I don't know if that clicked on my screen. Oh yeah, hang on. Thank you for the tech support there. I appreciate class A service. All right, so first of all just briefly We're gonna talk about our strategic planning overview as I mentioned go through a review of the 222 25 goals I'll ask Christine to make some additional comments on On some of that again many of the objectives that were not achieved in the prior bull period We have in the current matrix draft matrix that we put together. Then we'll discuss the 2025 through 28 goals that we surfaced as a result of the conversation. So we're again looking at a three-year timeline and then we'll talk about what our next steps are for the organization in terms of the strategic planning process. So just a friendly reminder that the strategic planning process is a process where the City Council set shared goals and objectives to help direct city staff to focus their efforts and city resources. You are the board of directors of the city. You are the policymakers that help outline where you want to go down the field. And Christine is your quarterback that's there to throw the fall, hand it up for the running back and allow and otherwise execute with a team that you have at City Hall. So it's immensely helpful for City staff particularly your City Manager. I have that key understanding of where you want to go and how you want to get down that field so she can execute on that process to help you all win and as a result help the City of Westminster win as well. As I mentioned in our strategic planning process, we had a kickoff call back in March. We did our, we had questionnaires and then city council interviews throughout the month of April and then we have our actual strategic planning workshop today and then we'll be going through digesting that content, finalizing the work product from today and turning it into a report that'll be in the May June period, just in time to kick off the new fiscal year in 2026. Our 2025 to 2026. This is the existing city mission statement that we were operating under and our scope of work here was not to necessarily tweak or adjust this mission statement. We were operating with it as is. There have been some prior discussions about potentially modifying this mission statement. I didn't sense a huge appetite for making a modification at the time it was previously surfaced, but if that is something you wish to do in the future, I would encourage conversation or discussion about that as we move through the rest of the presentation today. But as it stands right now, the mission statement for the City of Westminster for those that are listening at home, the City of Westminster is committed to providing the highest quality of service, ensuring that Westminster is a desirable place to live, work, play, and do business. And I will just observe that many cities have live work play as a pretty common tagline. I appreciate Westminster's effort to be further distinctive by noting that it is a great place to do business. All right, so we had prior adopted broad goals, and I will remind you also and for the public's benefit that we have goal areas that kind of encapsulate where we want to go. And then within those we have specific objectives of things we'd like to go tackle that we view as being consistent with the goal areas that we have identified. These prior goals are outlined here. Number one, chief financial stability to develop an implement specific plan for little cycle on the downtown district in the west side. Number three is attract, develop and retain well-qualified city staff members. Excuse me, staff members. It's implied that it's city. And four is improve customer service delivery to the community. So as a reminder, these were the four broad gold areas. We had objectives under several of these. So for example, previously under chief financial stability was addressing a sales tax measure to generate additional revenues. Check off accomplishments on that, for example. And I think with that, I will pause for a second and ask city manager if she would like to make any additional comments on these goals or achievements under these goal areas. I don't actually. That was pretty, it was pretty self-explanatory. All right, very well. As noted, where we had- I do have the question, though. On the second one, I'll develop an implement specific plan for little Saigon That's how the strict and west side For that one we also have the specific plan for their civic center, right? Then that's that's not included in here because we already have the specific plan for that correct I'm looking for my go ahead. So so there is a master list of Specific plan priorities and the all Of those that are listed in the general Plan are ranked the previous council Did rank those I think as it pertains To the bullet item or the number two on The slide the previous at the beginning Of the last strategic plan goal, those were the ones that were prioritized by that council. Yes, so we specifically discussed about that. We received direct direction. We received specific direction to focus on those. Right, okay, thank you. If I can chime in on that one, I think we had them, I don't think it was in that particular order, it wasn't a downtown. Those are, yeah, there's not a specific priority wise. I think we, maybe we let writer continue because I think some of those questions will be answered as he moves on with this presentation. And if not, then we could go back and I can touch on those. Sorry if we can just drop that. Oh no this may or this is very much a conversation for us to have to say and have a free format for that and you are correct to raise that question. We do have some general objective identified around the specific plan that we can fill in with more details we work through this together today. So I appreciate it being raised as a question. Okay back to our our magical PowerPoint. So just a note, these were the previously adopted goal areas. A brief common all make, which is government general operates well when it is not whipsod and pulled around in different directions all the time. And recognizing that in a lot of our goal work is long term and takes time, particularly when you're dealing with land use issues or fiscal stability issues that is not something you saw in three years and then move on. And it is helpful for organizations to have consistency. So often when I do these strategic planning processes, I would just generally say our goals are evolving. They are not fundamental revolutions every time we come to the game. Now sometimes that can change. that is the prerogative of you as a city council. But my general observation is that it is healthy for local government organizations. Government in general have pretty consistent processes in long-term goals that they're looking at. And we just evolve towards things as the ground game changes. So with that, I'll shift into draft goals and objectives for the new cycle. So these are up for your consideration. Again, these are draft based upon the conversations we had. You will not see a lot of evolution here. So the first goal area that we identified is sustaining as a chief financial stability. Part of the gist of that conversation was focused on the fact that while tremendous progress was provided by addressing a sales tax measure in the city and I know you are all very appreciative of the community's trust in the city to help execute, put those funds to good use. There are additional opportunities to achieve financial stability and the outlook while improved still requires additional work to achieve long-term viability and sustainability for the city. Within that, we identified several additional objective areas. Some of which again remain consistent with previously adopted objectives and some of which are new. So under, provide an update to the city council on the status of Creative Revenue Ideas. several of these remain the same, but then particularly when it came to the explore other opportunities to generate revenues for the city with a broader way of potential tax options. And again, I will just note this is exploration only. This is not a directive to go do this because partly I think you'd want to understand the revenue implications. We identified there seem to be consensus that it is least worth asking the question of what additional revenue options were available for the city and how could they have a financial impact on the fiscal sustainability of the city. Second, we identified a discussion around development of an economic development strategy and reported the city council. are many of which are carry-overs from prior objectives that have been identified. Some of which have been achieved through hiring particular positions. Third objective was research the establishment of business improvement district and present a report to the city council. Fourth item here was establish a policy set priorities on the expenditures of new tax revenues working with the finance department to take into account existing needs. And then finally, and this is a newer objective that was added which is assess the fiscal impact to city of cash businesses, not accurately remitting sales taxes and explore audit options to address the issue. And I will just note that there was consensus on these various items that I've just surfaced. And I'm happy that we're going to go back and revisit all these in detail. So if you'll indulge me, I'd like to just roll through all these as a presentation matter and then we can come back and address each one of these as a goal area and then get into the details on each. All right, we'll go to the next slide, which is a change up in the previous goal, which was very rather specific for a goal area, and that it identified a bunch of specific plans to go tackle. In here, because of the nature of all the objectives that were identified, I thought it would be more effective to rename this goal area, implement and support effective land use policies that encourage quality development. And the intent here was to not ignore the specific plans which we do subsequently identify as an objective area but to make sure we broaden our lens to include other work that's being done in the city to address overall land use policies that are important. So within this particular policy area, you'll see provide the City Council with an update on the city's recently approved zoning phase one study and a status of the city's ongoing zoning phase two study, including an overview of the project schedule. Provided the City Council of Bus Two or areas in Orange County and Southern California that have been redeveloped to successfully, to successful mix use projects. Third one identified was complete the citywide economic development study and initiate general planning amendments throughout the city. Fourth was provide the city council with an update on the general plan implementation strategies related to the city's mixed use districts, specifically the recently approved district to mixed use downtown. Number five is deliver a scope of work for recommended district two mixed use downtown specific plan that includes strategies for already identified goals of the general plan. And then two new additions was complete the corridor and sensitifications which is a relatively new objective that someone's already started but needs to be completed and those that's kind of the on the ground evolution of learning that help inform these evolutions of the strategic plan and the second one was developed and implement specific plans for key areas in the city and we could certainly have a conversation about naming those but this was our effort to not lose sight of the very important effort of doing specific plans in the city areas that the council has previously identified. The third goal remains relatively unchanged as some of this work is ongoing, and some of the work still needed to carry over from the previous goal. So the goal area remains a track developed and retained well-qualified staff members. Within the objectives here, our monitor accountability for mandatory staff training and or professional development through the annual evaluation process for staff. Second was to create job bulletins to replace class specs, which will be used for recruiting postings, recruitment postings. Third was identifying review and revise as needed department processes to improve operational efficiency and present to the city manager. Conduct a classic comp study. This actually is a, I think this was actually a new one that was added so it should be in a slightly different color but there was consensus around adding this. Next was conclude union negotiations successfully in a way that respects our staff but also does not destroy the financial future of the city. The next last one there was revisit the recruitment process and our strategies for attracting talent to the city. So those last three are all newer objectives where we have consensus. And then the final one of provide council resources and training to be effective, to be effective, meaning helping you be effective as council members and policy developers, whether it's policy innovation, ideas, state legislative impacts conferences. So, it's just ensuring you're being provided the resources you need to be effective council members when it comes to policy matters and policy development. This goal area also remains the same of improved customer service delivery to the community with goal objective one being developed and improved customer service training for all public facing divisions. Goal to being evaluated make recommendations regarding planning and building division forms templates specifications and information materials used by the public provide an update the city council. at an annual review process following the implementation of this. Third was to evaluate current online user processes and functionality and seek technology to improve online customer service experience. And the fourth objective was to streamline and modernize the planning and permitting process. And I believe these last two are relatively new objectives. And then two additional ones that we didn't get consensus on yet, but which were floated were to improve the business licensing process, so draw a distinction from the permitting process to keep business informed about the status of their business licensing process and overall improve that experience. And then number two was to improve overall customer service at City Hall specifically and how staff interacts with visitors at City Hall. So what's that experience when you walk into the front door of City Hall and you encounter staff and you start to ask your questions or seek guidance or otherwise seek staff assistance? And then based upon an array of very helpful comments and suggestions that were surfaced by council members, I added these additional, this new goal area, which I would probably define as enhanced quality of life and beatification throughout the city. So this has a lot to do with the visual look and feel of your experience in Westminster as you enter from points of egress and ingress or as you're just driving around town or as you're cruising through neighborhoods. And there was consensus on these first two which was revisit the co-enforcement process to be more proactive. Broadly speaking I would say in some communities they take a position of we'll just wait till somebody calls to complain and then we'll go out and tackle that. In other communities they wish to have a more proactive status as we'd like to make sure we identify things that are having material impact on quality of life in our community and try to work cooperatively with either residents or businesses to address those issues. This of course requires additional staff work and the code enforcement department in particular. But having council support for this proactive status is an important step and a good guide for Christine and her team. The second one was take steps towards city beautification to improve quality life and attract businesses and developers. So these steps could help you further define with council guidance or with staff making suggestions around how we focus on beautification. Sometimes this is focused on medians. Sometimes this is focused on gateway experiences. Sometimes this is focused on just where you're doing certain plantings or how you're addressing graffiti or how you're addressing some of the visuals along major corridors. But in general the goal would be to improve the overall visual sight line experience for those that are visiting or living in the city. And then three additional ones that came up through the process, but I didn't yet have a chance to surface. So I'd be looking for consensus guidance on these today would be to continue addressing the homelessness issues throughout the city that have an impact on the community to sustain and address public safety issues in Westminster. And then finally, spark and engage community pride and city partners to support beautification efforts. And those city partners were identified as Midway Special District, the school district, and the county as well. All of them play a part in helping make Westminster a great place to be. It could be critical partners in addressing some of these beautification efforts. So with that, that's the high level overview. We're going to switch our screen to Abby's screen. She's going to have a big Google document and a matrix format that you're relatively familiar with. So we'll watch that pop up here, hopefully, in a hot second. And I would love to turn our attention to a discussion about the goal areas first and foremost just to make sure we have some consensus on those goal areas and to dive into the details on each one of the objectives that we identify under the goal areas. So I suppose mayor my first question would be are there any questions or concerns with the goal areas specifically achieve financial stability Implement support effective land use policies that encourage quality development attract develop and retain well-qualified city staff members Improve customer service delivery to the community and the new goal area of enhanced quality of life and beautification throughout the city any comments questions or concerns from council about those five goal areas? Okay, great. I will also just want to comment that I was, it was really interesting and not unusual necessarily, really interesting that there was such a consistent tone of voice around the areas of concern that you each shared in our conversations together. And I appreciate the two things I heard was passion for the community and then passion about very similar policy areas of interest that I think was really great to hear from my perspective and made I think some of these things really stand out as areas to go tackle and address. Okay, so we have a screen up. Hopefully that's readable on your end. Is that zoomed in enough for my eyeballs on confident it wouldn't be, but I suspect your eyeballs are rather in mind. So why don't we discuss achieve financial stability? As you'll note, we're following a pattern that you are used to, which is identifying a timeline of when, who was responsible for this area, and then some specific details of the what around each one of these objective areas that I already surfaced in the documents you've seen. I will note on the screen that the bottom item is identified as an area that we would need to determine if there is consensus on, in which case, or excuse me, it's a newer area, but there was consensus on this. So, I guess all first, this is also, I should note that this phase in the conversation too, this is where we collaborate with city staff to also set some reasonable timeline and how we think we can go about achieving these objectives. So, I will either defer to your city manager or your highly qualified city staff, directors and the audience to help us identify appropriate timelines for some of these objectives. So the first objective that's identified here is focused on updating the city council and the status of creative revenue ideas, noting that we are adding this additional revenue area of explore other opportunities to generate revenue for the city, including transient occupancy tax, which is otherwise known as hotel tax cannabis taxes, digital billboard revenues and or expanding user utility tax. Mayor if I can provide an update on some of these. So originally the goal for this particular objective that stemmed from evaluating creative revenue ideas. Anxation was part of that. Investigating more efficient use of city properties is also something that developed over time as well. Anxation we're currently in the process of, you working the county on that. And so I'm not sure that that's something that needs to remain on here as part of the strategic plan. Goal is we're moving through that process. In terms of reviewing general fund revenues, how they're being invested. We can certainly work with our finance department and get a little bit more clarification from the council as to what investments you're looking at additionally, but we can at the very minimum provide the types of investments that we do now. Investigating more efficient use of city properties currently owned by the city for income generation economic development as you know We've moved forward with some of our properties and we're in processes of doing studies on whether we're using these facilities, you know at the best use But as far as exploring other opportunities to generate revenue for the city which includes transient occupancy tax cannabis tax as digitalboard revenues and or expanded user utility tax. We have been working through that digital billboard revenue as you know we've approved this council has approved a city wide billboard program and so we are moving toward that. If there are any other opportunities that this council is interested in exploring based on this list tonight, I think it would be beneficial for us to extract that from this particular objective and create a separate objective for that. So if you're for example wanting to look at a TOT, you know we can certainly pull that as its own individual line item because you know providing updates and some of these are very extensive. Anything related to taxes is definitely very extensive. So it would have a different timeline than let's say if staff was to provide an update on the annexation of the county islands. That's going to be three sentences. We're still talking to the county, right? So just keep those in mind. So question, say manager. So like on that one annexation, since you're saying to separate that in a different lines because of a timeline? So because the council has expressed interest in the annexations, we have been moving forward with that process. So we have someone that's a consultant for us that's working with Lafko in the county because the annexation process is very different. So if it's a matter of providing an update to the council on the status of the annexation, we'll do that one that times appropriate. There is really no update to provide you right now except that we're still moving for. It's a negotiation process, et cetera. So, would we be able to provide an update within the six months on the annexation that's a productive meaningful one? Maybe, maybe not. Just depends where we are on the process as the counties had some challenges. But for something like investigating more efficient use of city properties, that's also going to have a different timeline because as you know we are investigating the use of certain properties and some of those studies are going to be a lot more extensive than let's say, you know, evaluating a particular building than another particular building. So, yeah, so I feel like those would have different timelines for those specific items. So we should separate into another its own column. That's if you're really interested in having these updates stay on the matrix because certainly we already have direction with the council to move forward with some of these things based on the last three year plan, we can certainly just keep moving forward with that and then providing the updates to you. I leave that to your discretion, but if you were going to put some timelines on these, they would best be listed as individual items. It would be more consistent with the format too. Yeah, we can do that. OK. And then what about the last bullet point explore other opportunities for generate revenue? That one, what do you feel comfortable as far as the timeline? Well, it's really gonna depend on, first of all, if any of those peak your interest. So for example, the transient occupancy tax, we would be looking at what our tax rates look like, what neighboring cities tax rates look like, the process to, if you're gonna make any changes, what that process looks like, et cetera. So it just really depends on your comfortability level in us presenting your report. And then you'll have a decision-making point at that point if you're going to want to proceed or move forward with, if it's an outreach component, et cetera. Exploring other opportunities could actually be the outreach component first. You could decide tonight, maybe you'd like to poke around and see if anyone's really interested in a change of the TOT and then make your decision based on that. So timelines really going to depend on which method you want to go first. I guess that I'm confused right now. I want to know exactly that you're looking for the timeline, which is as when. Are you looking for a channel of timeline in a couple of years or because each of these items, I know, is different. An excitation or let's say cannabis taxes or digital billboard. We have to go through many steps in order to get there. So, yes. So essentially, yes, thank you for that. So essentially, providing an update to the City Council on the status of creative revenue ideas. So we would be looking to provide an update on these particular things within six months. And so all of these goals are three-year goals, but these objectives that we're reading off right now are really meant to be six-month objectives. So they're going to be certain checkpoints. So let's say, for example, let's say the council wants to increase transient occupancy tech. We want to look at the tax, right? So in the first six months, we're going to provide you an update on what that process looks like. So we're going to have to come to you and say, hey, it's going to be a consultant. It's going to cost this much. We're going to have to do this much in legal work. The process is going to look like this further on. And so by the time we've provided that update for you within these six months, you'll be on a decision-making point where you decide in the next six month objective cycle what that next step is. That next step might be like, okay, let's work toward getting it on the ballot for the November election of 2026, something along those lines, right? So, they're pretty much milestones in order to meet a larger goal. I understand that, but let's say that we are being reasonable with staff. We don't want to overload the bombardment with everything. So let's say that we were so excited, we said, okay, why don't we get all these done in three months? Then what can you say? Well, and so, and so the great thing about this process is, writers take in the information that you all have individually, independently provided to him as ideas. And so these were all ideas that were brought up. So you are right. I appreciate, you know, the expectations. And it's a lot to take six months. And