you you you you you Recording in progress. Hello, good morning. If we can please find our way to a seat, please, that would be great. We're getting ready to go ahead and start our council meeting, our special session. So today is March 8th and the time is 10 a.m. and we're going to go ahead and we're going to start our meeting, our special study session for our city priorities. And we're going to start off with doing roll call. Mayor Vada gone here. Vice Mayor Dynan is currently absent, but we'll be joining us a little later. Council member Abrika here. Council member Lincoln. President and Council member Romero. President, you have a quorum here. Thank you. So I'm going to be looking a lot to our city manager and attorney for direction. But I believe that we're going to move on to item two, which is approval of the agenda. Do we need to take a vote on this? Okay, so if I can have someone move to approve. Okay, second. Okay, it looks like it's been properly second. So all in favor of the approval of the agenda, can we please signify saying aye. Okay, thank you. So we're going to go ahead and move on to item three which is a community workshop which are our council priorities and I believe that I'm going to hand it over to our city manager is that correct? And he will give us further instructions. That is correct. Thank you, Mayor Baragon. For most, I just like to say, I know, typically I'm only supposed to speak to the council but also speak to our esteemed members of the party. I know, typically I'm not supposed to speak to the council, but also speak to our esteemed members of the public who are here to join us today. And just wanted to say good morning to everyone and welcome to our priority setting workshop. We're really grateful that you all have taken time to be here today because your voice matters. It's essential in helping us shape the future of our city. We're joined today by the team from Ramyun Associates who will help guide us through this important process. As we look ahead it's important for you all to understand that today's activity, the strategic priorities, are 20% of the work that the the city does. The other 80% is our day-to-day operations, street maintenance, doing permit applications, having conversations with community members. But the key projects and initiatives that drive meaningful change are the things that the priorities shape. So that 20% is where your input for today matters most. This workshop will be more than a discussion. It's a chance for you to help set the direction of the city for the next four years. The priorities we established today will shape the policies, projects, and investments that impact our community. And your participation today ensures that our city's future reflects your needs, your ideas, and your aspirations. So with that, I just want to say thank you again, and I'd like to introduce Matt Raimi, who will be taken to lead now. before we begin, I would like to make an announcement for interpretation services that are available today. If, I'd like to make an announcement that we're going to have the service of this morning's interpretation. If you're busy with an interpreter, please, hace la mano. No sé si todos de esta mesa creo. OK. Y ahorita les voy a dar un aparato para que les puedan traducir. But if you are on Zoom and you would like to listen to this, to Spanish portions of this meaning usually around public comment, user interpretation feature located at the bottom of your screen by clicking on the global icon and selecting English as your preferred language. Si usted le gustaría escuchar esta cuenta en español on Zoom, por favor use el modo de interpretación localizado debajo de su pantalla, preso its screen, pursuing the icon of the globe and selecting Spanish as its language preferred. Ah, there are available interpreters. Thank you. Good morning, everyone. I'm Matt Raimi with Raimi Dissociates. Are you all awake this morning? Yes, good. There's coffee in the back if you are not quite awake yet. I'm going to hand it over to Tiffany in just a minute, but I want to just give an overview of what we're going to be doing today. And first, I want to apologize to the council members now because I'm going to have my back turned to you. So apologies for that. So the first part of the meeting from 10 to 1130 is a community workshop. And this is really an opportunity for you all as community members to share directly with the city council. What you think the strengths and opportunities are in the city, what the issues and challenges are, and then your priorities for the future for the next four years in, as Melvin mentioned. So that's from 10 until 1130. During that time, the council will linger and listen, but they will not participate. So we're gonna keep them all honest on that. They're gonna be, it's their time to listen to you. At 1130, we are gonna transition over into a city council meeting. And we are going to move from there until four o'clock we'll have a lunch break from about 12 to 12.30. It's lunch on your own. And then we'll come back at 12.30 and the council will start getting into the strategic priorities. There will be a public comment period at the end of the day at about 3.30. We encourage everyone to stay and participate as much as you can. We know it's a long day. It's a long day for all of us, but it is very important. If you choose to go home in the interim, this will also be on Zoom. So you can continue