We're going to call our City Council special meeting to order for May 7th. It is now 6 o'clock. We think all of you for being here today. We're going to do a roll call. Council Member Lillburn. Here. Council Member McCallan. Here. Council Member Hogan. Here. Council Member Saldana. Here. And Council Member Timmerellon. Councillor Danna. Councillor Mellon. Councillor Danna. Councillor Danna. Councillor Danna. Thank you. At this time, I have no public comment speaker slips. Do you, city clerk? We do not receive any. Okay. Then we'll move on to our public hearing. At this time, I'm going to go ahead and open the public hearing and look to our staff for a staff presentation and is Carlos. Yes. Thank you Mayor and Council. So. and look to our staff for our staff presentation. And is Carlos? Yes. Thank you Mayor and Council. So what I wanted to do is just give a brief overview of why this item has been brought before the City Council for consideration. So I'm just going to give some highlights. And then obviously if you guys want to get into the details of it, we can. But in short, we've looked at the fireworks ordinance that we currently have and we thought there was a need to make some changes. So I'm going to highlight the two main changes that we've made in the current ordinance. And one of them is that what we're looking to do is increase the fine. The current fine for having fireworks at the city is $1,000. That's what it is today. What we'd like to do as part of this revision to the ordinance is bump that up to the maximum amount, which is $2,000. We want to get the attention of people who are doing this so that they stop doing it. Okay? Because obviously we need to do something more to get their attention, really, is the bottom line. And then the second thing is that we want to hold property owners responsible for the fireworks. So, you know, we want to be able to assign responsibility to somebody right if this is occurring. So it is not our intent to go and catch people or, you know, we prefer that people just abide by our regulation here, our municipal code that says no fireworks are allowed here in the city and really just enjoy it at other places such as the manual Baptist Church or other venues, you know, such as that. And so really that's at the heart of this. And so what happened is, you know, we're proposing these changes and these changes are based on a conference that I attended last year where I got a chance to talk to other city managers because I wanted to, you know, get an idea of, hey, what are they doing that maybe is different than what we're doing that where maybe we can affect the change here in our city that will help us. And one city that stood out for me as Bellflower. So I met with their city manager and the mayor happened to be be with me in the conference, and I think we heard a lot of good things. A lot of great things. And so the item before you hear is that with the adoption of this revised ordinance, what we would like to do is to do a pilot program to go ahead and on the 4th of July go out a team of four vehicles where it would be the executive team basically and myself with code enforcement officers and what we would do is during the evening of the 4th of July we would drive around the entire city and basically identify and we would have a dash cam on these cars and what we would do is rent cars because we don't want to, you know, we want to make sure that we stay a little inconspicuous because we want to catch the folks in the act. I don't think that they would even care if we were in city vehicles or not, honestly. But at the end of the day, you know, we want to capture who's doing this. And so what we would do is we would drive around the city and we would have is we would have a driver and a passenger and we would have mounts that we would be taken to identify you know where we were seeing this where the property was who was doing the fireworks and we would want to confirm that this was occurring at a specific property right that it wasn't just somebody walking over and lighting up a firework and then moving onto another place because at the end of the day, we want to hold the property on a responsible, meaning that we want to make it clear that the incident is occurring at a property because generally speaking, I think majority of the people that do it are doing it at their home and it's because, you know, they're trying to have a good time, they're trying to enjoy the Fourth of July. Unfortunately, that is an activity that we do not allow in the city. And so what we want to do is catch those folks. So what we would do is we would drive out during that time, we would make notations of who we were observing. And then we would collect all of that data. Then we would do is go through that data to make sure that, you know, we didn't have any oddities or any gray areas where we felt well, wait a minute. You know, can we really cite this person? Did we really see that they were at this property or what have you? I mean, we want to make sure we are very clear as to where it was occurring and that it was occurring at the address that we would be proposing to send a citation because that would be the next step. Would be to first go through, that through the information to make sure it was accurate. And then secondly, put together a list of all the property owners that we were going to send out the citations to and then they would