we're barely on the first goal of the first objective in the first goal. So, you know, when it comes to providing some of that generalized idea, it's definitely not as extensive because as, you know, the last three years where we've brought certain items to you We gave more of a a big picture overview of the item which doesn't take as long to do But it gives you some very clear checkpoints of this is gonna cost you X amount of it's gonna cost you you know a few hundred thousand dollars for a specific plan for example So are you really interested interested? It's going to cost, you know, it's going to, you know, require 18 months of research. Is that really something you want us to invest our, you know, invest our time into and our money into? So it's, you know, it's really just dependent upon what the council feels is the priority. We've talked about cannabis at some point in the last three-year plan, for example. You know, we've brought a few presentations around, you know, is this the time that you want to talk about numbers, what do real numbers look like? Expanding the user utility tax. We haven't really talked about that. Is that something you're interested in? Is it even feasible for us to do? So it really depends, it's at the discretion of the council and it's really at your direction what you feel like is the priority. And maybe some of these, it's not gonna be achievable within the six months, but we can maybe build it in so that we're working on a component of it now and then in the next round we'll expand on it or we'll follow up on that. It really just depends on your priority. Which of these look good to you? If I could just interject one of the critical point about particularly revenue measures is what's the actual impact, right Right like how much a revenue which would be part of a study that would have to be done that takes time but you know if a TOT only moves the needle by $200,000 a year but a cannabis tax moves the needle by $2 million a year Then that's probably a relatively important number to have to and I think I would have to be part of any Study work that's done on consideration of any of these measures as part of that comparison. The great thing about a lot of these as well is, you know, we try not to reinvent the wheel. So thanks to our networking with other cities, et cetera, and looking at data from other cities and just, you know, some of the experts that we work with, we can provide, we can provide just a very, you know, high level overview, preliminarily, for you to make some kind of a decision, whether you're interested in moving on to the next one. So it's not really doing that full research yet, but it is a good amount of information where you can, you can peek if this council is gonna be interested. Well, can you just, how sorry to interrupt? That's fine. Can you just get us like some general, like a really preliminary information as far as the revenue generation of each one of these items, like the potential? On the TOT, the cannabis. I think digital billboard we probably already kind of know about that And the expanded user user utility tax Order the potentials we don't know what I mean We had some praise like you mentioned earlier. We had some presentations on the to potential cannabis businesses, but those were just there for their own project. Yes. So yes we can certainly do that. I would say the recommendation on this particular item. So provide an update to City Council on the status of creative revenue ideas We'll leave the three that say revenue general fund review general fund revenues annexation of the county islands and Investigate more efficient use of city properties that would be one item and then I would say You create a new Objective that is just that explore other opportunities to generate revenue for the city. And then the bullet points would be transient occupancy tax, cannabis taxes, and expanded user tax. And then what do you think on the timeline was that? What do you think? Thirty six months? Next month? Next month. Next month would be great since we're talking about budgets. I think some of that's going to require, well some of it's going to require our city our city attorney's office to help us with the processes because obviously taxes have, you know, different ways to handle those. As far as from a legal perspective, we could provide analysis as far as procedures for each one of those in, you know, a few weeks, certainly. I don't think that's going to be the hold-up I think the hold up will just be the realities of there's limited staff time. We, whatever we want to decide, there has to be a realistic rate. So, otherwise, we'd set the timeline, but we can't do it. And, you know, it doesn't do it any good for us. Well, right now, our focus is, our focus right now is obviously adopting a balanced budget. So that's what we're working on right now. Without having some of my stuff here, that's not the department head team. You know, the reality on some of these items items is this Amanda's office takes a brunt of the work when it comes to driving these particular items. And so I don't want to speak on behalf of my staff who are also working on 50,000 other additional duties as assigned. But I mean, I would probably say August is probably a reasonable time frame to provide information on those other opportunities. We can provide it earlier if need be, but it would have to be like in June. So we're not meeting in July. But if it's a priority for the council, we can certainly push it forward. And then as far as providing an update to the city council and the status of the previous creative revenues, I mean, that's probably something we don't really have anything to report right now but maybe in September or so we can certainly provide an update on those. So I'd say September for that first one but on the exploring other opportunities and we can take out digital billboard revenues on that one as well. Take that bullet out on the last one. Yeah. Okay. We've we've talked digital billboard revenues forever. You already have a lot of details on that. We are. Yes. All right. No more exploration done. It's exploring. No, no. We've got a handle on that. Okay. I would say maybe on that one, second meeting of June, instead of waiting till August. Sorry, which one are we talking about here? The last one, the exploring other opportunities. Oh, second meeting of June. Okay. Yeah, I don't have the date off to talk my head. But I would say, yes, second meeting of June. I just want to remind you whatever the date that you committed, that we are going to hold you responsible for it. Yeah. I mean, don't put yourself in a situation that, you know, we can do August, it's safer. No, it just a guest made make right now and hopefully that they can achieve within the uptime frame. Well, then we have to move. Yeah, I mean, are there any particular ones that you want to discuss before others for under those other opportunities? Because that expanding user utility tax, I'm going to volunteer my public works director to work on that one. Which one is that you think it will be the easiest to do the three bullet points? Easiest by analysis or easiest by analysis. In that time line, like it's time is considered. I mean really the TOT is pretty self-explanatory and then cannabis taxes, the framework for that is, you know, exists in other cities. So I think it's really just a comparison to see what other cities are doing, what some of the revenues they're generating. I probably say those who are easier than looking at the user utility tax. So you want to just separate those and do that one in August to expand the user utility tax and put that in August. You see my finance director. I'm concerned. No, but then we would also need to know what the cost would be to do. Do we want to split? Do we want to? Thank you. Do we want to split? Do we want to? Thank you. Do we want to split those? Time, my apologies. We need to be recording this audio for the sake of our audience at home. This feels like the daytime talk show, right? Yeah, Now you got to sing a song with that microphone now. Sorry, that was just a really good. The budget in Wanda just to give you a quick idea on those two items. But I mean, it can be part of the budget. I'm not sure. It's council's direction, for sure. Would you mind repeating those two numbers, too? Oh, of course. So our utility users tax. If we were to do a one percent on that, it'd be about a million and a half. It's 4% right now and we generate. So our utility users tax if we were to do a one percent on that it'd be about a million and a half It's it's 4% right now and we generate About 5.8 million Our TOT is 8% and we generate around a million so a 1% I mean I just divided about 125,000 It seemed to me that you very much have that lineup already and I think that the opportunity to generate the revenue is number one priority for us. So I don't disagree with you that if we have to make it a priority, I think that that item should go first. So with the date that we have there in June 2025, I think that I do agree with that. For all three of those? Yeah. Okay. Great. Okay. So for that second, so are we comfortable with the first item of that last item that we just changed? Yes. Okay. Okay. Thank you for our work at that timeline. Now these are there's a probably go faster, but we got the harsh one out of the way. So next one up is begin development of the economic development strategy and report to the city council. I believe Christine one of these has been. Yes. So we have an economic development manager who is also in our audience today. So that is completed as far as hiring an economic development manager. She's still working through an economic development strategy because as we noted, it's been a challenge to hire for quite some time. It's a different positions, but this is one of those positions. We can certainly have her provide an update regarding where she's at with the economic development strategy and report that to the city council. As far as better outreach and engagement with businesses in the city, we can provide the update that includes her efforts as well. Establishment of an economic development department, we don't have the bandwidth and capacity to create separate departments. So this person department of one is really just reporting to the city manager's office at this point. So I would say that we're not anywhere in the realm of establishing that department. So I would exclude that at this time. Do you think that later on down the road that that manager at one point would need an assistant? At some point, it would be great to have, you know, whether it's an analyst or a specialist, et cetera, you know, the bilingual skills would really help considering we have a lot of businesses that require bilingual skills. Some were down the line, yes, but I would say right now, she's using the staff members that we have, whether it's our senior analyst to help with support, or, you know, our admin assistant, Lynn, to help with translation, et cetera. Just maneuvering through that. But yes, sometime at some point, it'd be ideal. Okay. I think that is important for us to take this item as the next priority, because I know that for the last couple of years we concentrate on infrastructure already. So this is the time that we need to look into economic development. And we need to put some time into it to get the city moving forward. Because if we look around the city, or ours, they are very much on top of that. And we are kind of behind. And I think it's the time for us to go with and speed up on that. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely agree. You know, we're really excited in the small amount of time that we've, you know, bringing on our second senior management analyst and of course our economic development manager as well. We've just, we're starting to engage in the community in a different, you know, at a different level. We're really proud back in February. We had our little small business expo that you were part of. And many of you were able to come by in a 10 and just reaching out to our small business community. And we're just still building on that momentum. We had a couple of business grants, et cetera. But our economic development manager is also going through and meeting with new business owners as well as existing business owners see where she can assist. Those are things that we can certainly share with the council now that we've had one on board for about five months or so. I'd say as far as beginning development of an economic development strategy, let's change that to updating the council on updating the council on the economic development strategy, which includes those better outreach and I'll update the council on the economic development strategy including outreach efforts and engagement with the business in the city. I see. I see you sitting there to examine. Absolutely. We're excited for that. So we'll delete those two lines of establishment, economic development department, higher economic development manager. The partnership with the Chamber of Commerce, we've were maintaining that as, you know, and the Chamber's been active and communicating with the city in terms of some of the events that they're holding and how we can, you know, how we can work together to elevate our small business community. So I think,'s the same in the partnership with the Chamber of Commerce. It would be status of the partnership with the Chamber of Commerce and just other small business efforts. But that's what we can update the council on. And I would say first meeting in June is reasonable, especially as you're thinking about the budget. Thank you, Christine. All right. Any questions without objective team? Okay, let's turn our attention to the next one here, which is research, the establishment of business and proven district and present a report to the report to the city council actually Christine my first question would be is Is this now the economic development manager working with you on that or is that for still require consultant? It would it would still be So I think this is where if there's an interest on a business improvement district, I think the initial report that needs to be presented to the council is what does a BID or what does a BIA look like? You know, potential locations and where the council would be interested in creating those boundaries and then what that process, what that outreach, public hearing, you know, what those processes would look like. I think for this particular item, it would be working with the economic development manager. We're not at the consultant level yet. If we do advance the efforts, then we would be looking at a consultant to help with the outreach efforts. We're not at the consultant level yet. If we do advance the efforts, then we would be looking at a consultant to help with the outreach efforts and fiscal analyses, etc. Okay. Isn't this one of the, it's belonged to one of the goal that we have in the foregose that we have put the little second district in also the downtown district. So yes, so the, as part of the little Saigon blueprint that was created for years back during COVID actually, one of the ideas came about was establishing a business improvement, a district. And essentially what that district does is it attacces, it creates a tax assessment for those businesses within the district. And those funds are essentially used to, they can be used to do things like, I don't know, wayfinding signs or marketing efforts for that particular district, whatever those businesses are in that. The thought of a BIA has been floated around for a long time, and it was part of the previous, it's been brought up. But I think it's a touchy area. And so moving along the process has been a little bit challenging as far as the, you know, the appetite for businesses to be a part of this. But we can certainly bring, you know, bring the item to let you know how the process works, et cetera. And maybe at that point, if you decide that there's something you want to explore, then we move forward to the next objective, which is to hire a consultant to help with the outreach, to help with engaging the businesses, where with this district, where's the interest, where would you have this district drawn? Is it the little side gone area, or is it really businesses along Westminster Boulevard, or is it a combination of both? Is it, how do you want to establish that? And I think Christine, you asked an important question to council, which is one that would as too, which is, is this remain an objective you're interested in pursuing still given the notation she made about the work involved? I think so. Sorry. It is. Okay, I'm hearing no waiver from it. So we're on board. Now, what's Christine? Do you have some thoughts on Timeline to report to the city council on efforts with this? I would probably say reasonably on that one since everything else is earlier. Probably August on that one. Okay. Yeah. First meeting in August. I'm going to use second meeting in August. First meeting in August. Remember you second meeting in August. I'll see you second meeting in August. All right. Put the economic development manager to work. Let's turn our attention to the next one which is establish a policy to set priorities on the expenditure of new tax revenues working with the finance department to take into account existing needs. You are, I will just observe you're in the middle of a budgeting process, so you must have some sense of how you set a priority for that, but I'll let you comment further. I'll actually let my finance director comment this time. Oh great, will please come use a microphone finance director. She probably keeps the microphone for this whole item, but... You can stay seated there if you want to just do it from there. Yeah. Sorry. Last one I can't see. Well, again, I think the priorities are part of the budget process. That's when the council allocates the funds. But if it's a standalone item, we can do it as part of that or we can do it as a separate meeting at a later time. I'm kind of either way. That would be fine. We could do it in June. We could do it as part of the study session in May. So I'm Mary May or June? Let's say part of the study session makes most sense. That make sense? Yes, it makes 14. This is the May 2025 study session. The only study session so far. Yes, the May 14 2025 study session before the regular meeting. Great. All right, let's go to the last object that we identified here, which is address fiscal impact of the city of cash business, businesses, not accurately remitting sales taxes and explore audit options to address the issue. So, I think partly you're, I'm looking to affirm the consensus on this that this isn't an issue out of fairness and transparency that the council would like to ask the city manager to explore and address in the community. I think so, but is this something that we can So? So, it's interesting. What we've done over the last few years to try to engage. So, are there businesses, are there cash businesses not accurately remitting sales taxes? And the answer to that is yes. You know, we do get reports. We do get quarterly reports on sales tax activity, which obviously confidentially can't divulge what those numbers look like, but the answer to that in generics is yes. What we've done in the last few years is we've engaged with the California Department of Tax and Fee Administration, which has, we've worked with them in terms of going out to do their version of outreach, if you will, and found that some businesses were less than cooperative. So really, it's interesting that, you know, we have the burden of these businesses being in our city that are not paying their share, but at the same time we don't have jurisdiction over their revenues. So that creates a difficulty for us. So we've engaged with the other agency, with the authority to do it, to go in and try to encourage, et cetera. But it's been challenging, Erin. Can you talk a little bit about that? It has been challenging. I've worked with them. I've talked to them, but pretty much where they left it is if we want to bring the evidence to them and provide them with the name of a business, a receipt proving that they're not collecting the tax at that point, they might get involved. But other than that, they're not willing to get involved, and they don't give us the outcome of their Research ether so if they go to businesses and look we don't get the information. It's not our It's not information that they'll give us so we've talked to them. I've had them I've requested them to to look into collections in the city but the last Conversation I had and I've actually reached out several times since, and they don't return my call, but the last conversation was if we want to provide names, and proof, then they would go out and look at it. It sounds like a lot of work, and then just hope for the best. Just here's this, and then we don't know. Yeah, and just, I'm aware of a couple audits that they've done, but they don't even give us the reports afterwards. They won't give us the name of the businesses that they've looked at. They don't really give us anything. So as far as our hands are pretty much tied, if we have businesses that we know of, we could certainly submit them. But even then, like I've said, I've reached out to the gentleman I worked with a few times and he hasn't returned my calls or my emails. Yeah, once upon a time, it used to be the State Board of Equalization, which actually had, you know, electeds that were, you know, that were a part of the State Board and they were the ones that enforced. Because of the nature of, you know, the political nature of having electeds on, you know on the board of equalization, the California Department of Taxed Fiat Administration was then branched off. There are no electeds that are part of that enforcement, just imagine it's like the FPPC for, you know, it's like the FPPC, this is an enforcement arm for, you know, for sales and use tax. The challenge that we have is, we get treated as a city like anybody else making a complaint, et cetera. And so we're not getting any special privileges to help fix some of these problems with them. It is a lot of calls that are not being returned. It is a lot of just you know, just a very haphazard way of trying to, you know, resolve the problem. You know, in the city standpoint, we've done the best we could as far as putting out this narrative that sales tax revenues that, you know, when you're paying into your taxes, you're essentially helping to pay for the officers that show up, yeah, the officers that show up to your business because someone did a smashing grab or you know grab your purse or whatever down as you're walking to the store. Like those are, it's those types of things that the tax is paid for. It's also just very challenging to put that out there and then expecting that people are going to pay for these services. So we tried the best that we could, it's just hard because we are not the enforcement arm of people's sales tax revenues. That's the thing that I want to outline. We want to come up with the time frame. But at the same time, I know that staff have been then put effort into that a lot already. And look like that we didn't get anything out of that. I would like to have been, you know, to have the last push on that to make sure that we have, we get the answer out of them. If not, then there's no point that we continue to push for it because it's not in our jurisdiction, so we can't do anything about it. So why don't we put the number one priority on that to get that done as soon as possible? So we can come back to Council and provide some alternative ways of outreach. I think what it boils down to for us as staff is going out there and whether it's explaining where your taxes go to as far as services go, whether it's, if we have to decide we're going to do a couple of town hall meetings or pop-up tents down in certain business areas, we can certainly do that. But as far as forcing people to pay, that's where we get stuck and that's where we've got to rely on the state to do that. But I think for us, we can certainly do outreach if that's this council's desire. We can do outreach. We can provide information, maybe create you know three language flyers that can be mailed and we'll take a look at what those look like. If that's the council's desire we can present an item with some of these different ideas. What is that outreach we'll do for us? And let's say that we get the result and we're going to send it to the state to for them to. I mean, you know, we spend money here, right? We spend money, we get people together and then we got the result and we are doing nothing with the result. Or we have no control over that. And what good does it do for us? And you're right, and that's just part of the challenge. We'll put money into something we don't know if it's gonna actually yield results or how many results that would, how much of that would actually result in anything. And we could, again, as part of that, we can sit down in front of, you know, we can try to sit down in front of state legislators. We can try to facilitate some of these appointments. And as part of the reaching out to the legislative bodies to figure out if there's anything that can be done, we can go as far as that goes. And I think we got to do something know, whatever we can do, you know, we have to try and at the same time, if there's something like red flag, it's obvious, then that's something that we can report it and just go for the best. Well, maybe we can we go back to that item, the back on that screen? Because right now it basically just says, it says, assess fiscal impact to city of cash business, not accurately remitting sales tax and for audit options to address the issue. So we can, I mean, we can provide financial information to really show what the impacts look like. That's something we can certainly do. We can provide a couple of different options. We can give some direction points as far as things that we can do as a city. I would probably say Maybe this is when we also do second meeting in June There's a little bit rushed maybe that might be a bit rushed I'm trying to think of it's it's hard to provide the financial information because it would be on a comparison basis, but because financial or sales tax information is hard to report. I'll work with HDL to see if we can get some comparisons. To other, I mean, I know that there's a publication that lists different shopping centers in Orange County, and I know we're listed in that, so I can provide that information that's already done. So I can provide information but as far as exploring audit options and those I'm not quite sure that could be done that quickly. And I'm not sure that we can really explore audit options because we just don't have the, I would say we'd have to remove the audit options to address the issue because we just can't, and we can't enforce how the date we don't have the, I would say we'd have to remove the audit options to address the issue. Because we just can't, and we can't enforce, we don't have the date, we don't have the date. We don't have the, they don't respond and we don't have the ability to do that. I mean, as far as when I speak to them, they said they did audit. So I mean, that's the answer, as they already did it. But they did it and we didn't. So it's, yeah. It's a, I mean I would say based on what the fiscal impact looks like and when we present the item to the council, maybe that's a time where council can decide, maybe you