you you you you you you you you you you you Recording in progress. Okay. Next is item five. Since we're moving 5.1 to later. We're going to proceed with 5.2 canapies presentation. Yes, canapie will provide an update on this past year's projects and accomplishments achieved in partnership with the city. Good evening commissioners. My name is JP Renau. I'm the executive director of Canopy. I'm here with my colleagues, Arbureconeer, Elizabeth Rodbus, and Arlene Nunez Garcia. And together we're proud to present to you our work at Canopy for the past fiscal year and our work ahead. I'm doing the easy part. I'm going to introduce a little bit about Canopy for those of you who may not know about us and explain a little bit of how we got here today. So Canopy is what we call a community forestry nonprofit. We're based out of Palo Alto and we've been working in these Palo Alto for the past 15 years. In our work, we believe that trees belong in cities. We believe that a vital part of our infrastructure in cities should be trees. And not only that, but that those trees are an essential tool to not only house more people, to allow for more housing, for more people to be able to live here safely and in a healthy way, but also to combat the changing climate that we know is here and also unpredictable. In Palo Alto, we have been your partners since, for 15 years, our roots in East Palo Alto are roots were planted along the sound wall of 101 where we planted 1,000 trees in community to be able to offer a barrier to the pollution and the noise and all the negativity that comes from the expressway. That was our first foray into East Palo Alto.. Since then we have partnered with the community and with the city to first put together an Erbis Forest Massal Plan which was a visionary document for East Palo Alto. There are cities around you with many more resources and history that have yet to do this. So it was a visionary document that really put your name in the national conversation about what urban forestry means, what equity means in urban forestry, why trees should be an important priority for this city, for many reasons, from, as I said, infrastructure to equity, to just a good way of like quality of life. What we'll present to you today and for what we've done in this past year and in the coming year is our partnership in implementing that plan. We are a strong and critical partner in implementing the work that the city and the community did over pandemic and passed through the Urban Forest Master plan. So we're proud of our work and we're happy to share that with you. I'm welcoming Arlene now. Hi everyone. I am going to be sharing about our fiscal year 25 scope of service. Under the urban forest master plan goals are outlined and we prioritize goal one and two and under goal number one it states to grow a healthy extensive vibrant and diverse urban forest to help grow the tree canopy coverage from its current 13% to 20 by 2062 and 30% coverage by 2122. So those are very great goals outlined by the city, by the community, as JP mentioned, when we first adopted the Urban Forest Master Plan in 2019. The goal for this year was to plant 70-Due trees, and I'm very happy to say that can't be one above and beyond this year and planted 138 out of 72 trees. 67 trees were planted in the public right of way and on private property meaning frontier backyards. Six were planted at parks. 65 were planted at schools and early learning centers and across those 138 we planted 35 different species and varieties. Next slide. Oh, no you're good. And goal number two is to connect with an engaged and informed community to provide stewardship for the urban forest. We know that it's not just about plantinetry and heading out, saying good luck, it's about fostering care and making sure that the longevity of its survival is cared for. So not only do we work with each individual resident and to be owner to ensure they have the needed tools and knowledge to feel confident in caring for the tree and calling us when it's beyond their abilities. But we also work with community members inviting schools, faculty, students, families to participate in our events from tree planting to tree care to beyond. This year we hosted 19 different planting events for our planting season and it was an incredible turnout each time. It's always different depending on who you're working with. But if you guys are interested in looking at photos, we have plenty if you wanted to dive in and look at some cute fun days. The Beyonders scope of work, we really truly do believe in connecting with community around tree stewardship beyond folks who can accept a tree. We've done library events, including tree walks, where we get to share about the existing urban forest and share about all the benefits and have folks connect to the trees that they have in their backyard, right in your sidewalks, all that good stuff. And we also hosted a community listening session to make sure that our work is still in alignment with the interest of our residents. And we're able to adapt our programs to the ever changing needs of our community. We also hosted two fruit tree giveaways. We know a lot of our residents are renters or live and multifamily complex homes. So we want to make sure that we're looking at a lens of equity and including everybody in the urban forest even if they don't have a lawn to plant on. So we were able to give a lot of fruit trees away. I did it right down the number but a lot I think goes over 100 over 100 and we also did a fruit tree grafting workshop which I really wanted to highlight today because folks were passionate, interested. It was bilingual and everybody was out with their phones, taking pictures and writing notes and asking for the next one. And we actually were able to invite the host was a local EPA resident that is super knowledgeable. but we've connected in various ways and it was really beautiful to have them lead in community. And then I will welcome Elizabeth to share on our tree care. Thank you, Arlene. So I'm going to speak on this very briefly. Under the Urban Forest Master Plan, goal two. Subgoal of that was to provide young tree care for 140 trees in EPA. And that tree care included residential, public right of way and park trees. So we were able to care for 52 trees in the later half of last year and 84 trees in the first half of this year. And we also planned in in-person tree walk at a local park that was led by an ISA certified arborist. And that was by lingual as well and there were 10 attendees. Pass it back to our length. The gillisabeth and for folks who aren't up to speed with various program lines, we also contract and pay 20 high school interns. And they help us. They're really core to our programming. We actually grew the cohort from 2021 when I first joined Canada, be a cohort of six to a cohort of 20. And they are super incredible. I have so much to say about them, but I will not, this is not the time. So we can skip to the next slide. And we also wanted to share today an emphasis of our work being in community with community for community. Beyond our scope of work, we also partner with so many different organizations and nonprofits and CBOs here in East Paul Auto that are doing incredible work beyond just trees and offering so many services to our communities. Here we just wanted to highlight the little blue house spring hunt and fruit tree giveaway that was very well received. And we also hosted a lotaria event at the Cooley landing and the other los mortos fruit tree giveaway at the Carilla La Casa. So we're so grateful for all the partnerships that reach out to us and include us. And yeah, reach out to us and let us be a part of the events. We'll go to the next slide. And here we have just a few other examples of all the work that we do. We have read under the trees at the East Pole Auto Library, where we actually just had a few months ago. We put up a few little trees, and we decorated them. We had kids come out and read some trees with our education department, which leads in classroom lessons and facilitates educational workshops like this for families, for pre-K, for little babies to adults and all the good stuff. We also again want to connect with the community beyond just planting and caring for trees. So we also, as our third year hosting a film, movie, night, we hosted a partnership with the YMCA. You can see photos there. And then again, the fruitry grafting workshop at the EPA library. And I will pass it to Aubrey. Thank you, Arlene. Hello, everyone. In the next slide, I'm going to highlight a bit more about the work going on in partnership with Canopy and East Palo Alto beyond our contract. And I want to take a moment to congratulate East Palo Alto. You are a tree city USA. I see faces in the room that were actually there with us planting the celebratory tree at Joladevice Park. So yeah, it's a very exciting year. And all the work that we've been sharing in this presentation would really not be possible without East Palo Alto's continued and long-standing investment in their urban canopy and just being an incredible, incredible partner. And the status, it's a label that work has been happening way, way, way long before, but it's such an exciting achievement. So that was a very special thing that happened this year. And Arlene touched a bit on these, but just to highlight again, our teen urban forester program has been a beautiful, beautiful thing to watch grow. I think it started as six kids in 2021. And now we have year round sessions of 20 teenagers. Most of these students are residents of East Palato, go to school in East Palato. This is an incredible program that makes our work possible. We are able to plant all these trees and do all this work because of them, really. And it's so much more than just planting and caring for trees. It's truly a workforce development program that exposes them to resources that help them in their school lives and their personal lives. They think deeply about where they want to go after high school. We show them pathways to green careers. And yeah, that program's a beautiful, beautiful compliment and very embedded into our Wrecking East Polo Auto. And like Arlene noted, we have had a wonderful partnership with San Mateo County Libraries with our fruit tree giveaways, but also bilingual tree workshops, community listening sessions and tree walks. So always to connect community members in East Polo to the trees that are already in their community. Just a snapshot already on the docket for this summer. We're gonna have more tree care workshops for the public works team. And tree care workshops, so some of you may know we provide three years of free tree care to residents after we plant a tree for them. And we want to make that hand off smooth so that they know how to continue caring for that tree after our time with them is up. So this workshop is geared towards residents that have received trees and we want to ensure their longevity after our time with them is officially up. We'll be having more fruit tree giveaways at the EPA library right across the hall. Well we're going to be having some summer park cleanups and to first gen interns that are local students from East Polytor this summer. So lots of exciting stuff still to come. And also would be remiss if I didn't shout out the EPA Public Works team. And Jay behind me, who they just so much gratitude for them. They allow us to have our little nursery and keep our tools and our vehicles in a corner of the Public Works yard. They are there. Whenever we need them, they're so helpful. Yeah, and just can't say enough good words. They really make our work possible and not just an East Pawl to everywhere that we work so yeah, and I will pass it back over to me again next slide please so to highlight Another part of our work is not just planting and caring for trees. We have a very robust education program. That's the counterpart to our community forestry program. We are in classrooms. We have done 46 lessons and Ravenswood City Schools. We have some nice pictures here. This resulted in engagement with over 700 students. We've had our junior four-star leaders. They, it's a program that teaches high schoolers how to be educators. So it's a very, very fun and hands-on experience for students to teach younger students about community for strain the importance of our urban canopy. We, you'll see in the middle we have students from Los Robles, they're adopted trees in your diocese. So we always like to leave a little parting gift with them. They always like name the trees, we get some fun names. a snapshot of amazing planting we did from