get mailed out. So what we would like to do is, following the further July within a week or two week period, all of those citations will go out to the property owners. Question? Well, the citations include pictures of the people lighting up the fireworks? No, we will have that evidence on file. We're just going to simply put them on notice that, you we're going to follow the same kind of format that Belfare did. They actually send us the letters that they send out. And so we don't want to reinvent the wheel, right? If something's already working, then we want to follow a similar format. And as you may have seen in the staff report, the city of Belfare has been very successful with these citations. Obviously, do they get 100%? No, they don't. But I think that they do get pretty good, they do get those citations results. They do get reasonable results. I think what we found is that they get about 70% of the results. You know, the citations that go out, people pay. Obviously there are people that are not going to pay and they're going to challenge and they've gone to court if they had to and they've been successful. There have been some instances where they maybe did agree and they, you know, tossed them, but those were very rare in nature. And so I think that this is gonna be a good tool for us to do and we're very excited to present this to this council for consideration. And so, the reason we wanted to do it through a special meeting is that in order to have this in place, in order to have it in place prior to the 4th of July, we wanted to essentially have the first reading today and then the second reading would go into effect on May 13th so that we, the ordinance would basically go into effect on June 12th. So that is a brief, so and I should also mention that we have, you know, consulted with our city attorney on the revisions to this ordinance. And so this is why the site is being presented here to the council. And that concludes my brief presentation. I'd be happy to answer any questions that you have. Thank you. Since we have no representation, presentation from the outside. And I have no speakers in favor of or in opposition of I'm going to go back to the council and At this time I'll close the public hearing and I'm going to open it up to the council members for any questions discussion And this did come to the public safety subcommittee About two weeks ago. So Larry, you have some questions? Yeah, just a question. It seems like some of these fireworks are really set off in the street. How would you identify the? Sure. So, and we got to see some of the footage that Bellflower did when Larry and I spoke with them and what they did to their dash cam is you could clearly see and so what we would do is as we would drive around the neighborhoods we would drive slowly to make sure that we could see that they're coming from a specific property so we would wait a little bit. In other words we're not going to just zoom through the areas or neighborhoods if you will. We're going to drive slowly and if we see something, we're going to wait to see if something happens so that because at the end of the day, that is a good point Larry. We have to be able to clearly identify that the fireworks are coming from a specific property. Yes, sir. If you can speak into your mic. No, that's what happens in most cases. Somebody will grab a skyrocket or whatever. Go to the middle of the street, light it, come back, grab a beer, you know, and so on and so forth. Is this from experience? No. That's like a confession. I was a part of a pilot program in San Diego. But that's how it's done. And that's how it's done on my street. And it's back and forth and back and forth literally all night. And we've had trees catch a fire. We have an older gentleman that was, he's a veteran. He gets PTSD every time it happens. I can't tell you how many of my neighbors have talked about what happened to their pets. They actually have to give what tranquilizer to their pets. It's a menace and most of the guys have no respect for anyone. They'll do it till two, three o'clock and a minute. They don't care. And it's a shame. So I like the pilot plan. Okay. Mayor Canary and Jack was one more comment. So what we're going to do is we are going to do some outreach to remind people that they're not allowed to do fireworks. So what we're going to do is is we're going to post the changeable message signs. We have two in the city. So we're going to put those out in the city. Number one, number two, we're going to post the changeable message signs. We have two in the city. So we're going to put those out in the city number one number two. We're going to put this in our city on our newsletter, which is on our city website number three. I've already coordinated with East Valley Water District and they have agreed that they'll put a notice in their monthly billing so that every customer of theirs will receive the notice. Question? do the known do the notice and give it to them. Yes. And then no one surged it into their building. So there it gets out to all the customers. So that's another avenue. And then East Highlands HOA, Ranch HOA, they're willing to also help send out a notice to all of their members. Because what we are trying to do is we want people to observe and not do this. But because we do know that they are doing it and they do it more than they should. Period, we want to make sure that we catch