establish, you have two council members that work with staff and we go on a mission to the state and talk to them about Impacts or whatever it is right based on the data, but we'll leave that as a decision point once we present this assessment Go from there. You may very well discover it's $50,000 in which case you have a fundamental policy question Like how much are you gonna spend trying trying to get after $50,000 even if it's a question of fairness on the other hand, maybe $500,000 in which case that's a different question. We're besting a few zeros based on some estimates, be honest. Yes, it's a lot more than that. I guess that can be helpful if we get more information so we can get together with the state legislative leaders so that we can sell the ideas and get the information, pick their minds and what we can do in order to get to the end result. So you mean? And I appreciate Christine suggested that we drop the bit about audit and let's just stick with focusing on the actual fiscal impact and estimate of fiscal impact. Can we add on their ideas of, you know, education to the business community? Yeah, we'll include that. Yeah, that's something. We can include that. That'll be part of the decision-making point for the council. We'll include that. Does that work? And then deadline on that one. It's September. Yeah, probably on that for as on the public education options. I can certainly include some of the I can try to include some of the fiscal impact in May with the budget. But I'll see what I can get. I we maybe put a later date just in case we can't meet that. Yeah. Well, we just put September for the time being, but I think some of that discussion can be built into the budget. Okay. Okay. Very good. So this is a reminder, a consensus of the items and elements that were elevated to me in the course of our conversations. I don't want anybody to feel like you're being directed to directed here, but I feel like we have pretty good objectives that are any other objectives or something you need to raise or question and ask. Can you scroll down? I wanted to see where we left off. So this is the last of the objectives in this particular goal area, and then we're on to the next here. Oh, yeah. Oh, sure. I had to add the blue up big for eyeballs but we can make it smaller so you can see it all. Okay. I'm fine. Don't forget, we'll take this to the next council meeting to confirm all of these as well. So what you're seeing right now is a draft. Correct. Technically a draft. Okay. Okay. Thank you. All right. Let's move on to goal area number two, which is implement support effective land use policies that encourage quality development. I will not read these individually and I suspect we'll turn to our assistant City Manager since he is across the board identified as the who on these various items. As you'll see, there are two in this yellowish color at the bottom. That color signifies that they, that we're looking for some additional maybe clarification and discussion, and we can get some guidance from city staff on how to beef the what up there a little bit to give you a sense of what we could come back and report. So, do you have any questions, would you like to or comment you like to make on any of these objectives? Sure, I think we can get into them. Just for the benefit of every bit, we're going to read through them. The first one was provide the city council an update on the city's recently approved zoning one phase one study and a study of the city's ongoing zoning phase two study including an overview of the project schedule We are moving forward with one of those components are being completed, which is the the zoning phase one that was brought to council So really I think the focus would be to modify it and to bring, to complete the zone phase two study, including an overview of the project schedule. We are actively working with our community development department. As you know, it's been infused with some recent good talent in the form of a principal planner that has joined us. He's been here for a little bit over six months now. So we're and we also have a consultant in-house staff member that's also been working very closely with also our interim community development director Sherry who's here tonight as well. So with that staff augmentation, we are moving towards completing the zoning phase two study. Amanda Tropeano, who's very familiar to the city for the good work that she's done going back to the 2016 General Plan update when she was with the previous company, continues to work with our staff on that. So we would, this one would be as far as providing you with an update, we can bring you an update. I feel like you just did. Well, a little bit more detail, I'm not the exact that. What about a date on the completion of Phase 2? We can, I don't have that information to provide, but we can definitely bring, for the benefit of we do have a new council member, council member Mark Wynn, I think for the benefit of this council we would be happy to come back with an update within a few months to let you know what the status is on all of this good effort. I don't have the council meetings memorized or committed to memory like our city manager does so I would need some help and if I say a few months from now I would need some help fine tuning actually getting me to an answer on what meeting date that would be. So we're thinking sometime in October or no September October? I think for the benefit of the new council I think it would be good to have us come up and provide an update on that a lot sooner just to give everybody a clear timeline. Okay. So, go ahead, Sherry. Good evening, I'm Sherry Vanerguse in the interim community development director. We'd be happy to give you that update in June Look at that in bang and then also to Can you include that like the process? Like for competing that face to Just so we know what you know Yeah, it'd be a thorough updated to let you know what staff members are working on the effort what consultants working on the effort and what the cost of the effort and what the ultimate project schedule is for the effort that would be part of the detail that day okay so I think our language in your reflects including an overview of the project schedule and I just added in cost Great. Second objective was any questions on this First Rejector? We can move on. Okay. Thank you for that. I'm actually really hoping that our Assistant City Manager doesn't have to be working on these. What. So a second objective was any questions on this first projector we can move on. Okay. Next one up is provide to the City Council plus two of the areas in Orange County and or something California that have been redeveloped to successful mixed use projects. Yeah, I mean we're ready to do that within the next couple of months really depending on the availability of our council We do think it is very beneficial to do so back when we were working on the 2016 general plan update Getting stakeholders and committee members out to actual locations to walk the type of projects that are that That are envisioned for for our intensified corridors within the city was very beneficial to that group. So it really, it's something we can do within the next couple of months, depending on council availability, I would say, definitely before the summer months so that we could get everybody, it will probably happen, it will be the same two are provided twice, right, to kind of break up the council majorities. As the ACM had mentioned, the intent of this was really to have this bus for leading up to our changes to zoning as far as allowing mixed use. We allow mixed use now. And so this is more for perspective. So it's certainly the desire of the council still wishes to have this tour to look at some of the newer projects to draw some inspiration. We can certainly do that. But the original intent is no longer, you know, the original intent is no longer there. But certainly we can provide an opportunity for the City Council to see some of the successful mixed use projects that have since developed. I'm sure each one of us have a chance to go around and take a look at different areas already, but I think it's beneficial for the City Council to take a tour in this area. And we have a number of reports that you are going to do in June. And it's better for us to see and then we'll talk about these before you guys update us with the information. Then we can digest the information when we get an update and get ready to make the decision right there. You have context. Yeah, the original plan we were looking at three different properties at the time. I mean, it was going to be on a Saturday and we were all going to get together on the wild bus and take that trip. What about June 10th? So, yeah, so we can certainly have staff take a look at your schedules to see what we can do in May or June. We do have a couple of locations that we can take you to. If it is easier for some of these developers to have the council go as a whole, we can certainly notice that a special meeting and that won't be a problem. So that all five of you can go at the same time and we will gladly provide that transportation. So it looks like you're still interested in doing it so we can certainly. Yeah, I think it'll be beneficial. I mean, for those who are not able to go on their own and what's what know what they're looking at when they're doing. Yeah, there's been quite a bit. Well, there's intensification and that's the whole purpose of mixed use, but the products that are being delivered to different areas of Orange County they vary tremendously with your traditional horizontal mixed use vertical mixed use product types so I think it would be a good idea to put eyes on these topics that are getting thrown around so often And it sounds like we have council consensus still to pursue the subjective I'm not hearing them of a say they want to pull out. And it sounds like it's as much, the who hears as much perhaps city staff as it is council and deciding your schedules to get there and make this happen. So what May June sounds like, so I think what I just heard Christine say, and that sounds like a reasonable timeline. I'm sure. Nobody's planning a 14 week vacation in Europe that we need to know about. Okay. So we'll look for May June. And I assume the principal planner will be involved again. Correct. All right. Next up is complete the citywide economic development study and initiate general plan amendments throughout the city. And you want to provide a status on this? Sure. We did bring to the city council the economic development study that looked at opportunity areas throughout the city and we received feedback from the council regarding moving forward with intensifying and in some cases changing the shape of these areas, expanding them, carving out additional space for this type of intensification mainly along major corridors throughout the city and obviously without any impact to current residential establishments throughout the communities. As part of the economic development study, there was the big chunk of it that was presented to the council. The next focus really is internal processes to go ahead and update the general plan to facilitate the type of intensification. Can I have you talk a little bit about the EIR process that goes along with just the general plan update? We have actually started the EIR process for that intensification because that is the lengthiest part of the process. And we have just received proposals from consultants to do the zone change update and the general plan update. So we will be in a position to be able to select a consultant and give you information on the schedule very shortly. the EIR work is currently underway so that we can hopefully minimize the amount of time that it's going to take once we get our land use consultants on board. Do you kind of have a guest timeline for that? I haven't seen the proposal yet from the consultants. They just came in on Friday. So as soon as I had a chance to review those, I'd be happy to let the council know when we select our consultant what the schedule is going to be. Okay. I do have a question for a citizenship manager. I know I understand that this is a strategic planning workshop and we're looking into the future, right? And understand that you know from the top of the slide say implement and support effective land use policies and also the item that we are talking about right now is a general plan, initials, general plan amendments. I hope you understand, I know that sometimes I go that we have the specific plan for the economic. the federal plan, initials, general plan amendments. I hope we understand, I know that sometimes I go that we have the specific plan for the economic development for the civic center. How is it for into this or should we look into that or we have to be, it has to be a separate item that we have to talk later on. I think the best place to discuss that particular topic would be on the next item, which specifically focuses on the actual mixed use districts. Okay. And we could talk a little bit more about. That leads us to the same question that the Vice Mayor asked about is where we are on the rankings, what other, what other specific plans exist in the city that we could do that on the next time. Oh, okay. Yeah. But we won't leave this page until we address that issue. Okay. All right. Thank you. I'll tell if it just so I'm clear, it sounds like we have completed a citywide economic development study, correct? Yes. Okay. pause for a second note as we're going through this process of updating you. We are also knocking off objectives that were partially achieved. So we'll be, we'll strike through on that particular item. And it sounds like the big, as they say, the long poll in the tent right now is the EIR report in terms of advancing the general plan or initiating the general plan amendment update. So I've tried to craft this into providing update on the status of that EIR and the timeline to deliver on this project. Does that seem like a reasonable thing to get done? Yeah, so does that also. So we can provide you with an update once we have a sense of the EIR timelines we selected a contractor, things of that, and we've initiated the EIR. And then my only other follow-on question is my only follow- following question for Adolfo's timeline we could, when can we report back to Council and the status of the ARR and timeline process on that? Since we are in the process of receiving and reviewing the proposals from the consultant world, what do you think shares, far as being able to come back with an update? I would say early June. The beauty of the, I mean, this is something that our staff is really good at, but as part of the proposal process, it's an opportunity for the private sector to essentially share their experience on this deliver these types of projects and opportunities for staff to learn and possibly refine the scope even prior to Council Award. So I would say in June we would come back and let you know what our original proposal what our RFP was, what the proposals look like, who were, who, what the refined scope looks like and then what the timeline looks like. And we would do that in early June and then quickly come back for an award through the normal city process for awarding that work to the, to particular consultant. Okay, so to be clear then the award would actually happen after June it would happen after okay very good I think I captured this accurately counseling questions on this objective. No, okay excellent Next up is provide the city council of an update on the general plan implementation strategies related to the cities mixed use districts specifically that recently approved district to mixed use downtown East to Golden West to Hoover. All right Mary believe you were just asking some questions about this one. So I'll let the Dolpha take the floor. Right so again with this fund I'll provide the City Council with an update on the general plan implementation strategies related to the cities mixed use districts specifically the recently approved District 2 mixed downtown, which is the East Golden West to Hoover. So one of the things that we learned through the economic development study was that it was in the city's best interest to take a step back and look at the entire city and look at the economic development opportunities for the whole city, rather than dig in completely into a specific plan for For one of the mixed use districts So that is what we went ahead and did as a result of that the work that was discussed previously Which involves some EIR work to intensify the districts throughout the city needs to take place In early June we'll let you know what that timeline exactly looks like but it's an EIR as you can imagine back in 2016 those of you who are on the council or planning commissioners at the time remember that that is a lengthy process and for that reason it really does put a hold on some of the particular focus of the mix use downtown district because we're waiting to see what the rest of the intensification for the city looks like from a, just from a policy and procedure standpoint going through the general plan amendment process. I know where you're going. Let's go for it, go ahead. No, no, no. Go ahead. No, I don't know. I was just popped in my head right now. You know how 2016 there was an EIR done for the general plan of the team? How long has it been? How long has the EIR valid for that particular? Let's just say it's valid for quite some time. But when you make major general plan, major land use and zoning changes, it requires that to be updated. Often. the . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . and that's what we're talking about. And I'm just going to say that we're not going to be able to analyze it back. So those all have to be analyzed. Okay. Triggers the major analysis. Okay. And then just a clarification when we say recently adopted district two makes use. Can you make sure we explain that that is not like what do you call it? Elected district two is remember we broke it. There was a different breakdown of why certain areas were called a particular number district. Correct. Can you explain that so we make sure it's for the benefit of every. Yes. Before we had districts in the city, the general plan of the state of 2016 identified. Mixed used districts throughout the city which essentially carved out opportunity areas throughout the city for example the mall itself is a district by itself doesn't necessarily mean that that is district one it is it is district one as listed in 2016 so there are some nuances that we need to adopt moving forward based on the fact that we are now a city with districts. Yeah. Voting districts. Correct. I have thrown the interim general plan to precede the work district there to bring to that point. Yeah. Does that think there was some confusion on the guy and I got in this question asked before by certain residents who are like, well, this is your, I don't know, it's not. Yeah. You know, we have district boundaries for elected up here, but it's not, and try to explain to them that it's not I'm trying to explain to them That is not elected district. It's makes you and makes use zone district. Yes, the term district has forever been changed in the Southwest. Yes. Yes. I don't know if there's something that we should Change that just to avoid confusion Well, we can't change the general plan as far as the text that goes. We can definitely do a better job in our moving forward with our explanations to be able to highlight it. Really by name, I think more than anything at this point, because these are very defined areas throughout the city. So instead of mixed use district one, well, bus and storm all is what we should be referring it to I think moving forward we'll focus on the names that were identified and refined by the council. So I need a little clarity what so what exactly is our next step here is to provide this more general update to the council? Well anything I, I'll open to your suggestion, writer. Because of the citywide effort that's going on, it does put a bit of a pause on some of the specific plans that are slated to move forward throughout the city. So I don't know how comfortable we feel about putting a timeline in. I know the goal today is to put a timeline on it. Well, it's certainly going to come after June. And since we don't really know the timeline after June, it seems a little more difficult. But what would be the outside edge of Somestimate would it be June of 2026? We'll ask Dr. Couture that giant Probably I think we're comfortable with that we don't want to over commit Definitely I know when we start talking about years it tends to make everybody feel like the year can become two years, but an EIR is, that's a standard. It's a work and it is realistically a year-long process. Theoretically, we'll have a better understanding of that once we complete the June 2025 update. We get through the IRRFP process. Okay. We put that, put on their buy instead of June just June 2026. You won't buy. I'd imply it. It's implied. Well I would put buy. I don't disagree. I would put buy. You say we have to June 2026. Did you get it done earlier? Great. Bring it earlier. Okay. And then we'll move to the final objective. That's a carryover, which is the lyroscope will work for the recommended General Plan District 2 mixed use development specific plan downtown specific plan That includes strategies for already identified goals of the general plan That's a mouthful it is it is and that's that's That's a whole effort by itself that would begin after June of 26. It would really look at essentially putting out an RFP finding the right consultant to move forward with a specific plan for that district. And this is Mayor, you brought up the discussion of the Civic Center, right? So when we identified this specific plan as the top priority for the city, we did also prioritize every other, we're not gonna call them districts anymore, but all every other specific plan in the city. And they are ranked, we brought that to council several times, I don't have that information with me now, but Civic Center Development is something that I've heard from the vice mayor black when you were planning commissioner and I know mayor You you you have an interest in that as well This would be the the moment to introduce discussion on that from your side all right I'm understanding is that when you say that Pacific plans already identified in the general plan For the Civic Center is already identified in the general plan Right my understanding it's identified as a specific plan area A mixed use district within the city where the next logical step would be to build That a specific plan for each of these locations And I'm sure you can probably talk a little bit more intelligently on this than I can, but I know you can't, it's very costly and it can be also confusing for a community. Even if we had the money to say, let's just build out specific plans for every district in the city. What outreach effort are you coming to it? It creates issues, right? So sure, I think I'll talk a a little bit more about if the mayor's interest is in running two specific plans, what that would look like. Yeah, I think we'd want to understand what goals you're trying to achieve, because we don't necessarily have to have a specific plan unless you're looking at making some significant land use changes in the area. Because a specific plan is useful when you're looking at making infrastructure changes and other significant changes. Chair, I'm so sorry. Mayor, we lost the quorum. Oh, all right. Take a break. Oh well, let's take five minutes break break and be back to the next video. I'm gonna go back to the next video. I'm gonna go back to the next video. I'm gonna go back to the next video. I'm gonna go back to the next video. I'm gonna go back to the next video. 