Art Luther King Jr. Day of Service at Los Robles, where we planted about 20 trees on that campus. So we had lots and lots of students and family come out and help us that day. So that was awesome. Next slide please. And the teen urban foresters are the tubs as we we call them on the left there they are presenting at the community or the partners in community forestry conference in Chicago which is a world stage and they had the main stage presentations. Really big deal and they did awesome and super well received and this model that tapping in East Palo Alto is seriously and I'm not just saying this because I'm biased. It's cutting edge, it's a leading model that other similar organizations and cities and communities want to emulate. And so really building history right here, but actually, similar shots of Tanya in the middle are environmental educator with Senora Arbol. And then this year, Canapes Youth Programs were awarded the Project Cornerstone Community Assets Champion Award by the EPA YMCA. And I will now hand it back to JP to close us out. Just quickly, just to summarize, to close us out. I want to just repeat what Aubrey said about the model that this relationship is to the country. Community forestry as we mentioned is a little different from urban forestry or before history is planting trees and cities. Community forestry is that plus the participation of everyone. Post partnerships from businesses, from community members, from elected officials, from city officials, from city staff, all coming together for each other and for trees. And we believe that that model is actually the right model to do when we are thinking about adding trees to cities because it is, it is a whole community caring for their urban forest. If you planted that tree, that's going to be a sense of belonging for you. That's going to be a sense of community. That's going to be your park, your school, your neighborhood that you had a part in building. When we plant in schools, those students are literally the architects of their own future. They're literally planting something that will last forever further than then we will live Finally canopy Canopy truly believes as you I hope you saw in this in this presentation that our approach of scientific It is equitable. It is inclusive and is sustainable We are we are committed to making sure that we're planting with the best practices in mind that that we do so in places that need the most, that everyone comes together in partnership and community, and that we are building a future with young people that can carry our work forward. And that hopefully we are also training a workforce that can not only care for those trees, but have a job that puts food on the table when all these trees are mature. So thank you for your attention and we're happy to answer any questions you may have. I just wanted to say I really appreciate that presentation. That was awesome. And I think you highlighted the intersectional nature of planting trees, which as you mentioned, there's a difference between urban forestry and community forest. I've never heard of that term. I don't know if that's something you guys coined, but I think that was really awesome. And I especially appreciated that you are doing workforce development with the high school students. Because I think so often we forget that, that like transitional period when you're, when you're growing up and you want to see what you want to do. And I think sustainability is such a huge pathway for students. And it's nice for them to see like hands on that this is a career path that they can move forward with. So I know personally when I was in high school, I volunteered for like a community organization. That's how I got into what I do now, which is urban planning very similar, but not, I mean obviously different. But yeah, I just think that's, as you guys are are doing incredible work and we definitely see the results of what you're doing. I feel like every day East Paul Toes becoming more and more beautiful and it feels subtle but then all of a sudden you're seeing your community grow and people are happier and like the environment feels a lot more comfortable it's because of like this master plan that you guys created in conjunction with the community. So we really appreciate the work that you do. And yeah, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you, JP, into the whole team. You know, I hadn't heard of Canopy before I saw the invitation to attend the tree planting to commemorate us becoming a tree city. And I left with a great impression. But hearing about all this work and how much you do to engage the community and teach the community and develop the community. I simply cannot think of an organization with a better mission. And I just want to say thank you on behalf of our community. I want to echo what Commissioner Patel says. It's really, I like the sound of this teen youth forestry program a lot. And I've read this tree master plan document. It's super amazing. It's super well researched. I learned a lot reading it. I shared some of the percentages about tree canopy covering East Palo Alto on our Facebook group. A lot of people are really interested in this and they care a lot about it and the feedback was that you know they can see compared to other communities that we don't necessarily have the same level of tree cover and I mean this is something people really do appreciate and care about so I want to say thank you for that. I'm really glad to hear that you work so well with our public works department. Thank you Public Works Department for everything you do and you know, I'm glad the collaboration is working so well and I just Want to reiterate that I'm in favor of you know supporting canopy any way we can So maybe we can discuss what we can do in the future to boost more coordination. Yeah, I just wanted to voice my gratitude and kind of just repeat what the commission has already stated. We were so grateful. I feel like since I've been on the commission, I've heard about Canopy more and more, and I feel like there's gonna be a forest in these balka with them on a work you guys are doing. So I just wanna thank you JP and Aubrey, Arlene, and Elizabeth for the work you guys do. And Jay from Public Works and the staff that are here. You guys are doing great work. Please continue to do that. And I'm interested in the tough program. From that, Commissioner Patel said, those types of programs leads are you to get into that area if it's something of interest. So have you guys seen that? Has, you know, someone returned and said, hey, I got into this because of the canopy program? Yeah. Oh, I'll just share a little story. Actually, the community forestry conference that we took our students to, they've been in our program for four years now. They started as freshmen and they're graduating this year. And I'll share just a small small anecdotal story with you guys. Bri was so shy when she for week canvas we go door to door knocking and asking residents of their interest in our for a tree program and I remember she was so shy was so fearful of knocking on the door and maybe by her second year she was learning Spanish. So not only was she knocking on the doors excited to share about her program in English, but she was bilingual reaching out to our residents who needed that language translation. And two year question directly, we are actually hiring one of our first gen students who was a teen urban forest or graduated went to college as coming back working as an intern for us. So they are coming back and it's only been a few generations but the concept of sustainability is really embedded in your mind and in the way you kind of act and perceive and it's a lens. So even though maybe not all, we haven't tracked where everybody's at, we actually started a little bit of a side project with Tough alumni network trying to see where everyone's going trying to invite them out We've invited them for two to three years now coming back to pantries with us as kind of like a Alumni event and where everybody gets to hang out and chat and catch up and we're kind of building that to see where folks are going and making sure that they know they always have a place here at Canopy. But I'd love to see the stats and that's a question that we're going to dive into a little bit more. Yeah. Yeah. Thank you for asking. And just a couple more questions in terms of when we plant these trees, if they're on the cities right away, the city owns them and maintains them. And so do you guys or does the city, maybe staff can chime in, is there a database that this, the trees go into? We have a database for every tree we've planted on the public right away and the private property. Maybe the city has a more robust tracking system of all the trees, but there might be two things going on here. We have a tool to track everything if need be. We could filter out for public right away, private trees, CDBPA and all the other cities that we planted. So if you guys are trying to look for data, trying to build something off of that, we can definitely have more conversations. Okay. Yeah. And then I saw in one of your first slides that you planted for FY25, 138 out of the 72 goal. So did that impact you guys? In terms of like, or was it just, hey, we planted more trees than we planned planned you know that we originally planned yeah there's no impact to it if we go above and beyond and we just go above and beyond but it's really been in partnership with Nostec SmebJP you can share a little bit more but Nostec SmebJP helped us out to get a lot of residential interest and we also worked with our early childhood collaborative partners to plant a few trees on the early childhood sites and Ravenswood. When we find somebody who wants a tree we're not going to see no to them. So we're not going to hit that cap and say no more to you next year. So we just we're not going to stop. And as Erlene said, we've you know, this has been a partnership that's been going on in the longer it goes, the more momentum it there is, and the more partners we have. And so with more partnerships like with schools, with early childhood, anyone who has plantable space, if you can hear my voice and you have plantable space, and you live in East Palo Alto, all you have to do is say yes, welcome. So there is a cap for contractual reasons but we're never going to say no to an opportunity to keep planting and taking advantage of someone who's interested. Yeah. I'm telling you, it's going to be a forest. Good. And then I think this is more for the, I signed the one of the last slides. So we worked with Public Works for Tree Care Training Program. Can you guys elaborate on that? And that'll be my last question, thank you. Yes, so we wanted to talk a lot about the misconceptions of urban forest and there's a lot of fears and insecurities that comes with accepting trees. That we saw a lot of that with our residents and with our public works department, the fact that they work directly with residents and the fact that they work at our parks and our public spaces. We have planted trees on city properties and all across our parks now. So they're seeing the development of big trees and they're seeing issues with X, Y, and Z and they want to know how to take care of X, Y, and take care of X, Y, and Z. So we're bringing in knowledgeable arborists to last summer they did three series trainings to understand the biology and the science behind trees and all the things that they provide for our communities public health. And we also had another, I think it was like a two-part biology benefits and then an infield practicum so that they can go out and see what tree care should look like, some of the do's and don'ts and talk about the bigger grand screen things. And this summer we're actually going to be talking about how to assess the tree. A large mature tree, they also, the City of the baby, P.A. also contracts out bigger mature tree care that can't be, can't care for. So being able to notice, die back, let's say there's a big branch and that branch year after year does in grow leaves. You can assume that that branch might wall with the big gush of wind coming through. So a lot of what we saw from the big storms we want to also be preventative and have folks again develop that lens to be able to assess the tree and be like we need help here. We have the ability to control it here. Can it be can do this? It was like how can we continue to work and build our lens to see where everybody's like strengths are and would ask for this or or who'd ask for that. Thank you. Yeah. and would have asked for this or who'd asked for