them and send them a message that this is not allowed in the city. because we also what happened last year on September the fifth when we had the line fire. Not that it was caused by fireworks but we know that fireworks can lead to fires and so at the end of the day we want to prevent this kind of situation from happening. Hopefully it helps. Right. Right. And but this is only for one day for the fourth correct? Yes. We would be looking to do it for one day just to see how this goes. And if the council wants to direct us to do this more for the next year, we can certainly look at that. But I can tell you that Belfar only doesn't once and that's on the 4th of July and it's been successful for them. Larry? I would suggest the neighborhoods around in Manubad district when they are doing the fireworks show. A lot of the residents around the church area are setting off fireworks too. So that's a fertile field. Yes and and just as a reminder, we're going to, we're going to canvas the entire city. Oh, right. We're going to have four vehicles. We're going to divide the area so that we don't get in each other's way per se. But honestly, to make sure that we capture the entire city. So that's why we have a team of four that will be going out and driving around the entire city. Very good. John, do you have any questions? The only question I have is on the siteation process. You mentioned we're going to notify or send it to the property owner. Are we going to do that off the tax rolls? Are we going to mail to the physical address? Okay, sirs a renter in there. Which chance at 90%, 80% chance there's going to be a renter doing that because they really don't care about the neighborhood. Yeah, I think what we'll probably do in this case is unless you have an opinion on it is we could send it to both we could send it to the you know the homeowner and the renter that way they both get it. I don't see any harm in sending the notice to both but I don't know if many so has any thoughts on that. I think that could be done. I think it's certainly the property owner that that is identified because that's whose information we would have we wouldn't necessarily know whether they're a renter or not. We would know this is the property in our address. This is the property in our, that's who the citation goes to, whether they would then have an issue with their tenant for what's happening on their property. That might be, who knows if that's a violation of their lease, but I don't know that we would have the information for the tenant per se. Very good. I would think that to mailing it to both the physical address and the property owner because I know what will happen if you mail it to the physical address only. If it's a tenant that will go in the round file and that property owner will never know it until he gets a collection later later or whatever. So we need to notify both parties. Yeah, that's why I kind of made that comment that that's what we would do because we do have that information. That's the only question I had now. Thank you. I do want to also mention that last year we only served 11 citations out of the entire city out of Woolworth re going on out there. Yes, it was. And so I'm not, I don't think the city is looking to make money on this. We're trying to serve a purpose on a public safety issue. And that's how I ended up with two additional dogs because they get out and they get lost and they're crazy. It's awful. It's sad and these people have no regards for animals. So let me ask you this. Will the PD play any role in this or is it just strictly the staff and does the PD, Jeremy, maybe you can answer this? Do you guys cite if you see? Since it's illegal, or do you arrest? Is this thing on? Okay. It does kind of a loaded question, and the reason I say that is siding for fireworks, obviously without having this video type of evidence. It can be extremely difficult to prove where they're coming from and who did them. I can assure you, I've been in multiple jurisdictions now. Fireworks are not just a problem in Highland, they're a problem everywhere. Whether they have legal fireworks or they're banned completely, every jurisdiction has the same problem. Some even have it year round. I know it's a problem here. So as far as this program goes, I can tell you that with our regular staffing, we can't necessarily commit to assist with this at this point and here's why. We have the parade in the morning I got to and we have a manual Baptist that we have to staff in the evening. So 4th of July our our staffing is completely committed to a full day event at this point. So is it relates to the staffing that we do have out on the streets? But of Fourth of July, I mean, really daily, if we can prove that somebody lit off fireworks, we will enforce it. Good. I think that you're hearing clear direction. We haven't passed it yet. That we support you guys 100% whatever you do out there to maintain law and order with fireworks. Thank you and you know when we get an opportunity I'm going to share some information on some operations we've done recently for about a month in a row trying to identify and I can just generalize like on the on the west end a lot of the fireworks are coming unfortunately from outside of our jurisdiction in the PD's area. So. There is some guy or girl I'm trying to keep it clean. Who I like two or three o'clock in the morning lights at MAD somewhere. Oh yeah, there's