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I'm a little bit more of a man I'm a little bit more of a man I'm a little bit more of a man I'm a little bit more of a man I'm a little bit more of a man I'm a little bit more of a man I'm a little bit more of a man I'm a little bit more of a man I'm a little bit more of a man I'm a little bit more of a man I'm a little bit more of a man I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go back to the school. I'm gonna go back from the recess. Local please. Thank you. Mayor Wynne. I'm here. Vice Mayor Munzo. I'm here. District one, Councilman Fan West. Fan West here. District three, Councilmember Wynne. Here. District four, Councilmember Wynne. Mayor Yufak Kwan, District four, Councilmember Wynne absent. District four, council member win. Mayor, you have a quorum with District four, council member win absent. All right, thank you very much. Can you go back to the previous slide? I can, Mayor. And thank you for calling a recess. Actually, it gave staff and I an opportunity to connect on a couple points because there's a lot of language going on here. And some of the language actually assumes that a specific plan is the best plan possible or the only policy route. And as we were discussing, that's actually a decision council made wanna make with some additional information that will result from some of the study work that is going on here. So my advice would be on these objectives, if we wanna put those on the screen, that where we discuss, so we have this first objective, we've already identified where we struck through. So it's this objective right here, this one, we're going to keep that. And my suggestion would be is down here we say we provide an update to the city council with an update on the general plant implementation strategies related to the city's mixed use downtown districts, specifically the recently approved district, and evaluate policy options including a specific plan for the district. And we leave it open for you to make a kind of go-no-go decision with specific plans of the best option based upon the expert advice of land use planners in the room, that would actually be the the best time possible. And that would also then actually probably have us eliminate this other objective, because until we know, until you have the information to make a call on that, we probably wouldn't proceed to the next objective. I have a question on that one. I thought we already established that, during the other specific plans. Excuse, a strategic plans. So we already had established that there was three areas where we wanted to proceed with the specific plan. We have the priority list from the council. And at the time we had had identified that the city was going to move forward with one of those districts with the downtown being the priority district. Prior to moving forward with any land use changes to just that district, with the city's focus on economic development, our trips to ICSE, Las came back and Really identified actually prior to the trip really but then really solidified during the trip We it became very clear that instead of going full throttle into a specific plan for that priority district Then we need to take a step back and look at opportunities throughout the city based on what was decided in 2016 We're're a decade later, the landscape of the county has changed tremendously, our neighboring cities have changed tremendously, so it really focused us on more of a city-wide approach. This doesn't change the fact that the downtown is still the top priority. I know the mayor brought up the civic center, so that's still in play as part of the ongoing discussion. But in sitting with Sherry, she has been a great wealth of knowledge to the city. And she has shared with us some success stories for iconic areas that she's worked on in Orange County. That went a different route than the specific plan route. And all we're saying is when we get to this point in June of 2026 it may be a specific plan it may be something else based on what the council needs and that in itself will be further discussions part of making prior to making that leap. Can you have an example of what that added route would be? Absolutely. Maybe you're familiar with the platinum triangle in Anaheim. I was in the city of Anaheim when the city council first had that vision and they thought that they were going to do a specific plan. But as they articulated their vision for the platinum triangle, it became obvious that a specific plan would not allow them to achieve that vision. And part of that was because they did not want to create nonconforming land uses. And it was impossible to do that with a specific plan. So we ended up going with traditional zoning and an overlay zone. So it was basically trying to find the best tools to implement the city council's vision. So that's why we're trying to keep the doors open here. So it may be that a specific plan will be the best tool. But once you've seen the results of the citywide zoning, it may be that a mixed-use zone is adequate to be able to implement your vision for these different areas. And if it's not, you still have the opportunity to direct staff to do a specific plan. If you recall the intensification of any of these districts was going to be done through the specific plan, and instead we're doing it citywide prior to jumping into one. Going back to your suggestion earlier, your question, I don't want to create any more than we already have. I don't want to create any more works, but at the same time, I would like to see if we can implement the vision that we have for the city center to develop pre-development into this. Because I know that we specifically mentioned that this is district two, McEuse, downtown. But now I think I think the Civic Center is now the sick three. Should we, I don't know, I'm asking question here. Should we include a vision that or the plan to have their Civic Center redevelopment here in this goal? So for this one, the way it reads, right? So let's work through it because I think we just made some changes to it. So provide the City Council with an update on the general plan implementation strategies related to the mixed use district, specifically the recently approved general plan. We'll just call it mixed use downtown and evaluate policies including a specific plan for the mixed use downtown. If a writer would you say that it is, this is an opportunity I'm hearing from the mayor to potentially have two priorities. One of them being the downtown district and another one being the civic center district to run concurrently. Right. I think that's what I'm hearing too. That's what I'm hearing. There's consensus on council to make those equal priorities and what the complication is or additional intensification is for work on the part of city staff. Well we had as far as the priority was that you need to get rid of the district. We'll clean that up. Well let get rid of districts throughout and let's just name them. We'll stick to the name that the council agreed. So for this particular one, it was mixed use downtown. Mixed use downtown. Yeah. And then keep the east, east, go west to Hoover. It's just that specific district. It's just that segment. Yeah. And then the other one was did a say gone and there was one other one was there's a bunch. They're all listed in the property. We had to identify three in priority. I mean I can go over. So original priority rankings. We had the mix use Westminster Boulevard slash down turn which is the eastern portion. Then we had the mix use for little Saigon. We had Westminster Boulevard slash downtown western portion mixed used corridor which Um, I think you mix use, yeah, it's just a mix use corridor. Yeah. Um, then we had mix use civic center and then mix use Northwest. And that third one was the West Mister Boulevard East. Excuse me West, because of that mix use area that is located is downtown. Yeah, it was located along Westminster Boulevard between Willow and Golden West. This West portion of district, the general plan district to focus on high commercial retail presence. And correct me if I'm wrong, that was also one area that was identified as we, that we identified as ICC as a potential project. Am I wrong? No, that's correct. So to me those are the areas that we should continue to focus on. Those are, and I'm pretty sure that that area is a sought out target area of different developers from what I've been hearing. I mean, if it would help the council, we could come back with an overview of all of the mixed use districts. It doesn't change anything that we're doing right now. It just gives us an opportunity to essentially to present to this council an overview of every district that exists in our general plan and and they could open it up for discussion. Because right now we're hearing a list that's being read by the city manager. Yeah, I was I remember when we spoke about this pretty intensely about the priority areas. So Mr. Mayor Christine I I just wanna verify. So the west side downtown is the off of Westminster and Springdale area or more toward the middle. So the western portion is west side. Along westminster between Willow and Golden West. So west of Golden West. Okay, that's the Western portion. So from the list that you read earlier, is that according to the priority that we said before? The so the priority rankings, this is what was presented at the time. And I have to go to another page to show what the priority was. And how long ago was it about two years ago? It was originally provided. The first iteration was in 2022. But we had brought this out a couple of times. A few more times. OK. Just try to go page. My suggestion is I agree with the Assistant City of New Mexico. What don't you look into that and then give us an update on that? We can do that. It's quite complicated. Going back to 2016, I would just say probably top left to write on a map listed in order. I don't think't think that was a rhyme or reason and if they ended up on a list it was just because somebody needed to go first, somebody needed to go last. And they were a particular size, right? And then when we brought it to the council, we looked at based on some of the input from our planners and our, and other land use experts, they said, yeah, it's kind of too big of a chunk. It's too big of a task to take on. It's very different. Let's break it up here. So that's how we ended up creating, actually, I would just say breaking up the districts and expanding the list, because now we had a large district that became two. And as part of that, we came up with a final segment list for lack of a better term and then the council ranked them. And just that journey has been about a two and a half year journey. And now that we're looking at intensifying areas and expanding areas, I think it would be a good time to bring everything back and say, okay, here are the expanded areas, here's what we're calling them, we'll clean up all the naming, and then we could re-rank them if the council chooses. All right, thank you. I think that would that be your answer. I was going to say what I'm hearing is like there was a discussion being had about elevating the civic plan as part of the being on part and move forward. You just made a critical point which is there's a lot of work happening right now which is a precursor to any of these specific plans actually coming to life. and perhaps more important thing is to come back and revisit and update the council on the specific plans that are envisioned and the prioritization of those in case there's a healthy council discussion, reprioritizing where civic center is because it doesn't sound like it was on a top top at the top of the list. No it wasn't. So that's what I've heard. Yeah. Anybody disagree with what I just stated and should we modify the objective to actually be come back and provide a thorough report back on specific plans, status of those specific plans, the history, it's really helpful to have a staff member here with the provide that history by the way that context as immediate is super important. So I think that I think that since Sherry mentioned that, you know, once council we establish what our priority is, maybe a specific plan may not be the way to go. So, can you need to reword that to state that, that maybe over what is the best route to provide? You want to evaluate the mix use zones? Yeah. If a specific plan is not the best vehicle to accomplish, we want to accomplish then. I want to think to mention this. I think before we start talking about the delivery method, which is I think the last column here, what I see being added here right now, I like where that's going. I look at you, but he's the one typing right. Riders typing. So yeah, I like where this is going. Right now we're in the process of an environmental impact study. We're going to come back in 2026 to provide you with an overview of like we're all that landed. At the same time we'll be ready to also provide you with an overview of all of these specific plan areas. Mixed used district areas, excuse me, misused district areas. An opportunity to see what the intensification looks like for you to be able to reprioritize if needed? I don't know if the term, the civic center, the development to be for us, but I'm more concerned of the building that we are in right now is unsafe and it needs to be renovated. So I don't know that we may have to take it into that. Because of that, we may have to pre-order ties, you know, the mix use. I don't know. I mean, it's a large site. It expands the entire civic center area and it just depends on what division of the council is is for the area Right and going back to it sure it was saying what delivery method that would look like But until we intensify like the entire city like we had stated and finish that effort Then I think we'll be able to come back and look at the benefits of repartising if that's what the council chooses to do agree So I have, this is why we like to work in real time to make sure, because we'd like to write it down for specificity. So I've rewritten this to say, provide a report to the City Council on the state of specific plan options in the city, the key characteristics of a specific plan, and review feedback from the City Council on their priorities for potential specific plan areas and prioritize areas that may be subject to a specific plan. That's a mouthful, I appreciate. So I think we're agreeing over here. It should be mixed use districts. My apologies. Instead of specific plan? Yes. Okay. Thank you. On the state of mixed use district options in the city. Going back to the first line. To the very top there. Yeah, there you go. the I'm not sure if I can do it. I'm not sure if I can do it. I'm not sure if I can do it. I'm not sure if I can do it. I'm not sure if I can do it. I'm not sure if I can do it. I'm not sure if I can do it. I'm not sure if I can do it. I'm not sure if I can do it. I'm not sure if I want to clarify is when I said the characteristics of a specific plan I was referring to wanting to inform the City Council about the trade-offs of specific plans and while you're marrying I want to do that. Which I assume would be part of that presentation. So I think here I do want to say specific plan like the characteristics or nature of a specific plan. And then we will council will provide feedback to staff on that. You will provide of what your like priorities are for those areas to help address the characteristics you want to see in those mixed use districts and then prioritize or reprioritize potentially which of those areas you want to go after first. Does that seem like a good summary council? Yes. Okay. Thank you. And that would be June 2026. Okay. Bye. Bye. Okay. All right. I guess we should all just acknowledge that the first one has to happen before that can happen. Okay. And then back to my prior point, I believe that eliminates this particular objective here because now we need to go to this instead. Correct. All right, so I'm just gonna strike through this for now and we'll move on. One of the things we'll also bring back and something we'll work with Sherry because her time is limited. We don't get to keep her. But while she's here, we'll also look at just for the benefit of the Council and the community for a city of our size, once we get a little bit further along in the process, what are the maximum number of outreach efforts that are efficient in the city? We'll look at all of those details to make sure that we're not overwhelming the community. Also we understand that the council has an appetite for moving forward, not necessarily one item at a time, but we'll kind of fine tune that to a sweet spot. Okay. Okay. Now, two new. I see. Is this? Can I see this in the? Is that okay? Huh? You need to see more of the screen. Yeah. If you can reduce the size real quick. We can. I'll just note we were concerned because as we get larger or as we zoom out it gets pixelated and people at home can't quite see the screen but certainly for purposes you see what we have we can zoom out. So we're really focusing on the zooming for the benefit of the public at home that's trying to view. Is that correct Ashley? Correct if it's too far out it's greening on the broadcasting so we're zoomed in for the purpose of those at home. Yeah we'll certainly send the council a copy of this after the fact so you don't need to worry about trying to screenshot it tonight because it is getting small. Did you see what you need to see Council member? Oh, it's perfect. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. So we have two more objective areas. These are very brief compared to the others. So I would ask for some additional context on me. So the first one is a conversation about complete the court or intensifications which have already begun. Explain that a little bit and talk about where we're at. That's already discussed above. We can cross that out. Great. And then the next one is developing one specific plan for the Key areas in the city which we just had a thorough discussion on. I feel like we've actually addressed that in particular because that's going to become a decision to make at a, once we get through this additional pre-work that has to happen. So you haven't taken that option off the table. It just remains, we need some steps done before then. So we're going to take both of these off. Okay. Okay. Let's move on to the next area which is a track develop and retain well-qualified staff. Three of these objectives are carrying over. First one being monitor accountability for mandatory staff training and or professional development. Three the annual evaluation process for staff. I would welcome any staff comments on this, but in some ways this is an ongoing and perpetual process. So it doesn't really come to an end, but I'm assuming our HR professional will just sat down. Any comments you'd need to make on this? So the first item, oh, we just took that off. The first item about the accountability for training that has actually been housed in all of the departments. So they take care of any training that is sort of unique to them. So that's been ongoing and we've had multiple discussions about it. So I think everybody has a good understanding and is starting if not has finished this task. And then HR has continued to do all of the higher level training, they're the common training like such a harassment and things like that. We also have increased the number of trainings that are available through outside sources like LCW. And so I feel like if we haven't already accomplished this, we've probably are almost there. All right. I assume city manager, you concur with that point. There are any questions from council on this? Yeah. So when this was developed, obviously there was a lot of, there were different kind of turnovers when it came to hiring, attracting, developing, different staff members, which is a different time in the last three years, almost four years that Jody's been here now. It feels like 20 for her. But during that time, we've been able to, again, try to streamline processes that seemed very basic, and we weren't doing them as well. So in the last four years, we've been really just holding different departments, accountable, staff accountable for things we've gone through and created different processes that were, that didn't exist before. So I feel like we're pretty much in a maintenance place now that this item doesn't really need to be brought back For any kind of implementation or update. This is really just maintenance of you know of HR and and the executive team at this point I'd agree at that point otherwise you'd have a list of a thousand things on here for all the maintenance Yes, yes With council consent. I'd like to go ahead and or consensus. I'd like to wipe this off the list and move on Yeah, I just had a question on the, when is this annual evaluation? Is that typical or can you do like six month evaluation? So we currently do annual evaluations. I'd also like to say that we're at a 95% turn in rate. So we've really improved that. But yes, we do that once a year. We were actually recently talking about maybe incorporating one a six month probationary period or whatever our probationary period is. Since we have two different probationary periods of the city, but yes, so currently it's once a year. And I think that's pretty typical. Once a year is pretty standard, but as, you know, whenever there's any particular opportunity where an employee needs to be evaluated specifically for certain things, we have since then implemented more, you know, more reviews and more evaluations per se to help the employees, you know, succeed. So we are doing more than just the annual review. There are more check ins, depending on the department and as needed. Yeah, and I would actually add that just in sitting with department heads, supervisors, we really have changed a culture in having discussions and recapping those discussions four years ago. I couldn't sit here and say that I felt that those kinds of conversations were being had on a regular basis and now I frequently have conversations in which we talk about certain individuals and then I hear them say and I recapped it in an email which like something very simple, but that's what helps lead to either building an employee or helping them to figure out what their next move is. And so I think as a staff, we are definitely moving in the right direction. Okay. Great. Congratulations on your progress. Thank you. Thank you. Let's move to the next line item here which is Create Job Boltence Replace specific class specs which will be used for recruitment posting. Yes, so I think when we originally got this one, it was, there was a little confusion. I think we thought that this was only higher level and so we were a little slow to start on this one. As new positions become available, we start to change the class's back to posting to a job bulletin. We've also recently with the layoffs with federal government. We feel like there's a real opportunity there, so we're trying to incorporate some wording to maybe hopefully attract some people that would not have looked at some, you know, some of our postings otherwise if they weren't out of work, if they, you know, with the government. So as these positions come available, we work on the posting. We try to make them creative as you can understand that takes some time. So I would say we're probably, I mean, this is really an ongoing, this would be an ongoing, long going because if we don't have a position that hasn't been posted in three years, if we don't have any, anybody leave those positions, that's not one that we would focus on. We focus on the ones that come up for recruitment. So, so I guess to what I hear you saying is that from your perspective, this is also in kind of that maintenance category. We have a process that's been happening. I'm just curious by your estimation, what percentage have been done? Yeah, that's what I was trying to get to. It's kind of hard for me to quantify off the top of my head, I apologize. I would say that probably 20 to 25%. We have about 150 positions, but not 150 positions come up every year. So we may have, in fact, right now I think we have 30 open positions in the last year. So we most likely have updated 30 positions. So it depends on where we were in this process. I've also had some turnover. So some were posted as a regular class spec, but this is definitely an ongoing top of our mind practice. And just to also clarify, the benefit of doing this is easier recruitment process? Yeah, I mean, if you've ever read a class spec, it's pretty boring As long it's it's in depth most people don't want to read it As you know the title says we have a hard time retaining talent And so we're trying to make a more user-friendly Job bulletin so that people can identify more with the positions and the way it's written I mean some of it is very outdated to when the position was position was first required. I think requirements on certain positions that must know how to use a typewriter. I've used a typewriter in a while, but it was certainly important back then. It'll work when there's a blackout. So, Kuchori, on that one, so on each job position, when you say bulletin, it's going to say what the job task is, not just the requirements that you need, but what's, you know, which job is expected of that. Yeah, so one of the things that one of my analysts is working on is I'm trying to get him to come up with like a catchy first paragraph because I want to sort of grab people. And then instead of putting like three sentences for one task, we try to break it down into smaller bites so that it's more, it's easier to absorb, right? So like instead of something like manage people in a budget in this and that all in one sentence, we will break it apart, just say manage, you know, a staff of five, manage a budget of $2 million at whatever that would look like. So we just make it more digestible in that way because right now an average like bullet point is like four or five sentences long and To be honest, I don't think people really read it. I mean, I don't I can't say that I've always read them so Yeah, the intent of some of these when they were created is it pretty much tries to be a catch all. So you could have an admin assistant that works in one department that deals with something and you have one in another department that deals with completely different things, but instead of having the descriptions really cater to each of those, you just combine it all. So all of a sudden you have someone who is required to work with council, but knows how to read engineering plans. Don't know how that works out, but there's a lot of that, you know, that catch all's existed. So we're cleaning it up as we go along. It's on one of the more lower priority items that we do have, because of the fact that we are not hiring all these at the same time. So as a position opens and we'll do the cleanup, but we do have positions that essentially some means have been sitting in there for a long time. And until we open that recruitment again, we're not going to do anything with it. So a question, I don't know. Tell me, if this is where this would go in, it's like an example of somebody, for example, let me just, one of my favorite positions is a court enforcement like that. Would on there, would it describe that position and what is expected, like to have, you know, so many cases and they got to do, be out there patrolling or I mean, would that be in there? Is that there is a different, different, different area? Yeah, so it's a more scaled down version when you first look at it, but then we put a link to the actual class spec. What we also do, because I think I'm hearing your question here, is when we have come in to our organization, I actually have them sign all of their job descriptions so they can't say that they didn't see it, read it, or digest it. So whether they do or not, they've signed it and so there are three points where they can get that information. And then also their departmental onboarding should also provide them with what their job duties are. Okay. If you're looking for specific data like how many cases are supposed to be holding et cetera, that's not going to be in the job description. That's what I'm asking you. Yeah, that's specifically not going to be in the description because as the position evolves what you don't want to do is pigeon yourself into a scenario where, you know, let's say, you must have, you must have, you know, 40 cases open, for example. And then things happen, life happens, things evolve, and then that number is, that number fluctuates, and now we're beholden to a particular, you know, description that said they only only needed to have X amount. They may be under, they may be over, depending on what the circumstances are. So we don't want to, we don't want to, you know, just stuck in that. Yeah, that makes sense. All right, thank you. Okay, so the helpful discussion around the context of this. It sounds like this is an ongoing issue. With this black ongoing matter, it kind of sounds very similar to the one above. So and it sounds like you're making excellent progress on it. So I think from Cat Staff perspective, this is handled. We're being handled in due course. It's hard to put a timeline on the remainder of work. Is that a fair statement? That would be correct. Councillor, are you okay with eliminating this objective moving on? I will note there's a later objective that is amorphous but is somewhat related to that point. Okay. Third item here was identify review and revise as needed departmental processes to improve operational efficiency and present to the city manager. That is a mouthful and a lot of work. So this is a prior to the existing objective. Yes. It was, can we put it up on the screen just so we can, sure, look at it. So I can tell you the focus of this particular objective was community development. And while it says departmental process and report back to City Manager really, we've heard loud and clear from this City Council that the top priority is economic development. All of that ties back to development at the at the at the counter with our planners and building officials to be able to go out and build bring businesses into the community. So really the focus has been within community development. And while our goal was to bring back at departmental processes as we we when I say we the city manager and I we we took over a lot of the day to day operations that happened in community development. We did a deep dive. We had a consultant team that actually worked with us to really understand what they needed to succeed, some of the deficiencies that existed, and what we've been working on and we're very proud to be able to make the statement is that we've really to modernize and bring the tools that are necessary to bring our city to do where everybody else is around us really to modernize our infrastructure and our workflow. We haven't quite gotten to processes although they have been worked on particularly with the arrival of Sherry and our principal planner. There are departmental processes that are right now getting drafted and in issues working hard before she leaves us to be able to