that. Thanks. Yeah, so I've worked personally with Arlene very closely over the last year and I've of course talked to JP a number of times and I attended a lot of canopy events like the tree walk and the nature lotudia, etc. I think, well, I guess, oh, yeah, the first, well, first coming for the to the commission is touching on commissioner East Mills point is that how can public works help work with canopy? Well, next year we're going to be have be doing our real spur project. This was supposed to be this year, think of postponed the city got a couple million dollars dollars of funding tied to the affordable housing at nine sixty five weeks. We're gonna take the whole rail spur, which is all just a piece of asphalt right now and add plants, add bike lanes, pedestrians, add lights and trees and all those commission here. Well, I probably won't be on the commission by that time. Definitely encourage you to pay attention to that one, because a lot of our opportunity there to take an area of East Palo to that has a low scandby coverage, like 4% based on that urban forest master plan and make a meaningful difference there. And then my other comment was about I've personally experienced how the canopy events have helped catalyze more plantings and action. So I'm the president of my HOA in Montage across from the epicenter with about 200 residents. And last year I worked with Arlene first to plant one tree at my house and I didn't know anything about trees and plants before that and before this commission. And then within a month or two, some neighbors had noticed and started talking to them about, hey, maybe we plant some in the neighborhood, a bunch of trees have been removed. We ended up organizing with Arlene of planting of 20 more trees last fall and October. And that catalyzed more action. At the time, there weren't many people interested in volunteering. It was really mostly can. The volunteers can be at Brock. We had a few neighbors. But people started noticing, and then early this year, people started asking about plants, like, um, pay. A bunch of plants had also died. And of course, we're still thinking about the second part of tree planting as well. And so I just organized another planting this time instead of tree planting but for plants and we had even more volunteers triple the amount of tree planting and we planted 250 native plants and worked with grassroots ecology which is this organization. And so I've definitely noticed that there's this catalyzing action where a neighborhood can go from literally known really thinking about things and then one trick and suddenly catalyzed 300 species that are planted or 300 items and we're still going to be doing more. So I just wanted to give credit there because I've also seen similar other other other other other other other other other other other to waste. person. Okay, well on behalf of the commission, thank you for your presentation and your work. Thank you so much. Two ways. Moving forward, seeing as we're still a little early before 615 before our 5.1 guest speaker arrives. So, I'm going to continue moving down the agenda and then we'll go back to 5.1 once the speakers here. Does that sound good? Okay. So, next is item number six for staff and commission oral reports Does anyone have any The staff or commission have any reports? None from staff, but if commission has reports go ahead So Earlier this week I did send out an email in regards to the city came out with the departmental budgets. They're going through the budget cycle and so it was just the recommendation to the commission to commissioners to to review the budgets, the proposed budgets for the new fiscal year. I think it's for the next two fiscal year. So FY26 and 27 and the reason I'm recommending it is if we do see, you know, if we do see motivation there or it may be advantageous to, you know, things that we do as advisory to public works. If there are things there that we can advise the council on that may be needed, you know. We all know that you know, if whether it's work or or at home, you can't really work on anything if you don't have the budget for it. So it's just, you know, if we could help and advise once we review the budgets to see if there are tools or any items within the budgets that is really needed for the next fiscal year and then we can pass that on to the city council to consider in the capacity that we serve on this commission. So that was just my report for today. Thank you. My oral report is that last week was Bike 2 Wherever Day, last Wednesday. last Thursday was Mike to every day and well props to our public works team or department for helping the organized. We had two stations one at the Clark Avenue overcrossing and one at in front of the O'Connor pump station such friendship bridge which which Ossia and I were both at along with Vice Mayor Dynan. And it was very successful. I'm told that the number of people visiting Clark over crossing was a significant increase from the last few years. Don't know the exact numbers. And our station we actually tallied over a hundred cyclists with the youngest being two years old and the oldest being 94, which is very impressive. Just a lot of actually probably a third of the trips are very long haul like people are going from San Francisco to Newspaper, like 60 miles. But everyone was in a very good mood and we handed out and almost everyone everyone took a bag and some foods. Does it, does a really good experience? Yeah, I haven't small oral report because we are doing repealing for the city and we are doing from street by street. So currently it's on a Euclid living close by and it's actually repaving on the street is going by faces. So the starting, the public work starting with a small part of the street then they're going to the sections. the middle of the work, it was a leakage on the street. And a couple of residents came to me at the end because one of reported it to emergency line. And another one called some kind of water department on something. Both of them are really curious what is going on with the leakage because it's going to be repaved. The street is going to be repaved and there is still leakage. So people got worried and said we're going to miss some money or it's going to be, they will need to dig again after we just repaid the street. The issue there was it's greater community was actually involved and they contact the CT actively, but no one got back to them. So I got proactive, I called myself to the emergency line because there is no clear way where they can call, because it's not definitely, it's not an emergency, right? No one is drawing right now and CT definitely have more serious issues. So in an emergency line, it's not for people reporting the small liquids, especially in the middle of weekend. But so I got successfully contact and the liquid was actually fixed on early in the morning and the public work in a great job so they were balancing and juggling around. So the pavement was done after the leakage was actually fixed. Not the one resident was contacted back except of me. So two people got in limba and they contacted me again and said, hmm, it's been fixed. How did you do it? But for me, it was I was actually spending time explaining to our contractor because the city is not working on Saturday and Sunday, right? And it's obviously in the contractor God like what we just didn't, we didn't, we don't know that's not our job. So what do you want? And especially for one of residents, he is not speaking English very well. So for him, even calling was kind of a little bit hustle. And he said, no one called me. So I recommend, probably, I do have a recommendation to the department to explore the opportunity first to publish some kind of not emergency phone line. Then the people can report everything except of just them calling to another emergency line. And another one is actively coming back to residents and saying them this is a loop. So So we've done everything. We close it because right now again, city done a great job. But we missed contact of residents. And this is pretty much it. Thank you for your feedback. I know what you're talking about. There was the EPA sanitary system issue. And then they were coordinating with the city. So then because obviously we had work going on. I'm assuming the calls were going to the sanitary district office? Or do you know any of those details? I know the one person actually he was a Spanish-speaking person. He said he called to what our department? I have no idea. I'm assuming it's San, I was just wondering I all let both like on our my team and then the sanitary team. No, we always aim to follow up with people. But and the second one called to emergency line. They asked him to provide video and making sure that actually it's not. Yeah, They ended up saying this is not an emergency. And because it was not an emergency, right? And they never called him back with any reports or something. Yeah, because the city does have a few emergency lines, right? There's the PD emergency, emergency non-emergency, and then the utility departments obviously have 24 hour contacts and each one of our system like we have water different water departments in sanitary but I could definitely bring that feedback back to them. Yeah and another thing is going to be really great if there is like clear bath what we need to do on the website for report that because right now even me I was like where should I call because it's survey definitely no one is working but this is not an emergency like yeah for utilities there's always 24 hour contacts because in cases like this so example, and I think all the utilities have their own like websites that are linked from the city one. So we are under public works. We have like information and links to the different web pages, but like if you click the Violia hyperlink, it takes you to their website and then they have information on who to contact. Oh thank you. For um, do you. For, um, do you want anything? Yeah, sorry, but yeah, each utility department typically has different phone numbers that you can call for different scenarios. Yeah, and also the city is working on updating the website. I know we talked about it last meeting too, but the good feedback for when they do do the revamp. Thank you. Yeah, I should have followed on orchial thing to that of an EPA resident and asked me about something related to wanting to issue maintenance thing. And I was like, oh yeah, there's just maintenance inbox. This Michael gave that presentation last week and also showed us a submitted request. And then they went on the city website and was like, I don't see this email anywhere. So I checked,, it used to be there, but I just want to make sure that this was intentional, that the maintenance at CDP or emails no longer listed anywhere. The only way seems to be the submitted request portal on the home page and you choose maintenance. That email, no, the email is still being used. Yeah, I know it's being used, but there's nowhere on the city website from what I could see. Yeah, I mean, I'll check a check with maintenance, because they have their own page that they only have the ability to edit. But I'll check with Jay about that and make sure that gets it on somewhere on the maintenance page or somewhere else on the website where there's the other contact. Yeah, I'm I'm not requesting that we have to put it. I just want to know if that's intent, because I know the city is trying to consolidate things through the other contact. Yeah, I'm not requesting that we have to put it. I just want to know if that's intent because I know the city is trying to consolidate things through the submitted request. Yeah, that's the intent and that's fine. So in a past and recent city council meeting, the opposite was requested where like they don't want all of these numbers and to just submit that main request through that portal on the clerks office. And so I believe, because you're right, it was there and none of us took it down, because that would have been me taking it down and I didn't. So I'm assuming that if it was removed was due to those requests, but the email for maintenance should still be in the public works pages, not on the submit a request general page, which is the city clerk's process and the landing page to those requests. So on council meetings there's something else being asked and then here it's kind of something different so it's just a matter of like all of us getting on the same page, but collectively, we are updating the city web pages. We are in charge of the public works once, and eventually I will have all of those, like Commissioner