watching on Zoom as well and potentially share your comments that way. So with that, I am going to turn it over to Tiffany Eing, who is part of Raming Associates, and she's gonna take us from here. Great. Thanks so much, Matt. Can everyone hear me okay? Okay. We wanna make sure this workshop is accessible. So if you need us to slow down or speak louder, just let us know. Thanks so much. So this is the fun part of today. We're gonna do a bit of an interactive workshop to talk about as Matt mentioned, your thoughts and ideas from proving the city. And so we're gonna talk about what is great great about East Palata, what do you like or love about the city? And also what are the challenges or needs of the city that we should work on together? In the end, we're going to create a list of what's called strategic priorities and projects that the city council can start to work on for the next two to four years. So they're kind of like short to midterm things to work on. For the agenda today, we're going to talk about our background process. So we'll talk a little bit about how we got to today, like what kinds of research we did, what plans we looked at, who we talked to to talk about, you know, what are some of the, you know, initial data to inform some of our ideas today. Then we're going to get into some small group activities as you can see from the table get your feedback and then we're going to share out to the bigger group so we can begin to see some of the big themes that are popping up from everyone's conversations and then we're going to close to the next session. So a little bit of background on our strategic priorities process with the city of East Palo Alto. So as you can see, people might be asking, why would you do this process? Why is it important? Well, it's really important because it provides direction to the city council and staff about what they should focus on. There's a lot of things that are really happening in the city. What are the small list of things that are most important to focus on that can really improve quality of life for everybody? It also makes sure that everyone's aligned in on the same page, right? Sometimes there's a lot of staff, there's a lot of community members. We want to all work together for a common good, a common whole. The other thing it does is clearly communicates a vision and direction for the city, so that everyone inside and outside the city knows where the city is headed, and it creates opportunities to re-evaluate priorities and projects so that we're not just doing work, we're thinking about how we measuring impact over time. How do we make sure that people are changing and having improvements in their lives, right? So there's going to be metrics and ways to measure that. Also, again, this is a community workshop. So if you need to get food, if you want to go to the kids' table, if you need to go to the restroom, feel free to do that anytime. We're going to be like kind of ebb and flowing in this activity. Okay. So components of the strategic plan. So first of all, there's a vision statement. So the vision statement just talks about what are the goals or where does a city want to be in like four or five years, right? What does it want to look like? That's the vision. Strategic priorities again are kind of like goals or big issue areas that the city can focus on. For instance, a strategic priority could be, we want to work on climate resilience, right? Or we want to work on fiscal health. Or we want to work on better mobility around the city. Those could be like bigger bucket strategic priorities. Projects are more like tangible activities or processes that will be carried out to achieve your desired outcome in that priority, right? So for instance, if a priority is climate vulnerability, you could have a project that's about creating climate resilient hubs or addressing flooding. So you're going to get more minuscule or smaller level projects underneath each priority. So as Melvin mentioned, while there's a list of projects that we're going to come up with through this process from now until June, the biggest thing is that they're kind of the tip of the iceberg, right? There's all these ongoing study operations that are happening on a constant basis, whether it's like park maintenance or street improvements or making sure that city staff are growing and being hired. These parties are the top issues or things that the city wants to work on. They're on top of those basic operations. So that's something to keep in mind. We think about parties. We can't do a ton, but we can do a lot with the resource that we have. So looking back at this last fiscal year of 2024 to 2025, we're basically just the last year. There's a number of priorities that were created to support the city's growth and development based on where the city wants to head, right? So the priority A was promoting housing, economic and workforce development. Priority B was implement the comprehensive transportation and mobility plan. Priority C was promote health and public safety. Priority D was ensure our financial and organizational health. Priority E was improve the city's water infrastructure. Priority F was develop and implement a comprehensive facilities master plan, right? City buildings and whatever city owns. And Priority G is enhanced community services and parks for residents. So you see, that's a lot of priorities. And under each priority, there's a lot of different