implement a lot of those. So that's one of the reasons we haven't brought those to you. But over the last couple of years, we have talked about modernization. We have everybody on NRGUB. We have it fully implemented. The old system that folks were holding on to has been discontinued and put away. There's one current system, the way that data has entered into the system. That is somewhat processes, but it's still modernizing. I can tell you I signed a PO for large monitors to be placed at every planner and building officials, building staff members desk so that we can now do a lot of digital intake and also do plan check, digital plan check that gets emailed back and forth as opposed to cumbersome plans that get marked up on a desk. So that is that's what we've been able to do. I think this one should still stay on because I think there's still a lot of work to do. Should it be specific to the community development department? Yes. It's the, it is everyone in that department, everyone in the city really is an economic development engine for the city but none more than the folks in community development. The work that they do touches the livelihood of private property owners and investors and that's what we've been focusing on diligently with the help of the council over the last three and a half years or so. So for it to be focused on community development is very accurate. Sherry can you come up really quick? I actually want to jump in on this real quick as well. In identifying or being revising the processes to improve operational efficiency, you know, at the time we didn't have the goal for customer service. And really in this particular item, for this particular objective, customer service is really important to us. And being able to be efficient is part of delivering good customer service. And so I think this actually belongs on the next, under the next school, providing customer service as opposed to retaining, attracting and well qualified employees. I can concur and see that. One thing I will note, and conjunction with this is, am I am I correct in hearing that we have an interim prediselt planner and a room committee to develop a director? We currently have an interim. Yes, we are also currently in the recruitment process for a permanent. One of the challenges that we've had with this, with really allowing this department to succeed is just the instability of leadership where we don't have consistently leadership for a long period of time. And so we are working through that process right now. We're not really at liberty to develop where we are in the process, but we will, the hope is that we do, we do hire a community development director who can then carry out this particular process and help us facilitate some of the processes that Adolfo and I can't and some of the other staff members can't. Yeah, and I merely ask the question is to note the long term need for a particular fulfillment as well. So I'm certainly comfortable with these can answer the question. I'm certainly wondering if you can answer the question. I'm certainly wondering if you can answer the question. I'm certainly wondering if you can answer the question. I'm certainly wondering if you can answer the question. I'm certainly wondering if you can answer the question. I'm certainly wondering if you can answer the question. I'm certainly wondering if you can answer the question. Council, would you give objections to moving this? I had a downer, do you have any questions about this? So this one here I think is pretty important to make sure that we identify areas of improvement because here you're talking about, here you would bring in a timeline as far as how long it takes to process an application. This is where it would come in. You identify if it's taken, we're taken too long, too little or I mean. That's a bit repetitive, but we have the technology in place for everybody to do their job in efficient manner. And that's something that the city manager and I worked on in our department worked on over the last couple of years. And then we needed the right person to come in and really do a deep dive on how the process internally happens at each planner's desk. And Sherry can talk a little bit about that. Thank you. One of the things that really surprised me when I got here was how long it takes to get cases to the planning commission. In most cities you can get a case to the planning commission in three to four months and here it takes significantly longer than that. So we now have written policies that will get a case to planning commission within four months and I'm still convincing the planners that they can do this. We are working with HR on planners that have had difficulty in complying with the new policies, but we are moving definitely in that direction. And so we have written policies now so that the planners understand how much time they have at each step in the process to process the plans. And so, change is hard, but we have definitely set up procedures so that they understand what's expected and then incoming applications should be going out much faster. Is that timeline typical in other jurisdictions? Yes. I looked at the timelines for other cities that publish their timelines online, as well as the cities that I've worked in. And although Sherry won't be around to help us with the next step after this, this ongoing effort, is the next step is to provide, and this is something that the city manager is very adamant about, because she's seen this done her previous city is to provide information in the form of simple digestible flow charts that essentially tell somebody that comes to the counter. You are here and this is what you can, these are your next steps, these are the time and I'm your contact information so that when they leave City Hall they have something in front of them or, they can find something that literally walks them through a process that is a predictable process that they can hold us accountable for because it's our publication that we're handing them. That would be the final piece of this effort. We're not quite there yet, but that's the goal. So I am curious, do we, some of this is still ongoing, what would kind of be our next reporting period that we'd like to come back with some meat on the bones? And is it that documentation of the exit flow chart? Is it, what's a good milestone team? When you leave Canada, something is going to be happening. After you're gone, sure. I mean, I always feel like I'll just jump in while they deliver it. But I will, I think that the identifying, reviewing and revising as needed processes, that's pretty, that's something we should be doing on a regular basis in any department, right? We're always looking for ways to improve. I think if there's anything that we're gonna look at at in terms of improving operational efficiency Maybe it's a worthwhile conversation to have out of study session per se I love study sessions, but We're not necessarily looking for You know counsel to To create the internal processes because that's that's you know, that we don't want to do that, but we definitely want to have a bigger conversation about some of the concerns that you have in terms of where those inefficiencies lie from, you know, from a customer service standpoint, and maybe that's the direction that we go into. Yeah, that's kind of was thinking too is if we could maybe identify a timeline to do a study session that provides an operational update to Council on progress that's been made. Sounds like you have metrics around the system too that you can theoretically pull from to report on and then talk about next steps for additional improvements where it weren't it. I think part of what we do provide to when we're providing context, for example, like a planner has X cases or a building inspector has X cases or whatnot, there really is no baseline for you to make a comparison to know what that even looks like. And I think just having that open conversation about what a community development department truly is, how they, you know, how the process is all intertwined and what it looks like, that would be a worthwhile conversation because I know there are some misconceptions about the things that happen or don't happen in the department and what timelines look like and this would just be a good opportunity to just put everything out in the open and just alleviate some of the stresses that go along with some of these processes. So. I have, I noticed one thing with the, you know, our city, when we mention about customer service is key. And we value that. And one thing I notice we can change is I have people complaining to me saying that they don't feel welcome when they come into City Hall. So I know we have that little TV that says you register here online below computer thing. So what I notice is I watch people walking in they aren't greeted at at all saying, hey, if you haven't filled out your information to be in line, please come to this, but without saying, hey, ma'am, hey sir, thank you for coming to City Hall. We are honored and privileged to serve you today. If you haven't, please fill out your information here at the Kiosk. I think simple as that. So to your point, Councilwoman, I actually identified in our next session where you can have a customer service specifically, this idea of improved the overall customer service at City Hall, specifically how staff interacts with visitors at City Hall, which I think was my attempt to encapsulate exactly that common that you just made. And so I'd love to dive deeper into that. I think it's obviously related to this point about the customer service experience on applying for permits, for example. But we can get in details when we get to that, if that makes sense. That's perfect. Great, okay. And so for all council, I've rewritten this item and I'll look to a timeline here for it, but to now say provide an update to the City Council in a study session on the progress of updates in the community development department and review progress on reforms, metrics, and next objectives. Does that encapsulate where you were describing Christine? Staff comfortable with that? It's council comfortable with that. You know, I also noticed this too. During the planning department I know that Sherry you mentioned that in the past it takes forever but the goal is within four months into planning department to get there but I noticed with a few of the application for different businesses in our city and I talked to few of them that already established their business. I asked them how long did it take for them to get their license. For the city, they say two years, some say three years. And I'm like, that's a little long. I mean, aren't they supposed to generate tax for our city? That's how we get the nursing. Exactly, thank you, Sherry. So I think we need to modify that, streamline that in a way where we make sure our staff understand, if it passed six months, we have to call follow up and say what's going on here. Not only email, because not a lot of people do email, maybe a phone call follow up with that too, besides an email to say, hey, this is what's happening. We have to get this information within whatever, you know, 30 days, within 10 days, whatever. But we need to know what's going on here. But I think there's need to be that kind of follow up because sometimes the business owner, what they're telling me, it's like, oh, we're just waiting on staff to give us a call to let our person know, and they're waiting on, and then staff is waiting on them to make the call. So there's that disconnect right there. And so it's embarrassing to me to know that some of the business owner, it took them three to four years to get their license. And then now, even business who are looking to do business in our city, one person is taking like three years, four years now. And their game really tired. So I think what it is they've mentioned to me is when they come to planning, they tell them this is drawing, and we approve this way, then this is what we undo, then it goes to building department. And then what's missing in there, I noticed is that they say, okay, you have to do this, fix this, and then we have compliance. and then what's missing in there I notice is that they say okay you have to do this fix this and then we have compliance and then when they come back with the new drawing what not then they're like oh but you need to do this this and this I Just feel like there's laundry list if you want something be done give them a laundry Let's say this need to be done and me met within x, y and z get. Get it done. And so if they coming back, then oh, there's one more. Oh, there's two more you have to fix. So I think if we can streamline that, hey, this is a laundry list in the building department, please get this done and you have three months to do it, X, Y, and Z or something like that. I could have heard some of that in the language about the workflow plan of trying to provide the road map for where they are on the process and how they get to the end game. And I also, I guess I would in my own Clarity try to draw difference between say permits for plan development or Tenant improvements and actually a business license which of course could be tied together, but our separate processes at the city I presume Okay, my understanding is that there's a planning study workshop that we have in the top. So my suggestion was this language I put here about doing a follow-up study session. I think what we're hanging on right now. First of all, it's Council okay with this new objective to do a study session to bring back more details about how we move projects through the development department. That's right. That's why I kind of did. Why don't we set up the date and move on exactly? I'm probably too different because I can sit here all night and give you all the other information and it's not going to get anywhere. I understand. So a study session is to be a good way to go. Yeah, we'll take a look. Can we bring the screen back up? But we'll take a look at an appropriate study session date for that. I will leave that up to staff. I do want to say when it comes to looking at a particular department, I just want to caution that we be extremely careful and mindful, not to call out individuals. You know, as part of their work performance because then we will be in a great area but we do want to look at the department in general and the functions in general and the division in general. Specific examples are great but we do want to caution that we shouldn't be discussing individual people. for sure so sure. So City manager, so currently is a... I would have been discussing anyone in specific and planning or... I just have to provide you with the process. I just have to process. I just have to process with that statement. So, currently right now we don't use a... mention of a flow chart. So currently there is a flow chart in use. Well, I would say that part of what Sherry and Ken have been working on is essentially a step-by-step process of how things are done from the planners perspective. That's very highly technical in nature. The goal is to then have information that's outward to the general public that is digestible. And that's something that has not really gotten started. So the question then is when we can either come back a little later, when we have all of it completed for a study session, or we can do it in two steps, where we come with the good work that Sherry and Ken are doing, we come sooner than later with what we've done up to date, which includes with City Manager and I have been working on over the last couple of years, and then come back again once the outward facing Lit Richard is prepared to kind of do an all encompassing I'll leave that up to the council. Or a right review of any suggestions. I would agree I would like to hear from council on that. I will wait for the study section to see more information in that but at the same time I would like to ask if staff can look into if when you mention about flow chart, I understand we have different flow chart. If you can identify your first small projects, it's different than mid-side projects. Different than the bigger projects. So each flow chart or each grind line, it's just to be different. So people can decide, this is a mid-side project, then they can go ahead and use that guideline. Correct. The goal would be to provide digestible literature for the public to be able to follow. And if you're dealing with a lack of a better term, a very high level sophisticated developer, we could provide them with a more detailed flow chart for that complicated project. But if you're dealing with a lot of the normal transactions at the counter, you would have something much more digestible. That is the goal. But we are not ready to present that anytime soon. I will caution that if you want us to come back with the entire presentation of everything we've done, it will be, it will, it's a waste from now. So I think maybe that question is, do you want a presentation sooner or would you like a presentation inclusive of the flow chart examples? So the should we separate these, this particular item into two? That was my, that was my suggestion, but it's up to the council. Yeah, no, that's, yeah, because that, that mother, more intensive reporting is to take a while, but if you can separate this and bring us back something like a high level. Yeah. Like the mayor's suggestion, the process of a flow chart. I would suggest that we take advantage of Sherry's time here and maybe before she departs when we bring her in June to to show An overview of the work that we've been doing over the last three and a half years that really focuses on Modernizing the department and thank you to the council for investing and believing us because I know we've come to you several times for Budget allocations and then the good work that Sherry and Ken and Stephanie have done over the last several I hope to see six months or so that that can all be capsized in one in June and then maybe end of the year we could come back for an all-encompassing one but for now let's focus on the June. So a dole for you planning on June on the 11th or June 25th, the first week of the council meeting? I don't know. Second, second meeting. I would say this. We don't want to interfere with our budget adoption, which will also be long. Right. Second meeting, first meeting. So, must be the first meeting? So, yeah. See, first meeting. Should we do the first meeting so yeah, so first meeting Okay, so I have now updated this to reflect a second new objective both of which are not going to shift down to customer service because they're really not about hiring call and qualified staff but more about execution of customer service and and the second one reads, Developed flow charts and customer service oriented materials that Better informed developers and residents on the community development Departments work process and how city customers can best partner with the city on Development projects. And as far as the who, Happy to leave myself in the city manager, but we need to add a. The for the first one, Sherry will be with us. The interim community development director. And then for the next one, assuming we, if we don't have a director, it definitely can our principal planner. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. You're okay with me shifting these down to customer service team. We'll move those down there. All right. So next let's go to this next item which I had consensus on from some from the City Council but this was to conduct a class and compensation study. Do you want to explain what a class and compensation study is just for the benefit of the Council? So a class and comp study are actually two separate studies. The classification study is taking a look at all the job descriptions in the city to make sure that they are well aligned with what the job looks like, make any changes. So, as you may remember, we actually started that as a city in 2017 and it was completed prior to my was completed prior to my arrival. I think it was like around 2019 2020. So we've had a recent classification study. A compensation study is more like a benchmarking. So we have the city has chosen 12 comparable cities in Orange County and we go out and we benchmark every single job to see where we fit in with the salaries. We also completed one of these. We had also gone out and contracted. It wasn't getting done. So my department completed it in 2022. So it was done just a couple of years ago. Thank you. So this had come up as part of a conversation anticipating that we were also going to be entering various negotiations with bargaining units and having the updated and latest and grace information was identified as of interest. I don't know. Christine, if you have additional comments on this one, but I don't. Okay. So the question in hand is the merits of executing an updated compensation study in the next year or so. And I guess I'm curious about the timeline or an executing on that. So if we could start with the classification study because that one's a little more challenging that we would probably need to go out to a third party consultant and that would probably take upwards of two years to complete. It's a pretty long and vault process that includes interviews with both written and verbal interviews or interviews with our employees and it's quite extensive. As far as a compensation study, so what I do now currently is I spot check randomly. I've always come from a place where once you sort of do your comp study, then you spot check as needed. But we can, if the council so wishes that we do a full compensation study, we could do that. We would have to get started because negotiations is probably going to start here around the end of the year, beginning of the year, because our MOU is up June. So it takes a while to do the compensation study, but that would be a much easier and the endeavor would be possible before the end of the year. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So how often is the classification study supposed to be done? You know, I've got to say, we find little things along the way that we sort of question. But if they're very small and they're not like a huge function of the job, we do have, I can go to Christine and we do have a little bit of wiggle room which you guys have given her approval to do that. But the classification studies seems to have been very in depth. I mean they spoke to, for my understanding, every single employee, we still have all of the interviews. So it's pretty in depth. I wouldn't recommend we do it that often. And it's also very expensive endeavor. I think we paid 250,000. That's where I'm going. 250,000? I could be off on that number. But I think, I mean, if you're asking my professional opinion, I feel like it's not broke. Maybe not, you don't need to fix it. But. Yeah, it might think my thinking is like, I mean, one particular job, how often does the description change? I mean, this is your task if you're Jake. I mean, often is your scope of work change. I mean, are you gonna make sure you're gonna have a whole different task in front of you? You have to change. I mean, often does it want particular position? Yeah, unless you, as the council, say to us this position is not working. We want you to re-evaluate it. Most positions do not change on a regular basis. And when we go out for a comp study, we actually have to compare. We don't do every single one because that would be impossible, but we do compare some of the other city's description. have to compare. We don't do every single one because that would be impossible, but we do compare some of the other city's descriptions and we haven't found anything that's completely off from where we currently are. They're pretty aligned city to city. So I mean like I said I'll take your direction but I don't know if the classification component of it is where you want us to spend our time. And so just to jump in on that, for a comprehensive classification and compensation study or a combination of the two together, it's not done very frequently as we just did one, four years ago or so, which ended up being a five-year project to no fall to jody. But certainly, when you're doing that big of a comprehensive study, you really don't do it frequently because of how little change it ultimately yields at the end of the day if you have employees that have worked in the position for quite a amount of time. Like it's a lot of money and time spent into this effort. But generally as positions open, as we look in the budget, as we look at positions and how they're evolving, we do have networks with other cities where we're seeing comparable positions, et cetera. If something comes up and it's absolutely glaring, we'll make those adjustments, which we have done. We've brought those to council as well. Looking at circumstances of people in their current positions, looking at our benchmark cities, if you will. As we go into negotiations and as cities also go into negotiations, we are seeing what other cities, you know, what they're doing with those positions as well and doing comparisons. It's again, it goes back to not reinventing the wheels. So we are doing these continuous comparisons without having to do a full-on class and comp study. As an estimated basis. Yes. Yes. I mean, I do informal ones all the time. And when you, I hesitate because when you make it formal and we produce a formal compensation study, then there's going to be expectations. And reading what the next point is that we're going to get to, you know, they could tie into that as well. So, like I said, I do informal ones. My last city, we would go out to each department and ask which classifications they wanted us to look at, and each department got like three or whatever. And so we would look at those, but we kind of have a pulse. We know when everybody else is doing their negotiations. So we wait until we see what they're doing. I talk to my counterparts. So we can do whatever you'd like us to do, but these are things to consider. So if I consider me from my perspective, it sounds like you're saying the classification study, you feel pretty good about the state of affairs and the details on that. And the compensation one, it sounds like you like you've been providing interim updates and don't feel that there's a particular need to execute a compensation study? Well, of course I will default to whatever the council wants me to do but with the classification study. Yes, I think it would be redundant at this point with the compensation study. I do informally pull numbers frequently and I use them within my office. And when I come to you, I'm prepared with those numbers as well. Does everybody remember when it was initiated by the time it was done, it was like outdated already, because... But that's every day, right? Yeah, but I mean, we're talking about, you know, what long did it take five years to get it done? Yeah, yeah I mean our goal the last time was to put us at median and we weren't median and within three months we were no longer at median yeah but in fact from what I have been told the history here was we had actually picked a certain number at one point to be like the fifth on that list don't quote me on that number and so we were trying to make the fifth on the list, But as soon as the next city gave theirs, we were no longer the fifth. So it's constantly a gain to like who's going to get to median. And we all look at each other's numbers and we all talk about it. And unfortunately we don't have a coordinated approach. I