Saminas mentioning, the maintenance pages gonna have the maintenance, whether it's emergency, non-emergency, on hours, off hours, and then similarly with like engineering and things like that. So we are working on it, but on in terms of the city clerk page, we don't have ability to edit that. I'm assuming that it was from a city council meeting request, which the opposite was asked, but I'm assuming. Yeah, just like for Tulsa, just please check if the maintenance email is on the public works pages. I But I'm assuming yeah Yeah, just just like for Tulsa just please check if if the maintenance email is on the public works pages I it sounds like the intent is to still have it there and I just couldn't find it And I can make those edits myself, so I will look into that Okay. Thank you. Next is item seven discussion and action. We actually have. Oh comment online. All right. Thanks. It is Dan chef. Hello. Sorry. Right now, why not be the proper agenda item because of staffing commission or reports. Do we do want to receive that? I believe there's public comment available in every item. Okay. Yes, please, please, please proceed, Dan. So I'll be quick. I was concerned I'm the gentleman that popped my head in earlier live. I was concerned. I wanted to raise my hand during this moment because we were on the topic of streets. I wanted to raise my concern about the university paving. I was working with a nice German lady in your council a couple years ago where there was some money set aside for like a wonderful bike lane that was green and maybe some separation. And you know we didn't get that that's okay we don't get everything we want but it would have been nice to have a smooth road my home bats up to university and I hear every car that goes by And I drove on it today and it's not smoother than it was a year ago and you know that's okay life's not perfect but I saw the striping westbound and the striping is just it looks like a child drew it and it just broke my heart so I wanted to just share that it would be really nice to want more for a community, especially between Stanford and Facebook to know when people come to our town, you know, we respect ourselves. Thank you, Dan. I just want to mention to the commissioners that the public comment sounded more as a general public comment. So there's no need for you to respond since it's not relating to your report out. So yeah. Okay, yeah, we have received the comment. Thank you, Dan. And also, thanks for stopping by in person before the meeting. We are going to be talking about this in more detail, potentially under item eight. So feel free to stick around if you have other public comments since we'll be talking about that, resurfacing more detail. Item seven, discussion and action doesn't have any bullet points. So am I correct that we move past that one? Yeah, there's no discussion and action items for this meeting. Okay. Next is item eight, a point one for general capital and proven plan updates and a stupid tool. Thank you. As usual, I won't be going through every single item, but I'm here to answer questions, but I did want to make one give one update regarding the speed radar trailer, which we've been receiving emails about and just an update we're reaching out to multiple vendors to comply with obviously our purchasing policy to get multiple quotes and we're working on purchasing a new one and They the team let us know that we're able to use the maintenance budget in this fiscal year to purchase it. So as soon as we get the three proposals, we will be able to select and purchase one. But that was my main update that I wanted to give. That wasn't listed as part of any of the other CIPs. So the, um, the street resurfacing, this is a capital improvement project, is that correct? Yes. So I have heard, um, perhaps from council, is it true that we are spending more money on that this year than in previous years? Could you talk a little bit about that. Yeah, that's correct. So in the past, the city had budgeted about $900,000 to a million dollars of funds for the annual street resurfacing project. Last year, the council actually bumped that up to two and a half million every year. Usually what we do is also we do it every by annually. So like in the past, it would have been like a two million dollar project. But this year's annual street resurfacing project was around five million plus, I think it might have been closer to six. But yeah, so the budget did increase because council had authorized some additional funds. For the most part, the project is actually funded through different like measure M funds, WA and gas tax. So we use multiple funding sources but they just allocated more of it, which is great because the city definitely needs it. And I think they also on top of that added additional funds for digouts, which is what we use to do some streets that are in really, really bad condition that aren't in the PMP for this year, like Donohoe on the west side, running me, it's stuff like streets like that. It's great to see all the work being done. I just wanna ask, to what extent is it feasible in the future to publish any sort of schedule or plan that residents would reference for the construction for the resurfacing in general. Yes, so we have been posting the schedule the contractor gives us a three-week look ahead and we've been updating that on the city website. It's under the public works page and in the newsletter we've been linking that page. So if you go there under files, we've been putting the schedule. And at first it was just general broken down per neighborhood, but we asked the contractor to do it per street. And so the past one or two have had like street by street information on there. But obviously those are tentative dates because sometimes what happens is like field stuff will come up. So things might get shifted a few days. So tentative schedule, but there for just general as FYI. I think some of the community feedback has just been wanting even more communication. And I'm just starting out some ideas here. Is it possible instead of linking in the newsletter just to put in like the text, like these are the upcoming streets or even to send out via the newsletter mailing list, like a schedule that way. Because I do see that there has been outreach, I see at the four corners that there's a sign that says, you know, the annual retreat resurfacing program is going on. And you know, I do see mentions of it in the newsletter, but you know, people tend not to click things. So I'm just wondering if there's just little things we can do that are not too much effort to kind of make things more visible for people. More as something to think about for the future, because I do think people are very excited that the work is happening, and that's how I feel as a resident, and I'm very happy that more money has been allocated to it this year. But yeah, just more visibility on the schedule, I think we'll be appreciated. Sounds good. But, too, that first item you reported on, what was that again? I didn't catch it. The trailer radar trailer. I think we've talked about it a few times. It's we had one that we've been using, but it just has not been working. And we've been trying to get an electrician to come and fix it because it was actually vandalized. Someone had like cut the wiring on it. Yeah, which was kind of unfortunate. So we're still trying to fix that up, but we do want to get a more technologically advanced one where we could access the data remotely like the old, the speed radars that we put on like Clark and Poulgis where we were a, there was like a cloud platform where we could pull data in real time and like pull reports. So we're trying to purchase one that could do that. So we could access the data a lot more easily. So is it safe to say we won't get that data from Poulgis and Fordham until that happens? Yeah. Okay. We are bringing, the city did put out an RFP though. I will say for on-call transportation services. And what we intend to do is use those all-en-call services for stuff like this, like when we've received traffic coming request or anything like that, we could send the consultant out and use like the resources that they have. So that, and we closed yesterday, so we're going to be going through that and hopefully executing a contract in this fiscal year. So we're working on that concurrently as well. Okay. The going back to the annual street resurfacing project. So one thing I noticed is it looks like they've completed, you know, there were two intersections. One, Camilla and Wisteria and then just driving here, I think it's Euclid or Addison right here, where they completed the road work. But like, one of the residents mentioned the striping, like for that, for those intersections, there's a striping of what's supposed to be the stop bar. Yeah, so though that's just temporary until the striper contract subcontractor comes out and we'll do everything I'll let one. So what's out there right now after the street is resurface is just temporary paint. It's not thermoplastic. The striping contractor is going to be coming in and doing like the permanent ones putting like the stop stencil bike lanes all that stuff So that's a separate self yeah, and what what's what's that is that shown in the schedule that you shared or Let me pull that up really quick the schedule is just a three-week look ahead and I don't know if it'll be done within the next three weeks So it might not be on there yet. Okay. But I'm pulling it over now. Okay. Can you give us just last question here. Can you give us an update on the Rutgers gate where we're at on that? Yeah. What's included is the latest. Their plan is to still tentatively bid it out this month. That was just the latest update I got from this other staff member who was working on it. Are we still waiting for SFPUC to give us approval? I believe that's still the case. And do you know why it's taken so long? I wouldn't be able to answer that right now. I could check with the team. I definitely know that this particular project because there's been so much stakeholders and each stakeholder has had their own process and procedure. It has been very lengthy, like obviously working with SFUC, mid-PEN, City, executing different agreements. I think that has played a big role in kind of pushing this out, but I could try to get additional information from staff on this as well. Thank you. But, Tulas, are there anything that commissioners can do to try and help get SFPUC approval? I've given that it's been over a year to basically open, to be part of a gate that's already a gate. I'm so concerned about how I'll take for us to build a levy and the big things that we wanna do. None that I know of, but when I do some additional investigation on the status delays, I can see if there's any, I mean, I'm assuming they also have public meetings, but I don't know how it's structured. I don't know if it's like similar to cities where you can go and make public comments. So I could dig a little deeper into that and see what I can find. Yeah, because we've had a history where previous commissioners Mark and then you, I think you heal those well. I showed up at the Mid Peninsula regional open space and all they got, you need us to prove I think their presence helped a lot there. About the resurfacing, I had a question about the sidewalk repairs because I couldn't find a lot of information on that in the plans that I've seen them happening. Yeah. Do you know how many sidewalks we're fixing and are any net new ones? So I could check the square footage because I think the way we broke it down in our bit is usually per like square, square feet. It's in the plans we only show the ADA work and like the concrete work associated with you know, ADA improvements. In the tech specs, we have a table that lists the location and the quantity of concrete like the square footage in each location But it was just wasn't shown on the plans, but it's in the text specs So that's kind of how we have it listed out. I don't know the numbers at the top of my head But if you want those specific numbers just send me an email like that could easily send that Okay, I going to check if there's any comments from the public. None online and none in person. Okay, with that, we will move to item 5.1 infrastructure policy presentation. And I will have Commissioner Eastmale do the introduction. Thank you. Thank you for joining us, Rick. Commissioners, I just want to give a little background on how this came about. So Rick Geddies is a professor at Cornell. He's the founding director of the Cornell program and infrastructure policy and some of the things