projects. So while the city meet a lot of improvements over the past year or so, you can see in the first column there is for instance a total of 18 projects for Party A and four have been complete. There's a number that have been complete or in progress. The city wants to think about, okay, we've done a lot so far, but how could we even narrow and focus these priorities and projects so we can maximize impact, right? when when you get spread then it's kind of hard to get things done. You want to be focused and strategic in our work together. So here we are in the process of the timeline. As I mentioned, we did some data and background review to like look at the environments and the documents have been created. We also worked with different community members and stakeholders to get their thoughts initially. And we did some public workshops around town, for instance, Cardenas Market and the Senior Center where areas where we did public workshops. We took all the information and we're here today to present that to you. At the City Council retreat and goal scene session on March 8th. After this process, we're going to get everyone's feedback from today's session, including the council's feedback. We're going to draft a vision statement, strategic priorities and projects for everyone to look at. And then we're going to do some further engagement and talking with the council, both through local efforts, as well as on April 22nd. There's going to be a second City Council study session where everyone is invited to look at the draft plan and give their feedback. At the end, we're hoping for a June timeline, but that will be the final City Council session where the City Council will vote to approve the plan based on all the feedback, all the research, and everything that's been happening so far for this year. So I'm doing a lot of talking, but it's going to be more interactive and a little bit I swear. So this is some of the background to learn more about the work that we've done. So again, we did some focus group meetings. We met with the city staff. We did a scan of background documents. We did public workshops. So it's been a great initial process. We took all the information and we surveyed like, what are the strengths of the city? What do people love about the city? And then also what are some of the issues or needs or challenges that people are facing on the ground, right? So one thing that people said was EPA is really diverse. It's a vibrant community, diversity is one of its biggest strengths. The fact that we have so many great people who bring culture and richness and life to this city. It's a very active community as you you know, through the history of EPA. There's been a natural history of people being very active through political activism to make this a better city. People care deeply about making this a better place to live. It's a great location. It's on the bay. You're right by the water. And it's also near opportunities from Silicon Valley. There's been improvements in public safety over the years. I think EPA has grown to feel like safe or acquired or more comfortable for people. And given its activism and its leadership, there have been great affordable housing social policies, right, like community policing that had been beneficial to the community. There's also support for small businesses, entrepreneurs, whether you're vending on the streets or you want to set up shop in a brick and mortar or bring in new bigger businesses. There's support for different kinds of economic development. And there's been improvements to the government. People say, I know who the staff are more. I know who city council is more. So there's definitely more trust that's been built over the years. When it comes to issues or needs, people have still mentioned that, yeah, we have done more on housing, but we still need to do more. There's more housing that needs to be built for different income levels, whether it's market rate housing, very deeply affordable housing or middle income housing. Displacement's still a really big issue. There's a lot of long time families in the city that want to make sure they can stay in the city and grow their family here. And there's people who want to come back to the city who might have gone to college and want to return. Some people have mentioned the business environment can be a little challenging. And are there ways to help businesses thrive and grow because when businesses thrive, it can create jobs and create revenues for the city to get all the things we need for our city, right? Like street improvements, better parks, et cetera. Again, more support for small businesses and job creation. A lot of comments around how there could be better retail and services so that you don't have to go out of the city to get things. You can get your groceries. You can get your coffee. You can get you can get your coffee you can get your your boba tea whatever you like to in the city That was my personal thing The people wanted to talk more about how to improve infrastructure whether it's Crossing the street feeling safe crossing the street having better traffic flows Making sure that and everything else are kept up. You want to make sure that those are things that people shared. People mentioned that although we are near the bay, and that's great, there's also issues with climate, vulnerability, and sea level rise, how do you make sure that we prevent flooding? What happens if