wish we did. But you're out of median the next time somebody signs a contract. At the end of the day, where we all cities are struggling to hire right now. It goes back to why we would have this goal to begin with as far as attracting and hiring and retaining and developing, etc. That the cost of a comprehensive class and comp study, it is a huge undertaking. I mean, I feel that as with our HR and her team has grown as well, that we're able to keep up to date with what the conversation looks like, what the classifications look like, the job needs, et cetera, that I'm comfortable if we, you know, we'll defer a council, but I'm comfortable with where we're at. Well, I understand that you're asking the class of our decision, but we have done the classification study before. A couple of years ago, and I'm not sure about the composition study, but we have done this before, and this is in your ear of expertise. And we trust you for that. And if you ask us to see if we approve, you ask us to approve for conduct of a study or not, then we just have to decide on that. We're going to the deep into detail, we can't say because you are the one who decide on that. So my question to you is right now, the thing that is should be a study, need to be conduct, if it is, need to be conduct, then give us the time frame. And then we can say yes or no, or that. I think it's easy. I would probably have a question for you when I come to you for your direction on how I can negotiate. Are you willing to match the median, which is what the expectation will be if we do a compensation study, or are you going to look at a budget? So I think, you know, that's the way that I kind of look at it. If you, if you produce this, this product and we have a median number, the staff is going to expect a median number with our financial situation, I don't know if that's possible. And so it would be really up to you if you want to look at it for me. How much you, you provide, if you provide for a raise or if you really want to get to that medium that we have in the past said that we would try to match. From what I see it doesn't matter you have a chat and no but you still have to do the classification study before you if you don't have money you don't have money but if you have money then based on the classification or based on your study, we can decide whether we can prove forward or not. But without the outcome of the study, we cannot do anything. I don't think that we can do anything. Even though we said we can't say that our, you know, go ahead and proceed and then we will guarantee that we are going to come and sit for it. Maybe I don't understand. So are you thinking that if I don't have a compensation study done you can't you can't give me a budget is that what I think the mayor needs the data? Yeah he just he wants to know if you think we need a class in class and class and you're not based on your expertise. What I'm hearing you say is you don't think we need a composition study. I would say that I informally do a comp study constantly. And when we have discussions, I come to you with current valid information. I would never come into a room to talk to you without knowing what I think that you need to know. So your answer is yes. Go ahead and allow you to conduct classification in compared to composition study. My answer is no. I would say don't do a classification and allow me to keep going with my informal compensation study. And then if you have specific questions about specific positions, then I can give it to you at that time. Without a stay-but-art. Yeah, that's what I was thinking. Okay, here we go. Yes, my question is, Jody, how much did it cost us to do a classification last time? So it was before my time, but I believe we paid $250,000, and that only gave us 50 jobs. We tried to go out to another agency. I think we actually switched to agencies. Christine knows the history a little bit better than I do. And it was just costly and it was taking forever. So when I got here, I finally just said to the council, can I please take this and do the, not the classification, the classification is a very specialized job that I just don't feel like my team is prepared to do. But the compensation, you know, I said can we just take over the compensation? And so it didn't cost us anything extra than whatever hours my staff put in. That's what I was suggesting. Just kind of remove the classification study portion of this for starters. And if you feel that compensation portion of it, if you can do it as an ongoing, that you kind of know when to do, kind of look at other jurisdictions, but they have just come back with us with a report on however many other cities are what they have. So stick to the informal one that I've been doing. So we just take that off. So I think we would just remove this. We would just remove this. We will drop the subjective based upon now having some very informed background information from the staff. And we can move on to the next item that's being discussed here. Okay. So the next item that's discussed here is a big objective. Not a lot of details here because it's a lengthy process, but theoretically there'll be a timeline out which is conduct the union negotiations successfully in a way that respects our staff and also does not destroy the financial future of the city. I suspect everybody would like both those things to exist. So fundamental question is, who's involved in this process and maybe the anticipate timeline for when those union negotiators would conclude unless we wish to identify an interim step in that process. So I am considered the chief negotiator for the city. I have already started talking to the unions and getting an idea of when they want to start. They'd like to start sometime late fall. So I have already started my review of the MOU and the policies and my informal compensation studies. It's a little hard because a lot of people haven't have enclosed their MOUs for this year. So I really stick to what the MOUs are saying. So I've already started my work. I believe that we will probably start getting into the weeds on this with the unions probably beginning of December. Last year was kind of a struggle. It took a pretty long time for us to close the MOU, because we had a tremendous amount of updates. I don't anticipate that being the problem this year. My goal is to have the new, well, my goal is to come to you at the beginning of the year with some idea of what my authority will be when I'm having these discussions. But my goal is to have this done away before the June deadline. So I'd like to have it done probably in some time in May so that we have some room to implement. Does that answer the question? It does answer the question. It also provides a key point about an update to the council sometime in January, February, with kind of where things are at. Yes. I mean, if you want to have that conversation before, that just, that gives me more time, but usually how we like to do it is we like to sit with the union and see what they're looking at. And sometimes that takes more time, they're not always prepared to give me that right away. So that's what, that's what took so long in the last time. I'll have all my suggestions. We identified February 2026 as the objective for providing an updated city council while retaining the broader objective of concluding negotiations successfully. That way they'll have. Okay. Any questions or comments on that council? Okay, great. Next up is revisit the recruitment process and our strategies for attracting talent to the city. So this speaks to some of the earlier comments we had about making our job postings more attractive and getting away from the government language to something that's more digestible. There was just general comments and questions and I want to make sure we're not getting into operational weeds for you because you're the professional and as evidenced by your excellent commentary this evening. I am just curious if you have some specific objectives you'd love to either report back or demonstrate progress on related to the recruitment process around here that we could identify for council's benefit. So I would say that so currently we only have I think it's 10 open positions. We have 10 open positions currently. I now have two recruiters who do recruiting as probably half of their work so as compared to a year ago I only had one that was half their job so I've got a full-time equivalent doing recruiting. So our vacancies are a little bit higher because we're not recruiting for everything but our current recruitment efforts are doing very well. As far as the process, I mean we use a software that all other government agencies, we advertise and where all the other agencies are. Some of the things that we've done differently is we've really increased our budget to go out to specialized groups like Ashton. She's in the clerk world. She's at a CPA. I don't know the acronym. So now what we're, just present of something. Yeah, so now what we're doing is we're going out to the groups that people are have membership in and we're targeting them. I also have one of my analysts, so our most difficult positions, and I actually wrote this down in anticipation. So our most difficult positions have actually been community development director, accounting manager, city engineer, management analyst. We have a dispatch shortage, but there's a dispatch shortage all over the country. energy near and senior planner. So where we are struggling is our more senior positions. So I have asked one of my recruiters because most of these seem to fall in his category to actually go into these groups, find out who the membership is and personally email every single member which does take a lot of time. So that and then in addition we're trying to go out to more events. There was an event at the ocean view high school last week. Did I get to go to show? I'm sure. I should be as good as you. Six or 700 people were there. It was a success. He went out there. He talked to share. Six or 700 people were there. It was a success. He went out there. He talked to dozens of people. And so hopefully we'll get some candidates out of that. So we're trying on all fronts. But, you know, there are some complexities. I mean, to be quite honest, our salaries are still less than other cities. I do think we have pretty good benefits but there are some things that we could do a little bit differently to maybe attract some of these higher level people. Some of the difficulties that comes with some of those higher level folks that have a lot of the experiences, you know, they're in other cities, they're in other agencies in which they have, sorry to jump in on this but but some of the other cities have, you know, they have systems in which they're considered classic members or they have, you know, essentially a higher retirement rate through CalPERS, whereas people who are incoming who are going to be new to our organization are going to be leaving, or they have a lower percentage rate, for example, for their retirement or their, you know, their what's called pepper employees. And so their benefits are a lot different, they're capped out differently, they pay into it a little bit differently. And so all those challenges make it really difficult for someone who sees in and already in the system to really want to jump ship to another job. The other thing that we've also seen as well for certain positions is there are hiring bonuses that are being provided by some of these much more fluent posh cities that have the money to be able to attract folks. You know, the nice thing too is we've had we've actually had some folks leave to another city thinking the grass is greener on the other side and they've since returned to our city. You know, because we do offer a certain vibe that some of the other cities were not able to provide for them and certain benefits that they were not getting even if it's not monetary. But our big challenge is getting that that journey level, you know, professional level employee in. And especially some of the ones that she named off as well. Some of them are actually making more in the private sector, which then makes a challenging to attract them into the public sector if they don't already work here. So there are a lot of different challenges. Yeah, one of the things, and I feel like we've talked about this before in close session, but like, pepper employees, they the new pension system. And the pension is inferior to the classics, both there's a first here and a second here. And so pepper people are about the all 90 dollar that they get in their paycheck. They don't think about the pension necessarily because their pension isn't as good. And so as much as I love to tackle this question and this issue and I'm constantly thinking about how do I educate the younger generations on what a pension is and how important it'll be in 60 years, you know, when they can't pay their rent, they look for the job that makes more money. So we recently had a person who left here to make $3 more an hour somewhere else realized that they weren't happy there and came back. And that's happened time and time again. I mean, I could probably count five people in the last year that have bounced back. So we are doing something right, but when they go out to other cities and they look at their bottom dollar of what they get paid hourly, they get attracted to that dollar amount. They just, but then when they get there, I don't know what their situation is, but they come back. So this is not a problem that's gonna go away. We just have to figure out how to handle it a little bit better. And I work on that every day, but unfortunately some of these things take throwing money at things that, I just have not been in a place to present any of my options for you as it yet so. Okay, council members, you've had some great commentary from. I just have not been in a place to present any of my options for you as of yet. So. Okay. Council members, you've had some great commentary from your HR professional and your city manager. Do you have any thoughts, comments, or any other elements to this that you wish to comment on? I'm having a hard time figuring out what angle we can put on here to give a specification or direction or report back unless it's requesting say listing of options for enhanced recruitment capabilities whether it's bonuses for certain difficult positions or consulting HR outside recruitment firms or something like that. I know I defer to the HR director come with that list but do you have any thoughts council members? Well I was on this one particular here. I mean, we're kind of like, what, Jody's recommendation, professional recommendations are at this point. She, what do you want to come back with ideas? Or give us a, if you need approval for those ideas? I think some of my ideas will be when I bring negotiation conversations to you. That would probably be the best place for us to talk about that. I have a question. So what's your guy, you guys use to hire people? Are there a process that you guys use or a structure that you guys use to hire people? Yeah. So we use a program called NeoGov. I would say that almost every government agency uses it. So with that, it goes out to, we place the position, positions are open from anywhere from two weeks to a month, depending on what position, how many applicants we think we'll get. Like, Jake's positions tend to get a hundred, so we're only gonna keep it up for two two weeks but a position for an analyst may only get 18 so we may keep it up for a month so so we use that and then based off of that then it goes out and it gets advertised on a site called government jobs.com so people who are specifically looking for municipalities government jobs they that's where they go and search for their positions. And then we just navigate through the paperwork, through that system, the hiring managers go through and they look at all the applications, they disposition whether they want to interview them or not. So it's a pretty well-oiled recruitment tool that's been used by hundreds of organizations of not thousands across. Are there, is this, I guess this website is it easy for us? Council Mayor to take a look at it and see the process. To see the process, I mean if you wanted to see the process you would probably have to come in and see it from our end. Okay. But if you wanted to see what the postings look like, you would go to governmentjobs.com or you could look up city of Westminster jobs and it would take you there. So, I'll just schedule appointment to come and see you to see what you guys see. Okay, and then if any of the council mayor wants to do that. Okay, I will set you up with one of my recruiters. We appreciate you know, recoument process and all the things that you have to go through. But my question to you is to remain it. Is there a need for to revisit the recoument process or not? And if it does, there's a need for it then when we just get it going. So from a software program, I don't think there's a need to revisit it. From being attractive to candidates, that is something I think about every single day and try to approve upon. So going out to events and putting our name out there, Shana is, Shana Hunter is one of our new senior analysts. She puts out, I think, weekly, our open positions. She puts out weekly, our new hires to make it a little bit more fun. So, anybody who's on our Instagram page, they're seeing a more light-hearted and fun way to look at Westminster. I think we are going through the same challenges as every other city. I think every city is really struggling to find good talent right now. So I think what I'm sorry to question. The question to remain, is there a need for revisit the procurement process? I think I'm not hearing anything, I'm with you, Mayor. I'm not hearing specific objective identifiably. I would say now. I would say now. Something about the future union negotiations that there may be some additional care to include in that process. Yeah, I mean, I would say no. I don't see any other way. We just continue to improve upon it as we get new ideas. Take it off. so that I think we're taking this off. Okay. All right. Any objection to taking this off on the council? No. Okay. Just got to the seat. All right. Any objection to taking this off on the council? No. Okay. All right. It's going to get a pretty skinny little section here. Last one I did not have a chance to get consensus on this particular item was provide council resources and training to be effective to be effective meaning effective in policy areas around policy innovations ideas state legislative impacts conferences. I know you currently have our resources that enable you to go to conferences and attend other programming. This surface has an idea that was raised, and I need to know if there's counsel interest and consensus in this issue. And if so, how you would like to measure yourself and make progress on this. I think this one, we already have the resources available to us, and it's just a matter of Take people take you know individually taking an interest and I really want to learn you can attend as many conferences as you Correct you're not the worst to watch you can't make them trick it exactly So this one I would say removing I think on this one because it doesn't really fit with our I mean, it it's almost like this would be its own goal for council member development as opposed to staff, but like, I think there are resources and training available out there for specific interests, so I think maybe the benefit of this is, it's not necessarily for this list, but if you as an individual want to, you know, certain areas that you want to receive more training on, get more resources, resources, fund information, I can certainly help facilitate that with you individually, because I know not everyone's needs are the same. And putting kind of a timeframe on something like this as well could be difficult if there isn't a particular training available for quite some time or. Look, Reed. So your recommendation is to remove it from... Yeah. That would be... I'm not hearing a lot of motivation from the council in this particular with details and I think the points have been made around around there are available resource to help support this as necessary as it is. Yeah, I don't think we should put a timeframe on it, but the resources should be available for the council whoever wants to go or want to go. I think it's going on right. I believe the resources are currently there. Right. So I think this one is actually effectively already been accomplished in terms of the available resources. So I'm going to put a strike through on that one. Let's move down now into our customer service section So the first two we actually had previously up above and we've removed them from there and they became much more specific to customer service around community development activities So we'll move down to line item three which is developing provide customer service training for all public facing divisions. This is a carryover from prior objectives. So I don't know if we want to provide a brief status update on that, or if this is now what we can consider accomplished. So this particular, so customer service, good customer service is always something that we're always driving for. And at some point, there was customer service training that was provided for front facing divisions. I think as staff has changed over time and responsibilities have changed, I think revisiting this would not be a bad idea. But I do think that customer service is different in terms of what the expectations are for each, you know, department or even each division, you know, for that matter. And so I think we should have a, we should have an objective for the customer service training. that each department would be responsible for achieving. And I think that would be a fair expectation. So I think what I'm hearing you say is we keep this and we also acknowledge that there's some new training needed because of staff turnover to make sure we cover staff that are newer to the organization. But we would like it to be training that is specific to the department needs. Yes. Theoretically just anticipating some, some councilman were comments concerning the experience of walking into city hall and interacting with front desk staff. I'm assuming that whoever those staff are also in department. And that goes along with, you know, the inconsistency that exists with some of our individuals at the front counter because I can guarantee I know exactly which ones are friendly and welcome, et cetera. And I know which other ones that are not as friendly and welcoming. And maybe they're not the ones that work at the counter all the time. But I think what we're at is we just need to revisit particularly if you're working in the lobby of any city facility, whether it's PD, community services, city hall, over at the yard. If you are a public facing front counter staff person or you're going to be, you work at the front counter for some period time, even if it's not a full time role for you. We should revisit customer service to ensure that we are all providing the same high quality level that's expected. On that particular department head, we evaluate that particular employee and if they're not cutting it or they're not being as friendly then that department head can make that call to maybe move them off of that position. Yeah so we so so we're talking about public facing roles so we have we have a full time receptionist for that person's main role is to greet people coming in and she's helpful. I hear from my office, she's great. You know, that's someone whose sole responsibility is providing that concierge service. Now, somebody coming to City Hall, we didn't have a receptionist for a long time, right? This is a relatively newer position, which actually stemmed from the previous strategic plan, because you all felt that that was important to have that person. Now, people who have been accustomed to coming in a city hall and going to whichever counter that they were used to going to before, right? Without going to reception, they're gonna go to a particular counter, be greeted by someone or not, in some of the experiences that have been mentioned here. That's where the department had to become accountable and aware. We've taken some steps to prevent some of those issues but all to resolve some of those issues. But it's sometimes it's not as easy removing the person from the position per se. We still have a lot of positions that are single role positions in which only one person at City Hall or in the agency does that work or they're more technical nature they have to come to the counter. They're not necessarily a counter person, but they're having to work with the resident or developer. That makes them public facing to some capacity, but customer service is not their focal point. Technical work is their focal point, right? But we need to remind, we do need to remind our staff that we are in public service. What we do is provide service. We need to be providing good customer service. That resonates, you know, that should be resonating across the board, whether you're technical or not or in the field, not in the field, behind a desk, not on the phone as much, but you need to greet someone, it doesn't matter. So I think where we're at is we do need to revisit customer service training. There may be a level of investment that's required to have a professional facilitator come out to meet with individual departments for those individual needs. But it's certainly worthwhile to keep it on here. So leave it on there, but it was that it would be ongoing. Is that what it would be on there? It should always be ongoing, especially since we have changes for maybe changing attitude of current staff, whatever that is. But I would say for an initial reboot, if you will, there should be a timeline for that initial reboot. Like it needs to be a collaboration of the department heads at this point to identify where some of our issues are and maybe we have a combined training for certain divisions and then we have specialized training for other ones but we certainly need to keep it on here. Okay. And what time, what would that be? Yeah. The entire six months. I probably, I. To get through all the departments. Yeah, like. Six months. I probably I get through all the apartments. Yeah, wait, we're I would probably save for the comprehend for a more comprehensive kickoff. You know, September's a busy month, or in October yet, can we move it to October? Is that too far? No, I that have six months to let me have to. Right. Okay, let's just do let's just do the October six months, but as things arise, as issues arise, we obviously have been dealing with those as they come up, so we'll continue to do that. But as far as programmatically structuring a customer service training, we'll aim for October, and if we get it done earlier, we get it done earlier. And I'll just do and I modified this a little bit as we are talking. So it's developing by customer service training for all public facing divisions with the department driven content, meaning it's going to be at the department level. That meets the needs of specific departments and or the context of their role of the city, meaning they're in some public facing position or working out of front desk regardless of which department they're in. And I think as well, Councilmember that addresses a concern you raised previously about that initial customer service experience walking into City Hall that tries