some babies going off. It's frustrating. It is. It happens in my own neighborhood. Yeah so we get it. Okay so and I'm sure you guys hear it. You guys are out there and you see it and I don't know I don't I don't even know what the answer is but I don't know either again just speaking from experience from multiple jurisdictions. I people just don't even know what the answer is, but. I don't know either. Again, just speaking from experience, from multiple jurisdictions, people just don't care. I mean, we, in some of the jurisdictions, they don't even care, they'll pay the fine. They don't care. Yeah. So it's an unfortunate thing, and she spoke about, without respect in others in the community, but that's unfortunately how it is. Gotcha. Thank you. Appreciate that. Can I just make another point? Chris, you can. To follow up on the law enforcement, being busy on the Fourth of July, we all assume they're going to be available. If we have an issue, they can, if it's a big threat, they're going to come, of course. The fire department on Fourth of July faces exactly the same issue. That is one of the busiest days and nights that they have. So if we expect the fire department guys and their fire trucks to run around, policing is it isn't going to happen. So I think that's why we should support this pilot program with the staff, with the cameras, and hopefully they'll get good information and define exactly what properties this is happening. I know a lot of the property owners are going to say, what the heck is this? You're citing me for what my renter did? But it sounds like reading the staff report. there's still a pretty good level of compliance from the property owner. So as long as we don't load this on the police department or the fire department having independent staff from code enforcement doing this, this is the way to go and I support it. I'm glad to hear that. So to any more comments or questions for staff? I have one last question. Okay. Are they going to make it? Is it going to be a difference between the fireworks to any more comments or questions for staff. I have one last question. Are they going to make a, is it going to be a difference between the fireworks that are sold before the 4th of July and the other ones are just so important? Because we don't allow any fireworks in the city that makes it very simple for us to find out who's doing it and who's not. Okay. Bottom line is if we see. Safe and sane. He's insane or illegal, doesn't matter. You cannot do them another way. And I would make sure that you put the number on the flyer if somebody wants to turn somebody in. They call you. No, no, no. No, they can call them and they can cruise that neighborhood if they know that somebody's sent them off like crazy. I don't know what the answer is but They may be going I'm so mad. I'm a turn this guy in and One of the issues we face here in Highland like many of the other cities is the sheriff talked about The city of San Bernardino allows safe and sane in many areas of the city. They sell it in Walmart, write a Jason to our city. So people don't know. So a big part of this is it's got to be the education and put up the the banners and work with the agencies and get this out. There'll still be a lot of a lot of fireworks. We all know that. And hopefully no one gets hurt. We stop big fires. That's a whole point. So with that, that's introducing and conducting the first reading of the City Council ordinance of Mending Chapter 1.2 arrest and citation. Chapter 2.56 administrative citation process in Chapter 8.58 at the Highland Municipalal Court to increase the administrative find as allowable under the state fireworks law for use of illegal fireworks and other amendments to authorize enhanced code enforcement efforts. And then there's two recommendation that we direct staff to file notice of exemption with the county clerk of the board is supervisors. We're approval. I have a motion. I second. And a second. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? There you go. Good luck. Thank you. We appreciate you, Carlos, bringing this. Our city, all cities are out of control. I mean, you can just see it's not the safe and safe. It isn't, it isn't your mom's firework show anymore. That has, it's gone wild. So thank you for doing that. All right, the ordinance number, thank you, record. Ordinance number 468. In ordinance of the city council of the city of Highland, California, del chapter 1.20, arrest and citation procedures of Title 1, General Provisions, and amending chapter 2.56. Administrative citation process of Title 2, administration and personnel. In chapter 8.58, fireworks of Title 8, health and safety of the Highland Municipal Code, pertaining to enforcement of fireworks violations. Thank you and I'll have our city attorney lead us into closed session. Thank you. We are going to be meeting in closed session for conference with the Labor Negotiator Persona to Government Code Section 54957.6. The Agency Negotiators, Carlos Carlos Salmano and the employee organization is unrepresented in place. So we're back into open session and our city were reconvening at 738 and our city attorney is going to lead us back into open session. Yes. So I just want to give the closed session report, the City Council met in closed session, pursuant to government code section 54957.6. Direction was provided to the city manager, but no reportable action was taken. Thanks.