there's a disaster? Do I know where to go? Am I mobile, right? Do I have emergency response systems in different languages? Those are things that people had mentioned during the conversations we had. While the city is great and vibrant and diverse, there can be some tensions. And people said that even though there's differences on what we want sometimes, people do want to come together for a better life. So how can we cross differences and come together to create these kinds of priorities as a city? City staff are great, they're growing, they're really caring, but we also know that there's not enough staff to do all the things that have to be done for the city, so how can we support those staff to keep staying here in this job and also get more staff? And of course, a lack of city funding, so everything takes money. So how can you generate revenue to pay for those public goods that we want? So if you want to take a look, this might be helpful for the next conversation on the screens. But these are some of the top topics that we saw during our conversations on both the background documents and during the public engagement process. Not very surprising, right? You have housing, if economic development, business support, workforce development, traffic mobility, neighborhood quality of life, and that could be anything from safety to, there might be some parking issues as hard to get around, you know, there's a lot of things that go into quality life. Infrastructure and public services, public safety, emergency preparedness, parks and open space, and city governments. So you can see these themes being echoed again and again, both in the strengths, the issues and the priorities. So one thing we thought would be really helpful to think about as we develop priorities together, is there's some things the city does have control over and there's some things that it has maybe more limited influence over, right? Because they're not the main decision maker. So cities have control over land use planning and zoning, right, where buildings go. They run certain public facilities like the parks. They can control urban greening, planting more trees or plants. They can help with city beautification efforts. They can deal with lots or areas run by the city, infrastructure like roads and traffic signals, bike lanes. They can do code enforcement, right? If there's people who break a rule or have a violation are in the state of the state. The state of the state is in the state of the state. The state of the state is in the state of the state. The state of the state is in the state of the state. The state of the state is in the state of the state. The state of the state is in the. Bus and public transit, well, there can be some influence. That is a regional or a county system. You know, as much as we want to bring in maybe a certain store that I really love, they can only do so much. They can zone to make sure that businesses can come in, but they can't always attract that one business that you really want. Immigration right is a federal issue, although there could be programs to support, making sure that people feel safe, feel safer, and know their rights. And there could be limited ways to increase funding for housing, giving our economic structure and funding that's available. So just really good things to keep in mind, because when we think about priorities, we want to think about what can we choose that's gonna make the biggest difference, the biggest impact. And when the city has control over the things that's power and decision making, they can make the biggest change. So this is the session where we kinda get into, yeah, the small group activity. So I'll give a couple instructions. We're gonna have one facilitator per table. And then we can get into giving feedback and sharing out. So yeah, go ahead. Oh, sure. Oh, yeah. And we're going to share the slides after this in case anyone has any questions. Yeah. OK. And so, okay. So some group agreements to make sure that we have really good productive discussions. You might have heard these before, but we want to make sure that we step up and step back. So we encourage everyone to participate. But if you recognize them, you might be talking more than than somebody else like making space for other folks to share their ideas too. Speak one at a time it will really help to make sure that everyone feels heard and listen to and also that we can write down everyone's ideas really clearly. We want to limit use of technology if that's okay so I know that if you have a phone call you can step outside, but we want to make sure that we're able to focus on the activity. We want to assume good intentions and ask clarifying questions. So we know that sometimes there's a diversity of opinions, diversity of backgrounds, and that's actually a really strong thing. It's good to have different ideas flowing, right? We want to make sure that we can listen deeply, If we don't understand we can ask questions and sometimes we have different opinions We can acknowledge that right sometimes multiple things can be true at once. We want to hear all those different things For city council members as people mentioned before We do want to make sure that the community has a chance to talk and share their ideas So we appreciate your ability to be in listen mode during this communityille part of the workshop. And if you'd like to, you can take notes during the discussion so that we can really