he focuses on are funding, financing, permitting, and operation of civil and social infrastructure and he focuses on the adaption of new technologies. So I ran into Rick and met him about a month ago and I just asked him on the spot if he would come talk to us. And the reason I think his presentation is important is that as I have said before, we have hundreds of millions of of dollars of gap in, there's a gap of hundreds of millions of dollars in the infrastructure goals that East Pole Alto has and the funds it has on hand to achieve those goals. We, as a city, do not have very many sources of income and revenues. We rely mostly on property taxes and that property debt tax base is an expanding at a very fast rate. So my hope for Rick's presentation is that he can just give us some ideas about what other cities are doing that face the same issues as us and what's going on across the nation, like how are other cities and municipalities thinking about this? So I will leave it to Rick. As long as you... Yeah. Oh, okay, there we go with the magic button. Yeah. How long should I hold for us? I mean, am I open to questions along with these interrupts? Yeah, let's make it a conversation to the extent possible. But, you know, 15, 20 minutes of speaking, no more. Maybe with some questions, peppered in the middle. Yeah. So maybe my presentation will stimulate some questions. Yes. So I was talking to Buttsool, so I didn't catch the introduction, but I founded this program at Cornell called C-PIP. I'm also my main appointment is and then I have to do a plug for our school because it's only four years old. It's the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy at Cornell. You may have thought that Cornell had a school of public policy given our remit as the land grant University of the state of New York. And yes, Stanford is modeled after Cornell. It is the Cornell of the West. You guys stole our red color even. And the president, the first president of Cornell of Stanford was a Cornell person. Anyway, so it's great to be visiting here. My main appointment is in the Jeb Brook School of Public Policy. That's my plug. I'm also in the economics department at Cornell. More to the point today, founding director of our 13-year-old CPIP or Cornell program in infrastructure policy, which I founded actually after working at the Council of Economic Advisors in the White House, in 0405 that was between Bush first and second term, because Congress was passing a massive highway reauthorization bill that was of 2005 called Safety Lou was the name of the bill. And I got exposed like a fire hose hitting me in the face drinking from a fire hose of policy issues that I had never been exposed to before that involved infrastructure policy. Like how do you pay for it? That's different than how you finance it. How do you permit it? How do you engage with stakeholders? That might be affected by it. How do you deliver it in a timely manner? How do you ensure that proper operation and maintenance occurs over time, which seems to be an endemic United States problem with infrastructure? But anyway, so, but so can you advance for me? That'd be great. So I'll talk about a couple of things that might be on the agenda of a lot of people's minds. And, but again, please interrupt me. First, we hear a lot about infrastructure gaps. And this bothers me because there's a lot of people who study infrastructure and it's a terminology problem that I think get this wrong. So first of all, I want to talk about infrastructure gaps. And then I want to talk about kind of a, maybe it's a bit of an overused term. It's really a term of art you may have heard of, called a public-private partnership. And maybe this will get us into some other issues that I really want to talk about, what you want to talk about related to infrastructure. But I can give some examples of how we can fill those gaps. But so PVPs, types of infrastructure gas, but so can you advance for me. So maybe it's worthwhile defining it quickly. There's two big categories of infrastructure. The term is overused. Some people in this area think infrastructure is the internet. I'm an old-fashioned guy, so I'm not talking about the internet as infrastructure. I'm talking about the stuff that delivers fundamental public goods and services, but hopefully we all value clean water, right? Waterborne diseases are one of the worst things you can get, which is linked, of course, to wastewater treatment systems that provide us with healthy, healthy life. We all think around here really value transporting ourselves, freight and goods from point A to point B. So it's important to have really good roads and highways, bridges and tunnels. Communication systems are part of the increasingly integrated part of, into the civil infrastructure. But so can you go to the next thing? So I've tended in my career to kind of stay away from communications because this technology is changing so fast. I couldn't keep up with it. And because other people are more apt on that, adept, I would say, on that technology. It also includes power and electricity. We're using a ton of it right now in this room. I promise you, we sort of take it for granted that the lights are on, the speakers working, but it takes a whole lot of civil infrastructure and generation transmission and distribution to get these electrons moving on the wires in a reliable way to make all this electronic stuff work. Railroads work actually for freight relatively well. I think in the United States, I tell my students to study infrastructure because they give you an attitude of gratitude because you'll understand what it takes to get stuff to the store that you buy. And it's really good to know how it doesn't happen by magic. Oh, it's saying low battery. Oh no. Okay. It's hopefully I'll get through. Maybe that's a sign that I should speed up. Solid waste removal, garbage removal, really important. If you don't see that streetlight sidewalks, fire hydrants, culverts are a big area where we live in upstate New York because of drainage because of climate change is getting bigger. The culvert in our yard was actually doubled in diameter recently to hand, handle the off flow. The interesting thing about all this infrastructure that I just described is its networked. It's connected together by systems of like pumps, plants, and pipes for water have strong physical connections between component parts. And if one part of the network goes down, it doesn't really work very well. That's particularly true for power, true for communications. If a satellite goes out of cell phone tower goes out. But also true for drinking water. If there's a hole in the pipe, leak in the pipe, it reduces it. So these are heavy, simple networked infrastructure. The category we call Facilities or stand alone pieces of infrastructure like a school or prison or courthouse a hospital that still provides public goods and services But it may not be oh, thank you very much It may not be networked together and the the policy issues I think are different. Can you advance from here from here? You have to run back? Yeah. I'm already going to slow. But it's useful to think about. So economists are sort of imperialistic by nature. We take our frameworks and we apply them in a whole bunch of different settings. And so the basic economics are a lot of these network pieces of infrastructure. They're very different. Sometimes they're integrated. One take home point is technology is more deeply integrating different types of infrastructure together. If you think about electric vehicles, I see a lot of those around here. They're done for environmental reasons. But what that does is it integrates the transportation system with the power system in a way that has not been the case before. And so that's a big change, something to keep in mind. These network effects are very important. Some infrastructure policy issues that are being faced right now that I would urge you to think about. I have observed in the past 15 years I've been doing this, what I call a quiet technological revolution occurring in infrastructure delivery. This could be sensors implanted in concrete. It was on a grant, we didn't get the grant, but they're about the size of your thumbnail. And you pour them into the concrete and you take a reader in a van over the concrete, it'll read out 12 different chemical properties of the concrete. Why is that important when you go to replace the road you don't have to tear up the whole road. Those sensors will tell you just take out that area over there the rest is okay. It optimizes your operation and maintenance of the road. I'm seeing changes as asphalt that make asphalt where I live, it's a lot of winters, hot cold, the asphalt expands and contracts, it cracks. That cracking is what makes it break up and that reduces the life. If you can increase the elasticity of the asphalt, you increase the life of the asphalt. So there's a whole lot of these underlying innovations that I've seen that are drones for the use of inspection used to be two guys with a flashlight and a heart hat going under the bridge to look for cracks. That's not true anymore. It's a drone that'll go in and focus on a crack that you know is there but maybe you're monitoring the crack. You don't want to take the bridge around him but. But you can use the drone in a whole lot of ways to increase inspection. So those are just some examples of innovations that are going on in design, construction, operation, maintenance that I think the issue is a policy issue. I get, because of what I do at Cornell, I get contacted by startups, a lot of young people, engineers who have some new idea. The ideas are often good. It's a question of adoption. And I think that's the policy framework. And it's getting the public infrastructure asset owners to be comfortable, to be aware of the new technology, to be comfortable with it, and to get it into practice. And I could go on about many other really interesting examples. The public infrastructure owners, that's the city. That's a city for whoever it is in the US. I guess about getting city counselors and other policy messages. Yeah. The spotty comfortable with adopting tech. Yeah, not too indicted. Right. And just being over here. I'm sorry, when when I use the term asset owner I'm referring to a public entity. Right. And in the United States there are thousands. Right. Right. Which is another issue about changing infrastructure delivery. Right. Because because it is you know the ownership is separate. It could be a county I guess could be a city could be a state one One thing my students are shocked to learn is the federal government owns zero feet of the interstate highway system. It is entirely, it used to be a funny example of the Woodrow Wilson bridge that was in dispute, but that's solved. So now the interstate highway system is owned by a state. So if you're the governor of Massachusetts, part of your job is taking care of your interstate highway system in the state. That's why if you look carefully when you cross a state line, the color of the surface will actually change, because one state will use a slightly different operation and maintenance plan than another state will. And so that's the ownership. But it's always a government entity, and it really is local, Isabelle. So it's really more city, county, municipality kind of an issue. And some of their state roads and things like that. But the more I study this and more, I think, really a local kind of issue. So when I talk about asset owners getting comfortable with the technology, those are the folks that I am thinking about when I say that. Big part of the issue, as I think you were discussing, is funding, the underlying dollars, where is that going to come from? That gets in, there's often the infrastructure gap people talk about these in terms of financing, but it's really a funding problem. And they try to separate and class those two concepts where the dollars are going to come from, two large buckets to think about. One is some sort of user fee. The state of Oregon, 10 years ago, switched to a road usage charge or a rock that is, it's just a flat fee sense per mile. And they got rid of their state gas tax. So that for the interesting reasons, Oregon has been the leader in that over time. Maybe that's something to talk about. The other is broad-based tax. The state of Virginia raised its sales tax, but dedicated the revenue to the roads in the state of Virginia So you know, there's there's the bucket is some sort of user fees some sort of fee you pay related to the degree of use You have typically of roads and the other is just