to speak to that context point exactly as you're describing it. Yeah, that's correct. Okay. Well, what I heard is that this is a continuous customer service training provided to employees, but I think that you know, so in training that we have done to certain employees, they need to sign off for it, you know, can continue to provide trainings after training after training, because they have to know their roles in responsibility. I don't know if that's making sense to you. Well, I think it- Like, are they written on, written on if I mean if this, what first warning from their department head and stuff like that? Okay, so yeah, so for, you know, for any employee, if you're... So I think the purpose of this is we're going to have a little bit of a reset, if you will. We'll call this the reset. But any time that an employee is not providing the level service they're supposed to, it's you know, or it's perceived as a certain way, the department head or the supervisor will address that issue. And with that, if it's repetitive, it becomes disciplinary, and that's where it becomes a whole other process. Okay. And I think what we heard was an objective of October to actually reboot that process as she's describing it. So, and I think it's a pretty chunky objective to go accomplish. So, I think that works. Okay, let's move down to the next one, which is evaluate and make recommendations regarding planning and building division forms, templates, applications, informational materials used by the public and provide an update to the city council with an add an annual review process. I somewhat feel like this is adjacent to something we talked about before. Exactly. That's what we just brought down from the previous section. So actually this is redundant with the second line item up above, which is the development. I don and second but yes. Okay so Council members if you agree with me and and your ACM this is redundant I'd like to delete this particular objective because we actually were placed by the two prior ones we worked on earlier together. All right great strike through that bad boy and then this is another I believe carry, which is the evaluate current online process. Evaluate current online user processes and functionality and seek technology to improve online customer experience. There's some prior context for this one that you may recall. It's almost relatively redundant. This one was also tied in with community development as well. So I think, you know, it says all department heads, but. Yeah, I also touched a little bit on the app that we have. So we did do actually two reboots now. One hard reboot where we got everybody in the room earlier last year, middle last year, and essentially got everybody on board. As some divisions were shifting back, for example, Co-Dem4sman shifted back to City Hall. We reworked the workflow within the app that is pretty popular with the community and other staff members. And then recently, as recently as about a month ago, we went back as a department to evaluate the effectiveness of the app as well. And then, obviously, I had mentioned previously that we had done modernization within our department. And I know that, as I look over to the city of Cleric, I know she's working on modernizing the way committees conduct business through the proper software. I know the public works are also doing the same. And obviously, the police department. So that's all I think it's all part of normal business at this point. So I would recommend removing that. Yeah, it's part of the strategic plan objective under this goal. Previously, we did hire a webmaster who's been with us for a few months now. Who's really looking at improving that online customer experience, really diving into the website content on the website, looking at the app and other ways to increase accessibility and just make things a lot easier for user navigation. So she is working on that as her main priority. So I'm hearing this is actually kind of a hangover, but in maintenance mode at this point. So unless council has some specific elements around us, you want to comment on it. I think we can strike this one. I heard enough of removal. So the deleted. I'm sorry, wasn't it? I heard a lot of removal. So with theitim Okay, the student of the better All right Next up is streamline modernized the planning and permit process. We actually already covered this So I actually feel like this one is wiped out as well. We covered it with your Pre-Shint Discussions earlier so we can blow that away unless you object I'm not hearing any objections so we'll strike that. And then this last one was improved the business licensing process to keep businesses informed on status. Again, this is in yellow category which means it was not one of the hair consensus on but it came up as some concerns about either expressed about the digital only process. I believe this also tied in with some questions about like integrating a on-site concierge service to better support the business licensing application process. It's currently done digitally. I subsequently had conversation with State of Stafford. I believe told me that there is now actually a concierge at City Hall who works on supporting that. So in some ways I feel like this might have been proactively addressed. But having said that, does council have any comments I want to make about this particular objective? Or is there some consensus to try to do something about this? So it's just one of their fights. So we do have staff who call them and check on them three months or six months to see how the application process is going for them. So when we're talking about this particular process, we're talking about the business license process, which is different than actually building your project, right? So as part of the business license project and working with community development, the third party company processes everything through our city staff. And early on, Sherry and myself identified that there were lapses and planning and triaging The workflow that comes through that so that's been taken care of so the answers yes to that and then the other part of it was that we We understand that everybody has different needs in our community and some folks just wanted to interface with a human being at the counter so as recently recently as late last year we implemented the concierge service. I know I've overseen two or three interactions through the concierge service and it's so far I think it's working really well. It's really in the process but I feel confident that we'll be able to maintain. Keep this really tight as we move forward to really solidifying the changes in community development. So I think the answer is you know I think that's great for the business license now to hear that you confirm that that's amazing. That's great progress for us for the city. Now my concern would be more of the planning department and the building so we can take out the business, license and put in planning. I think the planning stuff was addressed with the prior objectives. Yeah, about that. Planting is just a business license. Planting and building are addressed in the first two bullet points. If you can shift down a little bit. And business licensing just to... So business licensing is moving to the finance department at some point too. It is, you know, it is, it is a revenue collection. But that process of business licensing, I think there's, there becomes some confusion when it comes to certain businesses, you know, certain businesses coming in. the business business license is one thing. And then there are other triggers that may happen in their business license process related to, you know, their actual business itself, the planning aspect, the building aspects, et cetera. Those are not the things that should be holding up the business license. We essentially issue a business license to a business. At some point, it's depending on the type of business and what needs to be done, the business license that we provide is it's kind of a contingent one. That way they can go to a bank and say that they're a legitimate business, etc. But they can't operate until they have certain requirements that are met, which is a different process. So this business licensing process and keeping businesses informed on their status, few years ago, the city, before my time, we contracted with HDL. And when we contracted with HDL and the process for getting a business license is basically through an external portal Really all it is is it's an external portal that someone goes and fills out an application But it's the program. It's that that application still has to go to the city and that created some confusion from folks as far as like what they're seeing as their end product, if there's a hold up, etc. there's lack of communication between the business license side and the planning and building side for example. We've since kind of fixed some of those issues but this business licensing process now having that concierge it's really to help with the business license aspect of it. Now, if there are issues that stem from planning and building because they need to meet certain requirements, that's a whole other. That's a whole other issue. Right, right. And so on this top point that you have, can you go throw up again, then you have up there? It says, provide updates on the City Council to the city session process on community development department review process on inform reform metric and the next objectives. So on there, can we put like maybe add in like process to inform their status in planning and building department? The next one. I mean the second second one, develop flow chart, is that what you're talking about? Either one of them, but just act. I think what I did. My understanding is that there are a bunch of reforms that have been implemented in the community development process and that we're planning on staff with planning presenting that in June 11th that address some of these inefficiencies that work together between the licensing. among other issues, the licensing department and working through it with the community development. And so some of those points have been connected. I can, we don't have to presume we can certainly add a clause in here that denotes that integration of the licensing with the community development process as part of that update that's provided to you. If that's, yeah. I hope that's what I have a different thinking about that. you wrote up again to the last item that we're talking about? My suggestion is to keep the business license process there and monitor it simply because that if we want to remind the council several months ago, I believe that there were concerns from this council body that the process of getting business license too long. And so because of that, the council have have staff to look into the hybrid. And right now, I know that the hybrid, just mentioned the hybrid is another process that, you know, service in-house to work with HDL so that we can provide faster and better communication and improve the business licensing. And you know, we just implement not too long ago, just several months. And we still, and I think that we make progress out of that hearing from you and from the CD manager. I would say that, you know, we continue to keep that so that we can monitor it until that we feel comfortable with that. We feel that we make progress on that, then we can... Can we change the first word? Yeah, I was going to say, do we want to just do it, provide update to the CD manager? Monitor the business license process? Yes. I would say provide an update because... Okay, we're always going to say do we want to just do it, provide update to the city. Monitor, monitor the business license process. Yes. I would say provide an update because we're always going to be monitoring. Let's provide an update maybe in five months, six months. I would recommend after I would say September. September. It gives us an opportunity to collect a lot of data after the concierge service is implemented. We'll be able to bring you more data as to how many people are actually told you the concierge. Yes I'm happy with that And you on that one you would explain the process because I think getting the business license That is that doesn't take very long. There's that there are. Yeah, we would which would take longer. Yes. Because if they're on if they're missing, you can issue like city manager who's explaining you can we can issue a business license so they can if they need to go get open up a bank account they need to show that business license number for that bank account but they're not actually going to be be open for operation into the remainder of their entitlements, which that's completely different process. It's a different process. And a lot of times, it's not something that staff is holding up. It's something that their architect or what engineers, whatever it may be, that that's was taking a long time. And that at that point is at a staff's hands as far as the timeline? Something that we can be that can be done is maybe set up set of time that if they do not provide that information by that time, then either they get a phone call say you have index amount your time is running out and if you don't have it by that time maybe your application is void or something at that nature because that puts the owner and send them to hurry up they need to hurry up then we get blamed for the our staff gets blamed and our staff has modern phase and it. It's our phone. It's not our phone. That's true. I would be curious. You know what, what does CL's platform does to notify applicants of the status of a wayward application, right? It would kind of be, I would assume they do so. I mean, I applied through business license with HDL. I've never had a real problem with it. Right. No, we've made it so that there's really three or four different ways to get to the end, right? I mean, if you have a quick process and's really three or four different ways to get to the end, right? I mean, if you have a quick process and you're really good and you're a great developer and you do this all the time, you're able to get your business license, you get your permit, you're building and you're cleared and you're up and running. If it's a longer type of a timeline, we do the de facto business license where we give you the business license. It's not the official, it lets you set up banking and all the other necessary activities. At the end of the day, compliance is a requirement. Whether you go de facto, we put you on a list, and then we go knock on your door to make sure that you're not operating illegally. If you go to the proper, or to the more traditional route, then you end up also in compliance at the end. The goal is to provide flexibility and again, like City Manager said, not to hold up anybody's ability to establish a business in our city. Okay, so I've now modified this language. I believe it's reflective of what you were suggesting mayor and it's in line with this timeline for September 2025 to come back and report on progress in the impact of the concierge program. Great, okay, let's go to our new goal. Could we go back to that one? My apologies. Sure. Let me just make sure. Yes, I just wanted to make sure it also was a overall, we're gonna provide an update on the overall thing but also focus on the concierge. So that's correct. Yeah, okay. Okay, and sorry, I assumed it would be the finance director, but is that the right who there or city manager? Is there, that one's still out of our shop, just because we're overseeing HDL. We're in, like city manager stated, we're in a transition with that particular function. Okay. Okay. We'll put you guys down. Okay. Now, let's go to our new goal, which is enhanced quality of life and beautification throughout the city. So we had two in the green that were identified as consensus items, then three additional that we didn't get a chest of middle consensus to surround. So the first one, which is revisit the code and force from process to be more proactive. As I foreshadowed before, this is really a discussion where in some cities, they like to just wait for a resident to raise a complaint, and then they'll be responsive. I hear what I was hearing some consensus on. We'd like to be a little more proactive in identifying concerns, egregious issues, obvious things that need to be addressed. Well-recognized that to do this to take software, it takes people most importantly. And, but this is some consensus I heard from the council. So I would welcome council discussion on this and maybe some conversation about strategies we can identify on interim step to show some progress on proactive enforcement on this. So, Councilor First, is this aptly described as an area? Would you like to provide some color commentary for staff to respond to? I think this is a really important topic to cover. I think this all ties down, ties to economic development. Also, it ties to businesses wanting to come to our city. You know, if you have a run down looking city, businesses are not going to want to come here. So I think this bias having an affected code enforcement, it's an all around benefit, quality of life, property values, all that. So we need a really robust code enforcement and also the other thing that I want to make is that that needs to be supported by this council that if there is a code violation, a lot of times what happens is that particular resident or business owner then comes a calling and then the council needs to stand the grounds and say, hey, code is a code and you need to comply. Simple as that. I appreciate raising that point of view. Sometimes the response that we have for being proactive versus reactive enforcement. So that's, and we need to, we need to really understand what that stake by not enforcing the code and by not enforcing just the even just basic maintenance issues that commercial properties are not doing and we need to be supportive of staff, we need to be a team. But we also need, very important, we need code enforcement to do their job. They need to be out there not waiting for a phone call, they need to be out there patrolling. They need to have a task, we're going to look at this look at illegal banners, Okay, let's get out there. If somebody has an illegal banner, make sure they get rid of, you know, of that nature of create, create focus for them, you know, something of that nature. So yeah, I think it's very important for the Council to support the court enforcement process. One thing is that we always have, I'd rather be proactive instead of just sit there and wait in people call and then we can react to the problem. reason is we want to make sure that we live in the city, that we want to build a file a city, we want to have a city with a prow of believing here, just like the mission that we have, right? And at the same time, the city council body is the body of let's do a little bit of to make up, you know, policy and and and all the regulations. And then by the time that we finish with those and past by the city council and if we are not enforcing it, then why you know, why came up with this policy for regulation or ordinance for the matter. So I think that we need to be proactively enforced this, but at the same time we have to look at the power, manpower and the city council will have to support staff to hire more code enforcement if needed so that they can do that. Exactly. I think it would be you will need human power to make this happen. Yes. So I refer to some call to commentary any comments, Councilman. So I guess my question would be for staff. How would you like to go after this bad boy? So I would like to turn over to Sherry, her and the interim co-inforcement manager have a plan and it's being implemented as we speak. We have a plan. This is awesome. Sherry, you're the starter night, by the way. I'm sorry. You're the starter today, your question is. I'm pleased to report to you that this past month we challenged all of our code enforcement officers to initiate 40 cases each and I know for sure one of them has done and I believe the other two are going to do it as well. So we have been pushing them to be more proactive and we will be pushing them to continue to do that as well. So the officers have heard that you wish them to be more proactive and certainly with the inclusion of this goal and the strategic plan will reinforce that. But we are including that in their weekly goals to initiate more cases individually. And I guess if I could draw a clarification, initiate is different than respond? Correct. Okay. Then thank you for all the hard work there. I bet at the same time is that for revisit, can we do like the other one provide update to the council? As part of the title, yes. Yeah, so it sounds like we maybe given this new additional information, we want to provide an update to council about the outcome of some of these renewed efforts and maybe some metrics or data because I see a case management system. Yeah, is there something as far as, like I know years ago along a wall back up before any of us here, there was a time where, of course, if I got direction, like I mentioned earlier, I guess at that time, there might have been a lot of banners up in the city. And I don't know, you may remember the full of crack. That was, I don't know whose direction that was from, but they had to go out and look for, you know, illegal banners. Is that something that you think, Sherry, that needs to be done, like given a focus, you know, if out there in the community, there's, again, banners or inoperable vehicles, there was something that they have a task to go and look for these things, give them a task, because I guess what I'm asking. We could be focusing what we did this month as we focused on residential. And so we challenged the officers to find, initiate 40 cases in our residential neighborhoods. But we certainly could be focusing on commercial and extra on banners or something else. Yeah, I personally would like to see, because that's what the community sees is on their, you know, major arterials is the commercial properties not being maintained, you know, something or another. There's landscape issues. There's, I mean, there's other things that I see. Like one other thing I see is certain uncertain commercial properties where they have the, their trash bins, you know, outside of the screen there, there's a bunch of, and then trash enclosure, and they're not, they're out front on, when they're visible from the public view, you know, the things of that nature, that's what I see. So I think commercial properties is something we really need to focus on. We can definitely do that. I can tell you that our interim code enforcement manager is going out with the Dakota enforcement officer. He's getting to understand essentially the condition of the city. He came from another city that had probably bigger challenges than us. And he is trying to understand the needs of the community so that then he can have a work plan for each of the, for his division to implement. But definitely your comments will be included in that. Okay. Maybe as part of that reporting metrics, it could also be some geo location data on that too. So I'm assuming you have some geo location data. So you could show where and that city is being enforced to, just especially if it's one of those commercial you're getting more data. Yeah, the modernization we talked about for the department has benefited code enforcement significantly, so I can tell you our code enforcement, Interim Code enforcement manager is on the phone regularly with EnterGov, trying to understand how to extract information. And as far as when we would come back with this update, again, I think it's a, let's collect more data under this new leadership to really be able to contrast and show the differences So is that a September October November? I would say September okay I think the next item is very much coincide with the item that we just talked about. So it's also in the court enforcement process. It definitely is. Mayor, I would totally agree with your point that's an enforcement issue. I think there were also some other programs envisioned here around, say, encouraging resident investment in their own front yards and decorations and other programming that's designed to kind of encourage resident beautification efforts or collaborating with water districts on drop-ton or plantings and things like that. You know, this is admittedly a pretty amorphous idea. It's clearly aligned with the bar goal objective and in some ways this may be something where it's To the extent we want to pursue this and council has Consent to some this it's something to say you know staff can identify additional programming opportunities to collaborate with the community for Achieving some of these beautification efforts and that would really just be putting in the hands of staff to develop some of these ideas at some point. If I may want to say this takes steps towards city beautification To improve quality of life. I mean, I noticed other cities, they're implementing, you know, street art, you know, they're implementing utility box art, you know, those are the type of things that I think would be, you know, something that they're going steps towards beautification. That's what we're trying to accomplish. And this, when it says city beautification, those are what I will consider steps towards beautification. You know, what I would like to see, I see once you start doing things that that nature in the community that kind of gets people excited to, hey, maybe hand in hand. Now the city is starting to clean things up, we're starting to improve. Let me fix my place. Let me take care of my, or commercial businesses as well. It's kind of a rolling tumble we kind of affect. Hey, let's do it too. So to me, that's what I would consider steps towards city beautification. That's super helpful for some additional meet-up bones given how amorphous this is. Mayor, do you have any additional comments or councilmen, do you have any additional comments about other beautification efforts? Yes, to the point that I know that we push for proactive, proactive, but at the same time, I don't want them, I don't want our code enforcer, in the office service to go through the back yard of the house and dig out dirt from, you know, we just have to make sure that the What area are the front yards, you know, to be kept clean and kept, you know, mooring and grass and, you know, all those things. Because I can see that if you drive around, you can see a lot of people, you know, they actually have stuff in their front yards and all over the place. Then that, you know, that, I think, from their code enforcement standpoint, we need to take proactive in that term. Yeah, I think maybe it's the public facing side of everything. Yes, that's in a backyard. Sure, but there's being some massive violation of their, you know, something crazy. There's some reports, something that's obviously, something that we can't see on staff can't see. That's handled a different way. But yes, to your point, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit that people can address. And our code enforcement officers can look at. Certainly, they'll be focused on that. If there are things that are reported though that are a little bit more extensive, that require permission to be on some of the property. Those will be handled accordingly. Definitely, yeah. But yes, totally understand what you're saying. One thing I do want to just touch on vice mayor's comments about residential investments, et cetera. There