make sure we know what people are saying so we can incorporate into the afternoon session. Do these sound OK? Do people want to add any agreements while we're here? All right. If you agree to these agreements, can you put a thumbs up? If you don't agree, you can put like a thumb in the middle. Okay, all right, sounds good. So I didn't see any thumbs in the middle. Go ahead. That's a really great question. Yes, so we do have Spanish interpretation that's provided. If other folks want to provide interpretation, we have separate tables where people can have similar language conversations to. Yeah. Does anyone have any questions about that as well? We're good. OK. OK. Any other questions about our conversation or any kinds of accessibility needs? OK. questions about our conversation or any kinds of accessibility needs? Okay. All right. So here's the directions for this activity. So first of all, if you want to move tables, you can, you can meet new people, but otherwise feel free to stay in your table and do the activity. You're going to introduce yourself to your new friends and neighbors. And you can see the sticky notes on the table. You're going to write individual comments on each sticky note, right? So if you want to write like, I want to improve the street or I really want to work on a climate resilience hub, those are going to be individual sticky notes. As a team, you're going to work together to categorize the sticky notes based on the three questions of strengths, issues, and priorities. After that, as a group, you're going to get together with your facilitator. You can identify the top themes. This is really important. I'm going to say it again. You're going to identify the top themes from your group to share with the bigger group, because this feedback is going to be taken into consideration for the afternoon council retreat. And then we're going to have a little bit of a short discussion if we have some time to talk more about these ideas. So any questions about the instructions before we move to the facilitator work? Tiffany, we do have a online comment. Okay. We might need to clarify something so why don't we take that comment and then. And then I think we also have a council member with a question. Okay. Um, is uh, Isabel Lopez? Hello. I'm just wondering whether there will be an opportunity for online folks to engage and make comments at some point. Yes, during this community workshop, it'll be difficult for you to Engage, because there's kind of small group discussions at tables going on. We'll pan to that so you can see it at a later later, but the second half of today will be a regular meeting where we'll have general public comment and you can participate remotely. I had a question. Had we thought ahead of time of having like private rooms within the Zoom because I know that we can have that where you have What is it breakout rooms? Yeah breakout rooms That was something that was highly done during COVID and teaching so I don't know maybe that's something for the future to think about Yes, thank you for for that. We thought about that, but kind of due to being able to staff that, we intended for the community workshop to be primarily an in-person activity, but we will try to consider that next time to have breakout rooms. It was just hard administratively this time around. I think in addition to that, while there is limitations online, we do have a comment feature on Zoom, right? So we can keep the questions up. If you want to share what you think are the strengths, issues, and priorities for yourself, we can record those comments and take those into consideration. Yeah. So that's a really great point. Thank you. Does that make sense for the person? Is that okay? Yeah. Okay. Sounds great. All right. Thank you. Anything else before we begin? Any other needs, questions? So we do have a council member with a question. Thank you. Better Mayor. I just want to clarify something. After this session, when the council reconvenes, will you be given us a summary of sort of what comes out? The reason I mentioned is because during our quiet time, I have to run a family errand, so I won't be here for most of the time But it's fine. I mean people are gonna come up with their Suggestions. So I just want to make sure that we'll get it. We'll get some summary Even if it's not you know As detailed but at least something right? Yes, so I apologize for that, but I can't stay the whole time We do it. So that's one other one also, I think this has been a great process to really expand different ways people can participate, including what our mayor was saying, opportunities online. Also, I think, you know, for people who are not able to be here this morning, I think if you're friends or neighbors or relatives they can still at any time send emails send letters Correct, so that mean it is not close stuff after today that you know I just want to clarify that that People don't have to wait until the draft report comes out Yes, thank you. Yeah, what's the way in which people are out here today, you know, in the next couple of weeks, they can send in some comments, suggestions, et cetera. How will you handle that? Yeah. So I'll answer your first question, then your second question, if that's okay. So for all the facilitators, we're going to have these posters where we're going to list out that's five strengths issues and priorities. So we back to all of completely work on with a small group. In