a general Tax could be property tax could be sales tax as you might imagine economists like user fees more We're looking at a lot of it. But maybe this is an interesting time and you gotta tell me, please jump in with questions that the United States has been very lucky, I think, to have benefited from the way we funded infrastructure. Let's talk about transportation infrastructure. Basically, since 19, actually before 1956, that's the magical year in my world, because President Eisenhower passed the Defense Interstate Highway Act, I forget the full name, but defense was in the name of the bill to build the Interstate Highway System. There was a federal gas tax at that time, Eisenhower raised it a lot to pay for the construction of the Interstate Highway System, which was done sort of in record time. And then states also as you know have, it's 18.4 cents by the way now at the federal level for gasoline and 24.4 cents for diesel fuel right now hasn't been raised since 1993. Very charged issue politically. that was auspicious because President Clinton was the last president to raise the federal gas tax. The next year, 1994, the Democrats lost the House, and the Newt Gingrich and his team came in. So some people say the increase in the gas tax had to do with that. But the point is that's difficult thing to raise. I also say, even though we've had usually modest inflation since 1993, it's cut the purchasing power of that 18.4 cents per gallon by 45 some odd percent, cumulatively over that time. So the purchasing and then the states have their own gas and diesel taxes, which vary a lot by state. The point is most of those are cents per gallon, not indexed to inflation. And they rode the purchasing power roads over time. That's thing one. Thing two, we're now encouraging cars for environmental reasons that don't use gasoline. They don't use diesel, right? And so the analogy I like to do is say, hey, let's fund our healthcare system with a tax on cigarettes. But on the other side, we're going to try to discourage people from smoking cigarettes. Guess what's going to happen to your revenue for the hell? It's kind of like that. It's not that bad. But it is sort of like that. So that is a real funding problem. The system, I say, has been great. And again, the attitude of gratitude, we've had this great mobility in the United States. You know, I can drive from Ithaca, New York, down to see my mother in Baltimore in a day, right? That's amazing. And all this connected series of roads and interstates. But now the funding system is breaking down. It really is. Because of this, Oregon is a leader in switching over to their road usage chart. Some people, by the way, call it an M-Buff, a mileage-based user fee. But that's a user fee type of approach that helps to close the funding gap. One of my lessons in class is if you get the funding right, if you can come up with the underlying dollars to pay for the infrastructure, financing is not the big problem. The municipal bond markets will allow you to bond against that revenue usually, or you can do, which is what I've written about, is public-private partnerships and bring in private investors, which is what every other, not every other, almost every other developed country on earth and many developing countries on earth, due to lever those dollars in a whole lot of projects. So that's the last bullet on this slide is investing in infrastructures and asset class as the other side of this that I'm happy to chat about if you want, where real estate was the close cousin. It's a real asset you're investing in office building, residential condos, whatever it is. It's a real asset you can reach out and touch it and grab it. It has certain life to it. It has certain properties about permitting environmental impacts. And a lot of people for that world are now, at least in the US, moving into infrastructure. So that could be almost all airports in Italy are privately owned. Spain, is that, did you have a question? Was that too many? Question. Okay. Could you, in layman's terms, explain the difference between funding and financing? Yeah, so funding is the underlying dollars and that's the money and you know it's where are the dollars going to come from and then and that's where where I emphasize either think about some sort of you think about the the funding is related to the degree of use, right? And the congestion probably they misuse the term is cordon pricing in New York City. That's kind of like a user fee, right? If you go into the city in peak time you pay this added charge. You're using the downtown area of New York City. So that's at one end of the scale. The other end of the scale is attacks that doesn't really relate to use. But that's funding, right? So you have to come up with the dollars from somewhere. The investor people, the financing people don't want to talk to you unless you have the funding in place. So the reason I stress this is about is to focus like a laser beam on the policy problem faced by a whole lot of municipalities, which is where's the underlying money going to come from? Are you going to raise property taxes? Is that going to be the case? I mean, we have that where I live in Lithica. And that pays for our local streets. Are you going to raise the gas tax? You know, here would presumably have to be done at the state level. And that would go for the roads that's dedicated and highway trust funds. So the money's kind of walled off from the rest of the budget. Are you going to like Virginia? Use sales, raise sales taxes. But say we're going to use the sales tax exclusively for the roads in Virginia, right? So that's the funding. Then the financing is bonds, is delivering against that expected revenue, because you have, I say the students, there's a big F, there's a big fixed cost, always associated with infrastructure, whether it's designing construction of a new facility, renovating an old facility, and you borrow against the revenue in the bond market, or you use this public-private partnership approach to use to have equity involved. There's reasons a lot of other countries. Did I answer your question, or did I evade it? Oh, I do have a question. For public private partnerships, what incentivizes a private entity to partner with a public entity to fund infrastructure? And you can see that there could be cons to that. Yeah, absolutely. There's a lot of cons. So first of all, it's take a step. Maybe, but so if can you advance, I can't remember if I have it on the next slide that would help answer this? No. Can you go back one? We skip one. But let me just define what we think about a public problem because it sounds really good, right? Just let's partner with the private sector. They'll solve some of our problems. I try to give some rigor to that to say there's three elements to it. One is the bundling together of, it's a long-term relationship. So designing can suppose as a bridge. Designing construction of the bridge is bundled in this long-term contract with operation and maintenance. Maybe over 25 or 30 years, OK? And that would be called that would be called a DBOM, a design build operate maintain. Second, it is a long-term relationship. Third is at actual risk. So one thing you learn, study infrastructure stuff happens. And it's a risky thing, whether it's a tunnel, a bridge, an airport, a seaport, you know, I'm from Baltimore, so I knew the old Francis Scott Keat bridge very well. You know, the bridge collapses, right? It's risky. So some of that risk in the contract, a lot of that risk is transferred onto the private partner. The private partner's want to be paid back, right? So there's, again, two ways to think about that. One is they're paid back by a toll, some sort of user fee. If it's an airport, it turns out that airports generate revenue from a whole lot of there's parking revenue, there's landing fees, there's there's concession, there's drink, you know, food, there's beverage, all this stuff and that's why the private sector likes, you know, likes airports. The The other, if you don't get have some sort of user fee, it's called an availability payment. And it's like, think of a performance payment. So the idea is the private partner, if they, that's, it's called availability because if you keep the road available, so your lanes are available for use by drivers, you get paid based on that. If there's a dead animal, there's where I live, snow and rain, the clothes that you might get less of a payment. So it incentivizes you to keep the lanes available. So the availability payments are used in a lot of cases where the road's not told or the facility doesn't have a user fee attached to it But you want to bring in the private sector. Does that answer question? So you have to have those think about one of those two repayment mechanisms for the private partner For the availability payment are we saying that the public entity like where does that money come from to pay though? It has to be, it has to come from the public sector. Okay, so not as different calls in that case. It's, so I'm trying. Part of my point is people think you have to have a told road to do a public private partnership on that road. And that's not true. There's a lot of countries that don't have tolls on the road, but they have private operation maintenance contracts. Australia is an example of this. I have been told verbally that Australia has dozens of these contracts with private companies that do the O&M operation maintenance of the road. They're not told to my knowledge, although Australia does have certain roads that are told, but in these roads this availability payments approach. And that's common around the world. The United States does relatively little of this compared to other countries. So that's why we kind of, for policy lessons, we often look to other countries for available. Did I answer your question, Christopher? Is that... Yeah, I'd follow up. And then, just if I could interrupt, yeah, they may last 10 or 12 years is or 15 years. That's the duration of the availability payments contract in my reading of it. So I guess right out here, um, direction, but university avenue is a big court and reuse by got their traffic. So on any given day during rush, like right now, four out of five cars are not East Palette residents, but they're just trying to get to the Dunbar and Bridge. It goes to the East. Okay. So I've seen some conflicting interests in this topic. On the one hand, people who are driving the East Bay want this to be fast. On the other hand, the East Palette residents don't want a bunch of cut through traffic coming through and I've heard people say we should tell them etc that's probably going to be very difficult to do. And then on the third hand, in terms of making it flow, the region as overall wants it to flow. But the local municipality, which owns some of the streetlights, may not be incentivized to have it flow very seamlessly in the direction of like the availability. They may not want the availability since we may want to prioritize our own residents across the high that street. So I was just trying to think about like this as an example of like are there different models of I Guess changing behavior about maybe people carpooling but at the same time. Oh Like the availability payment thing But it's is the goal Nobody wants congestion, right? Is is that? Is that like the East Palo Alto residents don't want? You kind of said that they don't like it. Did I misunderstand? They don't like it flowing freely through there? Yeah, well, they don't. Of course, they don't like congestion. But if we had to choose between, if there is a way to choose whether it's congestion for the people cutting through or congestion for the residents, for example, you know, the highway. Yeah, and then people may want to cross the city because it kind of divides our city. Mm-hmm. You can imagine, well, if the streetlight has to choose, it's like, do you give all the time this way, or do you let the residents kind of cross the city every once in a while? Yeah, I don't know. I mean there are measures that again, not to Australia was used called traffic calming calming. And it had to do with the installation of a tunnel that was in Sydney. But I'm not sure that's what, it's, I'm kind of struggling with it because one thing you take pretty quickly from studying infrastructure, and it goes back hundreds of years actually. Is the notion of open access? And it's like the infrastructure should be opened everyone, right? And that's true, I say hundreds of years because I studied postal services for a long time. And the original idea was every town in the United States