is a difficulty of just your everyday homeowner or so wants to read something in in their home of accessing, kind of understanding our standards, right? So what are you allowed to plant in your front yard? What are you allowed to do to improve like the aesthetics of your home? And one of the things that as part of looking at processes and creating, you know, how to sheets and flow charts, etc. You know, we've been discussing for quite some time now, putting together like an idea. So one thing that we had discussed a few years ago was this idea on, you know, creating drought tolerant, like a guide for drought tolerant plants for your business or drought tolerant tolerant plants for your home, and it was gonna have standards of what you're allowed to put in, what some good examples of what this would look like, et cetera. But because of obviously the changes in staff and leadership, it's been very difficult to get to that point, but we completely understand, you know, some of the things that we can do to get people interested and just familiar with our standards. Yeah, I remember when we had the, what was the park where we had the corner, the water, those are the conservation gardens. No, not that one. Well, that one too, but we're back in the park. We have a coordinate park. Yeah, we have a water and a ward. And that is one of the locations that we have the conservation type of drought hall and plant. That conversation came to develop a, you know, put on our website guides to homeowners to have drought hall and plants, ideas of landscaping of that nature. So that's where that came about. Yeah, and I agree. And there was actually a lot that came out, you know, as far as for commercial properties, we're like, you know how to water your grass anymore? And they do. So actually there's a state bill that prohibited the, they call it non-functional grass or non-functional turf. So that will be rolled in our slowly a program that we contact those businesses and tell them that you have to convert those grass area or those turf area into a different drought-horring plants. And they still have some rebate from the county, but they still have to pay a significant amount to make that conversion. But that's, like I said, as we're acquiring from the state now. OK. And on this one that we're talking about, steps towards city beautification. And I talked about implementing. I know Garden Grove, they just did like, because they had strawberry festivals, so they did a huge strawberry and the street art. And I'm assuming it was on a city owned property. So I can touch a little bit on that. So as part of the closeout for the 405 Improvement Project, there is a infusion of cash that the city is going to receive for art that is owed to us on all the public bridges All the four or five bridges right now as you drive over the bridges in the city the new ones There's a stainless steel plate. There's nothing on it. The idea would be to work with the council to To identify art that could be placed at those locations. That would, and I've been waiting for that program to launch so that we could, in alignment with that also kick off our utility box art, which I know the bismar, you've been very patiently waiting for that. For close to four years now, let's be honest, right? So it's about four years now. I know. I'm used to waiting. Yeah. Thank you for that. You're patient. So it's part of- Sorry, and assistant manager. It's nine o'clock. I sent my timer for nine, but we passed nine. I know a meeting goes to nine, but I have to excuse myself. So thank you, guys. You want to wait until the Mary gets back? Right, we'll take another recess. We'll take another recess. Or there is Mary. Mary, I have to excuse myself. I'll meet in at nine. So that's all I put down for nine. Thank you. All right. Thank you. We're almost done. Right. So I want to repeat myself. So we're ready to launch that. Thank you for your patience on that. So and this is the utility box art. We'll have to figure out how to fund that. I want to repeat myself, so we're ready to launch that. Thank you for your patience on that. So, and this, the utility box art, we'll have to figure out how to fund that. Shouldn't be an issue. I know that there's, I initiated conversations with, with a local business that works with artists. There's different ways of implementing that. And our senior management, Anna LaShana, who's working with investigating how to roll that out. The other one's pretty easy, because we will have the funding to be able to implement art on bridges. That, along with like the investments of our bike trails, Mendez Park, where we have interactive panels, the Hoover Trail will be closing, we'll be finishing that at the end of the year, that also has interpretive panels and that, that idea behind it. We're also always seeking opportunities for grant funding to take some of these corridors and implement more unique lighting, I know Jake's implemented lighting projects over the years. There's opportunities for our traffic signals to be spruce up, revamped, painted, look different, a lot of cities are doing that. So we're looking for opportunities. And really going back to what the city manager said about the little psych on blueprint, that gives us an opportunity because that's specifically outlined as an implementation measure of that study. And it's a very unique area. A little psych on would be a great, both side of it would be a great core to implement that type of activity. And then obviously take that to other areas of the city. Yeah, very good. So I don't know what the when and the who on this, on this particular. It's pretty broad. I was trying to, I mean, frankly, we just covered a bunch of great territory and different options. I love the specifications. I think in the course of my conversation with Councillor Ayes or heard about median improvements and gateway signage and whatnot. Welcome you to the city and with those experiences our light in particular as you start to enter the city. So there's probably additional territory to cover here. I'm trying to come up with something to like package this up as like what can we do? Because there's a million directions to go. I feel like this is come back to council with some options and some updates on programs. We just heard a bunch listed by your assistant city manager and your public works director. That feels like the natural response to me about where we would come back to you on with some programs and some updates. So who will be here? I would still think the interim court enforcement manager because they are part of going around and make sure that there is no so So far, laying around or stuff laying around the, you know. I suspect there will be a combination of interencodement enforcement manager with probably, I mean, some of these programs span the city. So you start to get to the city manager's office at that point. And as a matter of fact, it's kind of my take on that. Well, this one right here, the code enforcement is above, but this one is more, it's a step to beautification and prove quality of life. And we're talking about utility box, so that would be more. Here's saying because it's new implementation. Yeah, it would, it would, it would, exactly be, I would say city managers office would be the overarching. All of this is public, so it would be obviously working very close to the public work structure. Yeah, public work director on this. That's what I was thinking. Put his work director. Okay. And then the follow-up point would be timeline when we might think we could provide an update to we're looking like summary memo various programs and ideas that we may want to pursue or the status of some of those efforts. We're closing out the 405 project. We're very close. We will have that money in hand as part of, we'll have money in hand soon. And I would say somewhere in September we could come back with a program outlines for actually starting to implement it. And that's timely because I think the original idea was to implement student art. So that would coincide with the beginning of the new school year. So I think we would bring it to council in September and then engage the school districts, maybe the Orange County Department of Ed, to see where we could locate some of this art that would go on these bridges and kind of coincide this fresh activity with the new school year. Okay. Okay. Let's move through. So these are the three as noted here were I didn't have consensus on them but they came up in the process. Some of these are pretty meaty so and there wasn't necessarily consensus so I need to hear from Council on the day. First one was continue addressing homelessness issues throughout the city. I doubt there's any objection to that. You all want to address homelessness. That's also an ongoing activity, which is a strong objective to identify towards. Unless there's a specific objective you all might have in mind in terms of addressing that. I know it's part of the deal. We're going to do that. We're going to do that. We're going to do that. We're and having a sense of where your numbers are going, which is I will just say sometimes a fraught process because that data can vary for reasons that are beyond our control. But I welcome discussion on this. Well, homelessness is still continuing in the issues ongoing. Correct. Well, I'm on ongoing issues. But at this time here I believe that we have quarterly update from the from the our police. Yes sir. About the navigation center. I believe I asked for that right? So yeah so there are quarterly homeless updates that is actually coming on the next Council meeting agenda. Okay. All right. So it will be continuing. I still do need to keep it on there because we're already doing them. Sustaining, we're already doing quarterly. Yeah, we don't need to have that. So that's obviously for if there's anything new beyond, there were some specific concerns cited with cleanup around the 405 area, where some cal trans areas have caused some problems as my recollection for my discussions with a council member. And yeah, no, those are true, but I don't know if they've fallen through this homelessness section of it. As we take it out, because it's already on goal. Okay. Okay. There was, in my process, there was a council member discussion that just brought concerns about crime and public safety, challenges in that area, and kind of ongoing vigilance. Again, I never met a city council that doesn't want to fight crime. I suspect that's no different here in the great city of Westminster that you are like most Orange County cities right if I crime tooth and nail. So I don't have any specific objective to identify here. And this may very well go the way of the homeless conversation we just had as well. But unless's so many specific objectives are concerned you wish to raise other than reaffirming your commitment to public safety. Yeah, I think we're already doing that. Unless our PD, do you have anything to add on here? You guys are going to get the first quarter crime stat update next meeting as well. Right. I think you guys will be pleased. But the next part is addressing public safety issues. There's nothing, do you have something? Not ongoing. No, it's ongoing. It's ongoing. Yeah. I'm a little bit later. I know there have been certain council members. You've expressed different things over time as far as specific locations or specific types of crimes like, you know, break-in, sub-is But, you know, those are certainly things that are a lot more specific, but we can certainly discuss those, you know, if there are certain things that you would want our staff to do. But that, I guess that would coincide with our quarterly update if anything. Yeah, we have quarterly updates from PDs and also from fires. And so, you know, we can always address further. So, is it then? Okay, so we'll take it off. You see. We'll take it off. And then the last item is one that came up in a conversation around partlyly was a suggestion that I noted where I'd seen a number of communities that were doing kind of dumpster days and they'd take into difficult neighborhood. They bring a dumpster and have cleanup days or cleanup weeks and really try to promote that community to do some cleanup work. It's a very program specific, but it raised a broader question about all the various partnerships that we really have without the overing government agencies who should be our partners in trying to address these beautification objectives. So we identified this as like how can we spark engagement and community pride not just with the community itself but with our city partners that are overlaying partners in this effort to support our beautification efforts. So I think that actually seems like a really important idea given some of the entities that are listed here. That we'd have to come back with some programmatic identification of what that might be and some obviously dialogues and conversation with some of these other agencies. But this seems like a pretty natural out, kind of outspin of this effort. Yeah, I have a communication with MCSD, MidwayCD Sanitary District staff there, you know, and I'm kind of giving them the idea to sit down with the city of staff so that we can come up with some effort to get her, like we can clean up this city in terms of periodically, and I don't know what we can do without a nut, but they need to sit down and see if they can work together on that. I don't know what about city staff. They agreed to look into that, but I don't know from the city staff. You have any concern over that? So, you know, as far as MCSD, for example, they've been great supportive partners, you know, the city for a lot of the efforts. I know they have very specific initiatives. So you have different cleanup events that you do, et cetera. Certainly, we can further engage that conversation with MCSD, especially since leadership changed for years ago in that organization. Not a problem to sit in front of them when we've had issues. We haven't had a problem collaborating with them in certain things. Jake can speak a little bit more to that as well. So currently the business waste sanitary is this. It do have programs that do have several occasions that they take their bins container to the parks and collect anybody bring in their Bokeh items so that's been going on throughout the year ready. I would say at least three or four events like that. Yeah, but as far as enhanced and as far as You know, I guess doing more I understand where some of the concerns have been, they're doing their, they're doing their bins and their own thing and we're not exactly doing our, you know, how can we... Collaborating with, like we as a city go out with them and have a joint, joint event. And the event that you just mentioned about that they have five events every year sometimes six events but they are going from park to park and and they have been there for the people who are willing to take those and use the items and they want to throw them away so they they will take it away but I'm talking about those items that for the people who Just you know Bring it at different areas and they just them with their in the back of of the of their Supermarket or something you know the back are early Nobody gonna pick them up because it's not under their responsibilities and and you know It's under city responsibility and if we don't do that then it will be there forever. So Jake why don't you share some of the efforts that you're looking at and cleaning public right? Sure so for the food item or abandoned items in the public light right away yes. When we received this report from either from the residents or from the council from any even staff myself I go out and want to see them We send staff out there and pick them up and take them out to the other sites So we very proactively do in that every day and that's on top of these you know to work with the CPU as well Yes, I use that pretty often in report Discarded items on public and within public view But I don't know if I mean I don't know if it's worth it having instead of I know they do it on the park I don't know is it can we do it on a given a neighborhood? Can we do it like bring those trash bins to a neighborhood? I don't know maybe we can Suggest that idea to them. But what I'm saying is that not in certain neighbourhood, but you know, some other time on small streets, on both, on different areas, we saw that trash everywhere, you know, literally by those homelessness. And nobody clean it up because the business there they're not going to care of it because it's on the street. And I don't know who's responsible here to do so. So if any debris or any abandoned item in a public right away, part of work, we do take care of that. But if they have trash or any homeless encampment on the private property, we probably need help from PD as well, co-enforcement or NCPU that come out and work on that issue. But like I said, any debris that is in the public right away, but the work is responsible for discarding them.. So just that we need to sit down and talk about it and see what we can do to get her to make it. Yeah, I agree with the mayor. There is. I've used the app a lot. I know quite a few residents who do also use it. But yes, I would, I don't know if it's hiring more community preservation unit or maybe changing the maybe how public works do it, but there is items or discards that are out there for quite a, you know, days, you know, sometimes even weeks and to somebody calls it in or reports it. And if it's, to me, if it's in public view, it's something that we should take care of. Hopefully our team sees it before it being reported. So I don't know if it's something that we need to just touch the team is that you need to be out there patrolling more often and don't just wait for the report. So we do rely on the app report from the app as well as staff when it sees on the street. Like as I myself driving around, I call it in for my staff. There's a lot of time that people have schedule their bulky item pick up together with a trash. So we come in and take those you know like I said a ban them We think we think is a ban them, but they are a schedule with the midway sand for pickup up already So we have to be careful on that one Well, I understand from midway sand They only pick up in the front of their house on the day that they pick up the trash. Otherwise they are not going to pick up anywhere else. Correct. Correct. What do you say? So the residents need to call in and identify the items that they want to pick up. And they have to bring it out in their front right next to their trash can on the day that they pick up the trash. Otherwise if they don't, if it out and they don't call Commitway City or they have it in different area, it will be there forever. Yeah, absolutely. Like I said, when we go out and we see the piece of abandoned or this card item on a public right away, with no trash can next to it, we absolutely pick them up right right away when we see somebody like right in front of the property with a trash can So we know that there has been schedule with midway center street Okay, but anything in public right away when we've been notified or we receive the app Would you know my staff would affinities are gonna go out and and take them away We've been talking a little bit about the obvious bulky object, things that catch our eye. And one of the other things that's been initiated recently and Jake could talk more about it is when you just have a corridor that seems unkept. You have glass. You have not a big box, but you have just a collection of debris along the corridor. Jake is now implemented a more proactive approach to systematically going through the city and addressing these concerns. Good, you like that? Yeah, so absolutely. So we've been basically focused on our contractor for the meetings to focus on the area that they do the maintenance to make sure that they take a look at those. My staff is also driving the main accord or main material to look at any debris that is on the street. And so our staff can pick them up. And but again, like I said, we cannot be everywhere at the same time. So we try to be proactive, but we still rely on the rest in so anybody reported in which we're absolutely going to act on. Let me ask you this question then. Sorry. Sorry. Go ahead. Let me ask you this question. Then every street in our city do we have what we call a street we are a sweeping day going right now or a certain street, every residential street being swept twice a month. Okay. All right, so like every two weeks. Now you say residence, what about business? Materials, materials, some of them being swept together with the residential. Some material for example like Bolsa, Westminster've been sweeping, being swept out weekly. You know something that I would just remind me that what I think that we need to do, and I think I spoke this about repeat offenders, repeat via later, I should say. There is quite, I can think of a few properties that they're repeatedly, I would say the tenants of that particular multi-family property, whether repeatedly dumping things in front on close to the city sidewalk. I think we need to really come up with something that we are, is we can't keep going back there every single time, every single time they dump something. We need to make contact with the property owner and issues either warning citations because if they need to make sure that themselves are policing their own tenants and instructing them that they cannot dump furniture onto the in front of the public right away and there's just I can give you a list of just the same ones and if we just keep picking it up they're like oh well just put it out that the city's gonna come get it and they think that it's normal that's what you do that's what you do is put it there in the city and come and get it. You bring up a very good point. In fact, last week, Deputy Chief Ron Weber, he sat with our co-enforcement team and our interim co-enforcement manager, as well as our homeless liaison officers to really address the issue of, it's one thing to be out there proactively dealing with the homeless activities, but it's another thing for us to voluntarily pick up debris on private property. So our interim co-inforcerant manager, I gotta give him credit for stepping up and saying that's not appropriate. We need to go the violation route or else we're enabling that behavior. So that is something that we are actually working on doing. Yes, that's what I was just thinking. Because I know there's, I can give you four locations in this. And to me, they, what I said, I have to repeat myself again, but the tenants I'm thinking, they think that that's what you do. Yeah, I'll just put it out there So we need to know go knock on door or make contact with the property owner So all the works have we called a hotspot Information that's mean this that's repeating locations that we keep picking up this stuff So we absolutely gonna be working with Co-enforcement manager and give him those locations so at least he can Talk to the property owners a lot of time we talked to them and they basically blame it on the tenants just moved out. And they couldn't schedule anything. So they put it in behind the alley or put it in something in front and that person are you left. So that's a lot of those excuses but I think it's good that we were reconforced so they can continue with the responsibility on the property owner as far as apartment complex. And since we're on that subject commercial sites, they have a large parking lot. There's a couple I can think of on Bolsa. We're assuming a large commercial site like that that has a large parking lot that they they should be having those vacuum trucks go out there and vacuum all the trash up, you know, and that I don't see that happening and there's some parking lots that have a lot a lot of trash on their parking lot, but we're not responsible for that. I mean, what can we do as far as addressing that? That's also through the code. That's part of the discussion we had last week with our interim code enforcement managers. Because that debris ends up blowing into the bus shelter, it ends up blowing into the street, and then it does become our problem. So yeah, we are addressing those unkept commercial properties, particularly, sorry, Christine, particularly the large ones that are run by reputable companies and they have tenants. I mean, they're clearly not struggling. They just need to be at the expectations, they need to be set higher. Well, yeah, we appreciate that that works up done a lot of things. As you mentioned, we appreciate that, but at the same time, going back to the item, I think that we should still need to be engaged with those identified there. I see if we can find new opportunities to partnership with them and to take care of the problem that we have at hand. If there is any that we haven't taken care of. Thank you all for that. That's the timeline for that. I mean, I say this is is probably gonna be just initiation of conversations to begin with so Yeah And we can easily do that. Easily do that by June. Okay Probably earlier than that, but you know By June that mean you can do early in that. Yeah, and just to keep in mind a lot of the keep in mind a lot of James business going to be a very busy eight weeks right now but some of these you know conversations don't necessarily some of these objectives at rather don't necessarily need to morph into something that's reportable so we can certainly have conversations and see where that leads but yeah us doing it by June doesn't necessarily mean we're going to go to council and let you know how it went by June. Fair enough. Okay. That is our last objective we identified. Is there any other objective under this area that is really healthy, robust conversation about that trust off so I'm glad we had the experts in the room to have it. Anything else that we wish to identify and our objectives here? Thank you, Gregor. No? On behalf of the city council and city staff, we'd like to thank you for your time and a very productive meeting. Thank you. I appreciate for our applause. Thank you very much, you're welcome. So at this time, I will close out the meeting and we adjourn the meeting and I will see you next time. Thank you very much for your time and staff. Everybody, thank you. And if we can't thank you council, obviously for this effort, strategic plan effort is, you know, it's not an easy one and it takes a lot of brain power and commitment to it. And, you know, I just appreciate what the council does and your ideas and input for this. So thank you for the direction. Thank you very much, Holmes. Appreciate it. Thank you for the staff. I also wanted to thank our council too. I mean, a legal council. Thank you, Stephen Manard. I'm sorry, Stephen. 20. And thank you everyone for attending the meeting and doing this now. Thank you. I just want to say we didn't ask of unless there's any questions that you didn't get her up here in front of you. She had it. everyone for attending the meeting and doing this. Thank you. I just want to say we didn't ask of a message any questions. She didn't get her up here in front of you. She had enough on her plate. Wait until this Wednesday you will see. By the way, this Wednesday is going to be a report to the in the Black depot at 10 o'clock at the Memorial Park. And so we would like to invite each unit one of you. in the Black depro at 10 o'clock at the Memorial Park. And so we'd like to invite each unit one of you. Take some time to go out there at 10 o'clock in the morning. Thank you.