should have a post office. It should have access to physical male delivery. And we shouldn't have any towns, no matter how small, cut off from postal delivery, even if they're on the frontier way out there. So as a nation, we strove to get that. The next thing was telephones. There should be a landline telephone, and you see that on the Royal Roads phone, pull, phone, pull, phone, pull. It's to get communications out there, and then of course it was electricity. So it's kind of like that with transportation, where there's like this embedded notion that we shouldn't have any communities cut off from that. So that's, you know, I don't know if what you're suggesting would somehow conflict with the notion of open access, but you can't discriminate against, you know, East Palo Alto residents versus those coming through. If you're gonna do a toll, everybody would have to pay the same toll, right? I have, you know, and it could be peak off peak. And I'm a huge fan. You can go right now and see even though the New York City congestion pricing plan has only been in place for a while. The impacts of that are amazing. I mean already people as the buses are moving better, pedestrian traffic accidents, which are often, are way down, wait times or you know delays are down, environmental effects, air pollution is down. So anyway, I don't know if that would help some peak off peak thing, but the availability payment is really, you know, it's kind of done where you can't hold the road. But you want to have a private company and there's hundreds of these around the world, do the operation maintenance for you. So I'm not sure I'm answering your question very well, but it's a tough question. It kind of bothers me a little bit because I worry if it would conflict with the notion of open access of the facility. What I've heard people want could inflict or... Yeah, but you can continue with the presentation. Okay, okay. I don't know. Let me see if I can get it to come back. It went out. Is it still... oh, I can see it at here. Yeah, anyway, there's a whole lot of issues. I don't want to step too far from the. Oh, it's okay. Can you advance it for me? I mean, I don't want to take up too much time. We have. Yeah. We have a whole bunch of these policy issues here. So, yeah, another example for I've. So right now, East Palo is We're very close to the bay. I don't know the elevation here maybe 15 feet above ground level or so sea level 15 wow that's low above mean sea level yes once to our light your presentation council yesterday they're looking building more levees around the bay. We have a part one. We have a part two coming. The money seems kind of magical in the sense that I mean the city and the grant seem to things doesn't seem to be contributing that much towards a pretty expensive couple mile to heavy. There's a clear benefit in that every home that's near it, many of them could have to pay up to $2,800 per year towards FEMA flood insurance. So is that without the Levy? This is summer with the Levy and still $2,800 just because it hasn't been completed yet. Yeah, but like you hear, I live in the gardens where they've built a partial levy, but not complete. So they self-tapey flood insurance. But like for something like this, if we didn't have this magical money coming in from like the region and the state, et cetera, are there financing schemes for something like this from if a local municipality just want to dress it on their own? Yeah, I mean, so that Christopher gets me to something I was going to talk about is depending on our time constraints is sort of this notion of value capture. And I don't know if it would apply in the case of a levy, you'd have to think about it. But there's a lot of places and one of my favorite examples is Boston, where the installation of an infrastructure, right, raises the value of the property. And that increases the property tax, but the value captured arrangement is where you would capture some of the increased value over time, you would borrow against that expected increase value to pay for the installation of the infrastructure. It's kind of a circular thing. Let me give an example. I was heard a talk in Boston. And certain parts of Boston are or were sort of cut off from the subway system. You know, they wanted to put in a stop, right? It's somewhere in the in the subway system. But they didn't have a lot of money to do that. It's expensive. So the idea for it was a tax increment financing, where you define a district, an area around where the subway stop is going to be. You kind of know that the value of the property is going to go up because you installed the subway stop and then you put it in, you borrow against that but you pay for the installation of the subway stop by capturing some of that increased value and that's but that's there's a whole bunch of flavors of this. So it makes me wonder if and again I don't you'd have to think about it. If the value of the property would go up as a result of the levies, if you would save money on the insurance, here's my question. Can you capture some of that value with this creative policy borrow against the improved value of the property to pay for the levies, or at least partly pay for the levees. And this is something that fascinates me. In our town, it's if it go upstate, old town. Our wastewater treatment plan was 100 years old. There were a lot of leaks. It was settling ponds, the big circular selling ponds for solid waste that are putting methane into the air of the city partner with Johnson controls to install spheres the big white sphere like you know like a big baseball or something except it's enormous with a plunger in the top and it captures the methane And they use that methane to create electricity It would normally go out to the atmosphere and that electricity powers the plant. To the point where the plant now sells power, it doesn't use power because it captures the methane. It sells that power onto the grid. So what was the money losing scheme for the city where they had to pay for the electricity to run the plant, becomes a money making and you improve the environment at the same time. The point is that this didn't cost the city of Ithaca hardly anything or anything because Johnson Control said, we'll just capture part of your lower electricity bill. Right? Do you see what I mean? So you get a little risky, you get a little creative in how you capture that value. And I remember the mayor's happy because there's no cash outlay from the budget, but you get the new technology. So I did have a tour of that. I saw that the turbines, they're about the size of large refrigerators. They turn it at 100,000 RPMs. It's an amazing technology. So I would like to see more creative things. The other thing I want to think about is what we're seeing is more municipalities banding together. So you don't do this, you get your friends. And one thing you learn in infrastructure is the economies of scale are real, right? You don't want to be that doing bidding at this, you want to kind of get a group consortium if you will together and then try to bid it out at scale and you'll get a better outcome though You'll get more bidders. You'll probably bring in international companies that are around the world are experts in these sort of value capture arrangements and You know you end up with a really good outcome. So your question makes me wonder if it's possible with the levy, right? If the levy is gonna increase property values, can you capture maybe not the entire cost of the levy, but some of it and bond against it in order to pay for the levy? Just the back of the envelope, I mean there's two buildable square miles in East Palo Alto 28 30,000 people 8,000 or so homes. Let's just say it's 1,500 homes. Okay. 3,000 per year 4.5 million dollars I think per year. So just a quick back then. I believe you know. yeah, that could find something. So we're going to find a new in is not a trivial amount of savings. But is that annual annual? So you'd say that then every year, but would you, would, would you hear? So it's kind of, yeah, are you saying you create that amount of value every year? Every year because then anything, residents would continue to pay this growing female. Yeah. But then that's where, that's like the wastewater treatment plant methane value capture deal, where you expect the lower electric bills every year. It's amazing what the bond markets will allow you to borrow against, and you borrow against that future savings to pay for the installation of the big infrastructure up front. And that's one thing you learn quickly is the fixed cost. It depends on the infrastructure, but think of a water system. You're embedding the pumps, plants, and pipes in the ground. And then the marginal cost of running another gal in a water is almost zero. I would think similar with a levy. Probably, I don't know much about levy's, but the installation cost is gonna be your big cost and then the maintenance over time is relatively small. You gotta keep it up, but that's small compared to the installation. I think when concerned that some municipalities might have about things like the value capture tax increment, what if the political will was not for the value use of the property score for example and he's called so there's been a lot of gentrification displacement for the one. The decades as we come back. Could that be a disincentive towards taxing and financing? Yes. Because maybe the leadership doesn't actually want the private school up in value. They want to keep it maybe even going down. Yes. It's an interesting question I've heard. Some things to that effect before. I don't kind of have, I guess, a weak answer. But the answer would be that there's other flavors of this that don't depend on property values. There may be other ways to capture that. This was just a mechanism, right? And it was, the mechanism is through the property tax. But one thing you see, there's, there's, actually USDOT has a manual that's like this thing on value capture arrangements just for transportation. So there's a whole lot of different flavors. So what I would think about is a flavor of value capture that doesn't depend on increased property values. If the residents of East Palo Alto as a group don't want property values to go up, right? And I, it's weak because I'm trying to think of a nice example of another tool to give you, but I'm having trouble. But I wouldn't think of like the value capture for the ethical waste water treatment plant had nothing to do with property values. It had to do with old 100 year old waste water treatment plant that was emitting methane into the atmosphere, which that's natural gas. And it can be used to make electricity. So that didn't, that's a value capture arrangement that did not depend on property values. So anyway, that's what I would think about. I don't want to take too much more of Rick's time so do any of the other commissioners have any questions I want to ask. And we have two people who work for the county transportation board here. Commissioner Patel and Commissioner McConeys. So they have some more deep insights into your presentation. Yeah, no, thank you Rick for giving your insights into this subject. I mean, my peers here have asked a lot of the questions that I was thinking as well. You answered, but just going back to the road user charge. if if you fall told wanting go down that road what would we have to do what at a high level and you know as it relates to policies. So that's it's interesting to think about what can be done at the municipal level and I think with that you'd almost have to have at the state level and there have been a lot of discussions at the state level, because California is encouraging the use of, or discouraging the use of fossil fuels, right? And of course, the gas and diesel taxes are based on the use of fossil fuels. So you want to then think about what the state of Oregon, I think Washington, the state of Washington, has been another leader in moving to a road usage charge. And so there's a whole literature to answer your question on how you do that. It's called Aurego, and you can Google for the user interface, this is what the average motorist in Oregon would see what it's called Aurego. And they really prep people to explain this is not new tax. This is instead of the state's gas tax. We will get rid of the state's gas tax, but we're going to have a more sustainable tax to pay for the infrastructure in place. And then you estimate the sense per mile based on the revenue and it was based on the the rev, it's not like New York State congestion pricing, New York City congestion pricing, that's trying to reduce the congestion in peak times. This is a revenue, right? This is about paying for the roads and the bridges and the tunnels and everything else. And so the other thing that I think is interesting is, and I remember this, I've been following this for a long time, was people concerned about privacy. Big brother, how if you want to define Big Brother, the corporations, whatever, knows my where I am, right? So they have a menu of options. And I remember there was one, there was one, it was a cube about this big. And it plugged into your car's USB port. And for reasons I don't fully understand, it monitored not your Obedometer, but your speedometer. So if you know what a car speedometer is doing, you know how many miles a road you could just do arithmetic and figure out the mileage. But it's completely agnostic as to your location. That was one option. I remember another option, which I termed the all you can eat option For roads. If you pay a certain amount per year, we're not gonna monitor your location at all, right? You've paid your road bill. Go at it. The other one maybe for the young people I've discovered have no concerns about privacy is is we can monitor your location in real time in the x, y, and z vertical space down to this gizmo, down to the sub meter level constantly. And we're just gonna, I'm sorry, but your privacy's gone. And we're just gonna bill you based on your use of the roads. Right, so there was a menu. And I think Oregon, they really thought it through for a decade before they implemented it. And I think it's reflected in the fact that it's now operational working or ago as a real program in the state of Oregon. And other states are looking at their example to get away from the fossil fuel taxes because it's's not sustainable. It's not politically people don't know, it's hard, they're very hard, to raise the gas or diesel tax. But on the other hand, the revenue, the purchasing power of the revenue is declining. So I wish I had a better, I mean, the privacy concerns, the cost to collection concerns. There's ways of doing it that reduce the cost to collection. I mean, we could talk a lot about, guess and diesel tax is a relative and low cost to collect. And I think that's part of the reason why we've been successful for decades in providing good roads and bridges and tunnels relative to a lot of other countries. But the problem is now that that system is under a lot of stress at the state level. Oh, one last question. I mean, if you've seen any successful financing, like public private partnerships or financing schemes for like bus transit, because here I don don't know exactly Sam Trance, SamoTale counties, but it's something. $15 cost per user and they're only getting like $2 and something since. And it's like a money. It's heavily subsidized. And I don't see why a private partner would want to jump into that. They wouldn't get it. Obviously they're losing money. It's a social service. Right. So it's subsidized for, but is there any way that you've seen maybe the capture something some creative way? Yeah, so I actually wrote a paper, Christopher, that I forget where it appeared. But you can use, you can get very creative. So that's maybe part of my theme tonight. And some people say that a service has to be, I did this with a former student that's coming back to me now. But it, people think that in order to have private partner, it has to be a profitable system. But you can subsidize that and have a private partner involved. And the idea we worked out, it's turned out that others had thought of it first, but it's called least subsidy bidding. So suppose you're bidding for a concession. Suppose it's a restaurant in an airport, right? And that space is really valuable, right? You might think, well, we're the airport, we're gonna bid that out. And it's gonna be based on who bid the most, right? Who's gonna bid the most for this space in the airport? They win. They get the concession, right? So that type of a bidding is, you know, is an English auction, like who gets the most, who bids the most win? The reverse is who bids the least subsidy? Like I'll provide this service. You have to subsidize me. I'm a private company, but I'll bid against others, but not for the highest all pay, but for the least you have to pay me. And then you say, well, you have to provide all this service as money losing service, but you do it on the basis of the lowest subsidy, I will accept as a private operator to provide your bus service, right? So, and it turns out there are examples of this. It's not as common as a regular concession, but there are examples of this least subsidy bidding. So you wanna provide universal service, right? The issue with a municipal bus is you don't, again, you don't wanna leave certain neighborhoods out. It's like in the DNA of infrastructure. It has to be universal, it has to be open access. We don't want to say certain communities, you can't have access to transportation, but we lose money. So how do you get if you want a private service, you have to use at least subsidy bidding approach. And again, you know, that might get us into the weeds a little too much. But the lesson is people sort of say, well, we can't have a private partner because of this, you know, because we lose money. And a lot of other countries have gotten who don't are not as wealthy as we are have gotten around that by being creative in the bidding. Okay, yeah, I think we'll conclude the presentation. OK, thank you for the invitation. Thanks, Isabel. Thank you. I'm really appreciate it. It was an honor to come and speak. And I'm happy to follow up. Isabel knows how to reach me. So if you guys have follow up questions, I'm only an email away. And we rigged only here in California for like five more days. He's going back to New York, I think. Yeah. But we got him in the next daughter's graduating on a battery. So we're going. Congratulations. Yeah. But thank you. But I'll still be on email and I'm happy and I'll probably be out visiting another time. So thank you all. Yeah, very, very cool presentation. Definitely. We'll need to think outside the box. Okay, item number 9.1, future public works and transportation commission item requests. So I think my direction to the commissioners is are there any new items you'd like to see and or are there any specific items in the current list that you think should be you'd like to request to be prioritized for the next couple of meetings. David. David. Who's that work? No. Okay. So building on what Commissioner McConey was talking about earlier, you know, we have a proposed budget for public works. I was wondering if Hamza would be willing to come in and present the approved budget afterwards after it has been approved and not sure if it has been. Just in the process. Yeah, I think the next couple council meetings are budget meetings. meetings. Perfect. I think that would be super helpful in understanding what's in store for the process. Yeah. I think the next couple of council meetings are budget meetings. Perfect. I think that would be super helpful in understanding what's in store for the year. Yes, thank you. Okay, so following adoption to kind of bring it and understand what was approved. Yeah. I also, I don't think I saw a hand raised earlier but I'd see a hand raised by Adrian. Yeah, I just want to clarify if this is for the previous item. It wasn't, I checked for public comment for the case, it's for this one. So once the commissioners are done, then we can go to public comment. Okay. For our current list, I would recommend that we can remove the woodland avenues, go field avenue concerns. Given that it's very nicely paved now, and I believe this was a concern about all the polls before I just saw it with my own eyes today. through the chair. I'm trying to look at this list real quickly, but can we get an update on the daylight law and where we're going to be moving? Yeah, so actually a few weeks ago, public work staff and PD staff started going through driving around the high and drain network streets because the city, what we're doing is we're doing like a tiered approach. First, we're working on implementing the day lighting law on the high and drain network street. So like, Poulgis, Clark, Bay, and so we haven't gone through all of them, but we started going intersection by intersection and recommending proposed improvements, whether that's like signage with like some red curbing or other improvements like striping improvements. So we're still kind of working through the intersections and our goal is we do plan to go to council with an update soon. So we could probably bring that same update to the commission if that's of interest, but we're still working on it. And I know other cities are kind of kind of slowly taking on this item because it is such a big item. So I think all cities are kind of looking to each other to see what they're doing, but definitely educational, we're in an educational phase right now and we're going to start to implement some of those like signage and red curving, but like in conjunction because we need signage when we put red curbing. Um, I, I would like to request for the, the potential new city gateway sign project to be prioritized for two main reasons. One is our cities, the roads are looking more and more beautiful and I think we should be proud to, for example, when people going on university, they should realize their knees pal to Wednesday cross woodland and not another mile up the street, Wednesday cross the auto zone. Two is I was actually talking to some residents recently and I learned that some students from some art, I don't know if it's epic's epicenter somewhere else are working on some type of mural for some entrance to the city. I don't remember the details there but it sounds like another organization maybe tackling this similar thing. I'm not aware of this I could check with the community services team because I'm assuming it's something that they would be coordinating. But one thing about the Gateway Signs on University Avenue, we have a Grand Corder project, which was recently awarded by City Council. And part of that is looking at the corridor as a whole and kind of implementing different things like a new Gateway Sign. Obviously, there's going to be a lot of public outreach envisioning the first phase of that project, but something that will be looked at as part of that, but on university obviously, because it's the University Avenue Grand Corner project. Okay, I'm going to open to public comments. Also, I guess just to clarify the item, it might be helpful to clarify the item we're on. Oh, yes, the item that we are on is item 9.1. Oh, like for you to introduce the public comments. Okay, yes, Adrian. Yes, Adrian is here. And Adrian's going to ask, do the chair and I miss public comment a community forum but I'm going to try to align my comments with this agenda item and starting with that I'd like to ask in your future agendas perhaps you can make the website more accessible so that community members can find information specifically regarding different types of maintenance, street repairs, and when and if we get to development that the community's thoroughly informed. And I know my go to is a website before our call. So if you can indulge me for a quick second, I also want to give a shout out since this is National Public Works Week. I want it to let Hamza and Bartol, I've said this to you guys before, but I want to do it here on the record and say, thank you for always being so responsive. When I do call, I try hard not to reach you as my first line, but sometimes I just have to get to you. And you guys are always very responsive. And I do see sometimes when I give you my unsolicited advice, you do take the time to try to explore it. I also want to give some shots out to our commissioners, McConee and Cal. I really have learned a lot from the stuff that you have agindized and I just learned a whole lot from this commission and I'm so grateful and again I'm sorry that I'm not technically within alignment with the agenda but I couldn't I'm, you know, missed a time to say thank you to the Public Works Department. I missed a community, I'm sorry, the City Council meeting last night. So this is my last chance aside from calling directly or sending an email to say thank you guys. That's all. Thank you, Adrian. We really appreciate your comment. And we echo Adrian sentiments. I'm happy public works week and we appreciate everything you do. Okay, so that's 9.1. Seeing as there are no more public comments, then I'm calling the meeting to end item 10. Thank you. Recording stopped.