terms of other feedback, you know, there's emails on the flyer where people can send ideas. But in addition to that, there's ways in which people can like, we'll be surveyed. There's going to be some workshops. So this is just the first round of engagement, if that makes sense. So the second round of engagement's going to include a survey based on like the priorities, like what do people think about the priorities? Is anything missing? So that's the second round of engagement. And then there's gonna be a third round of engagement where we actually do more in community work. So there'll be multiple rounds. Yeah, I just wanted to, um, yeah, clarify that that individuals who are not here, who may not be in the survey, who they can still just directly send, like the person right down online. In other words, yeah, she's not here, she can be in the survey, she can send her comments or anybody can do that. Yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, so we can give some more instruction at the end of the day to make sure people know where to talk to. That's great. OK. All right. Anything else? Any other questions or comments? And again, if you'd like to join a table, you're welcome to join because we're about to get into a small group. Go ahead. How many people we reach? Mm-hmm. Yeah. For people, something special is that they've lived in 100 people. Always, because for people, they've got to get your attention Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, know, the more you see the center of the people. So, the more people, and I know in soon, but in the hour's time. Right. And I think in. I know that it's a little bit more people, but I want something and I want to ask for a lot of people. Yeah, that's a good point. It's a major, just Tiffany just really quickly, for the benefit of folks following along at home, when you get a question, we're going to try and circulate the mic, but if you could repeat the question so that they can hear it as well. Right. So the question was about what were the pop-ups like, how many people did we reach, and what are the future engagement activities, and that's a really good point. So we did a senior center workshop in the morning. I believe it was about 30 people attended that workshop from different backgrounds for the cardinous market, we actually didn't do a head count. But how many? How many? You think that's it? I feel like we had like 50 people. It was a good amount of people. We were there for two hours and for the market. So we got people of all ages to show up there. But we didn't do a head count. So that's a good point. For your last question, which was about, oh, future engagement? Yeah, we definitely heard from people that afternoon works better, like after work hours, and so there is going to be an online workshop that we're going to offer in addition to in-person stuff. So we'll make sure that the online workshop is during like people's free hours. Thank you. So if there's additional questions, please feel free to reach out to some more staff here where we'd love to take down your questions. But just because of time, we're gonna move into the small group activity if that's okay. Okay, go ahead. That's just a basic two-down work-up. Do you have the right to go to the right? I'm sorry, this isn't community stuff. Yeah, so both. Yeah. Okay. So we're going to have the facilitators come to the tables if that's okay and start to lead the activities with you. So Michelle, Orley, James, Matt, are you going to leave one in there? And myself will be at the tables. Okay. So we're going to do this for about like 45 minutes, we'll come back and then do the big group discussion. you you you Oh, look at this guy. and you're not going to be able to get a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit of a little bit I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. you you you you you you you you you you you I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. you you you you I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I opened the door and he said there's, it's like he don't go, he's an excellent, excellent, great sense. Like, now you are going to the other way. I opened the door and it said there's, it's like, you know the door, it's like, you know the bin there would say the same thing. But not because it was a scratch of the door. Yeah. I'm not saying that. I'm saying that. I'm saying that. I'm saying that. I'm saying that. I'm saying that. I'm saying that. I'm saying that. I'm saying that. I'm saying that. I'm saying that. I'm saying that. I'm saying that. I think it's great to hear all of this in the background. Tell us about it. I think we're going to go to the next slide. you I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. you you you you you Thank you. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm sorry. Each group should spend about two more minutes writing your issues, opportunities and priorities. you you you you you you you you I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the small groups, you might be almost done putting your postage down. The facilitator can work with you guys to start to organize the post is by theme. So obviously lots of housing things together or lots of street improvement things together. You can start to organize your post is so we can see it was right into the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm sorry. So, I'm going to start with the first one. I'm going to start with the second one. I'm going to start with the second one. I'm going to start with the second one. Oh, no. Yeah. Yeah. you you you you I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. It does. It does. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Wow, I think it was that good. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm sorry. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. Okay. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to be a little bit more careful. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I don't know the melody. So, I'm going to start with the first one. Start the Okay. I. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. That's it. That's it. That's it. That's it. That's it. That's it. That's it. That's it. That's it. That's it. That's it. That's it. I'm going to start with the first one. And that is the... I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm sorry. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. you you I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm sorry. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. you you I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm going to go back to the next slide. I'm going to go back to the next slide. I'm going to go back to the next slide. I'm going to go back to the next slide. Yeah, I'll be looking at the difference today. I'm not at a different stage. Oh. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. Oh, I'm going to pass it. Yes. Five times. Five times. Five times. Five times. Five times. Five times. Five times. Five times. Five times. Five times. Five times. Five times. Five times. Five times. Five times. Five times. Five times. Five times. Five times. Five times. Five times. Five times. Five times. Five times. I'm going to go to the next slide. That's why I'm pretty perfect. Sorry. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. you you you you I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. you you I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go back to the next slide. I'm going to go back to the next slide. I'm going to go back to the next slide. I'm going to go back to the next slide. I'm going to go back to the next slide. I'm going to go back to the next slide. I'm going to go back to the next slide. I'm going to go back to the next slide. I'm going to go back to the next slide. In the virus, in the virus. So that would be a five. So that would be nice. I am getting credit in the office. I'm not going to start. I'm going to start. I'm going to start. I'm going to start. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go with the first one. I'm going to start with the first one. I'm going to start with the first one. I'm going to start with the first one. I'm going to start with the first one. I'm going to start with the first one. I'm going to start with the first one. I'm going to start with the first one. I'm going to start with the first one. I'm going to get a little bit of a little bit to ask you a question. I'm going to ask you a question. Can you ask me a question? I'm going to ask you a question. Can you ask me a question? I'm going to ask you a question. Can you ask me a question? I'm going to ask you a question. Can you ask me a question? I'm going to ask you a question. Can you ask me a question? And they share but signature to the entire animal. We invited that. Thank you. Good job. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I don't know if anyone's fine, but I don a person in Malibu. How about that? I'm sorry. I was here. I don't know. I'm sorry. I was here. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I was here. I was here. I was here. I was here. I was here. I was here. I was here. I was here. I was here. I'm sorry. and you see them in the right office. Let's try and have the groups wrap up and be ready in a couple of minutes to report back. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. you you you you you you you . All right, one more minute and we'll come back together. you you you you you Okay. Okay, so they're going to wrap up. So we have enough time for the report backs. Yeah. Oh, okay. Why don't we have to come up with that? Are these on the mic? Yeah. Okay. So it's okay. Here. Yeah. Okay. It's a good question. If you hear my voice clap lines. If you hear my voice clap lines. If you hear my voice clap lines. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So we're going to do that really well. Okay. It's a good question. If you hear my voice clap once. If you hear my voice clap once. If you hear my voice clap lines. If you hear my voice clap lines. All right everybody, we can start selling down. Thank you. Yeah. I've never been doing. We're good. All right. So we're going to come back together and do the small group report back. We're going to give everyone two minutes because we went a little bit over time and Matt here is going to be an enforcer. So unfortunately just to make sure that everyone has time to report back if that's okay. But don't worry there's still more time to give feedback and we record everyone's notes and ideas on the paper. So their report back is really reiterating you've heard in your small group. Okay, so you get a volunteer. Oh, volunteer over here. All right. You want to come to the front? Paper and all the paper. And we're going to have you come over here. Yeah. There's people. Yeah. Yeah. Hi guy. Okay. Why don't you come to my phone? Yeah. You can Yeah. Okay. I got a record. I mean. Okay. And the form I introduced everyone's made this first. I know you don't have to say it. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay, good morning everyone. I'm representing this table over here on the bottom left. For, and these are no particular order. And we did go above six. For strength, one of the ones with small city, meaning embracing a diversity in history from a small city to a strength being youth programs such as like epicenter and the and and K through 12 programs. Third diversity of facilities such as epicenter in the library. Support from city staff during times of need such as the emergency flooding, sandbags were provided, central location, between San Francisco, San Jose, the nature trail, like the Bay, and good transit for challenges. They're can admit in sidewalks, which falls under walkability, including things like no curb ramps in a number of places, like mom's or strollers, can't walk. To safety and robberies, lack of a city center and also lack of retail. Fourth is quality of life issues. We talked about cleanliness, illegal dumping, motorcycles on the beach rail, which aren't allowed. In fifth is news pollution. This relates to a lot of sound from the 101 and also sound from the airport. Six is pipe infrastructure. We said this because of like water and sewer pipes and wanting more employment opportunities, lack of housing for all incomes, bike ability is a challenge and also land owned by other agencies. For example, the fact that the city of Palo Alto owns 15% of the land in each Palo Alto and we can't do what we want in that land. Some priorities, so bike lanes, sidewalks and street lighting, group them to one. Sound wall, long 101 highway, close to, close to Ferguson Clark, more diversity of stores, for example, like healthier foods. Another priority is water quality, water distribution infrastructure. This one had quite a few pluses, was residential parking permit program, behavior health services, wanting more housing for all incomes and also park improvements. Thank you. All right, thank you. That was incredibly fast and efficient. And I think we probably need three minutes per group to and a half to three minutes. Yeah. Next group over here. Okay. Want to come up? No. and so Sounds good. Hi, everybody. So for the strengths, we put six. We thought of more about there just wasn't enough time to add more in the moment. So strengths number one is diversity in his Palo Alto. And for number two is the programs that are offered for all different kinds of ages. And then number three is rent control. Number four is community leaders. Community leaders helping with resources to the residents of East Palo Alto. And number five is community legal services. And this is a great place for people that are rent teams who go and ask for help when they are needed to pay the rent. And then for number six is client and location. And some of the challenges that a Courney's Palo Alto is lack of free spaces for use. So for example, a teen center with teenagers, so they can see what they can do or find a talent that they may have, but they just don't know it. And number two is criminal activity, drug use, and open spaces like parks and the streets. Sometimes when there's residents that go in the park, there are teenagers doing drugs in front of children that are about, that range from three to five, and it's not really a good look. And so number three is need more tenant rights and number four is not on businesses to provide jobs plus revenue. And number five is issues with parking plus traffic law enforcement since a lot of people that live in spaces. It's more than one family so it does cause a lot of a traffic jam. Okay, for our priorities, our top one that we talked about on our table was tenure protections and specifically protections against displacement. So more supports for people already living in East Palatos so are not displaced. Code and law enforcement, and we talked a little bit about this in terms of just like, again, cleaning up the streets specifically. The general, oh, the West Side Chapter General Plan revision. We were also talking about that as an important piece because we think that the tenants and the people who live in the west side should have a lot more protections and a lot more communication from city council so that they are protected if they are going to be displaced. Housing for low income families was also a big one. Lots of housing points were brought up at our table, infrastructure improvements and funding, and more community programs. And one thing that I brought up at my table in conjunction with more infrastructure is thinking about having public health initiatives that are not just around police, actually having public health initiatives that help us like build community mental health services, having more of those things that are actually supporting our community instead of just police infrastructure. Yeah. Hello. That's our table over there. I can't see it. Okay. So, file strengths. And these are not in priority order. This is just, you know, how they came out. Community engagement, deep connections between the community. Okay. And the working class leadership is a strength. Talk programs for all. Location, location, locations. City services, cooling landing the library at the police department, the diversity, and then city staff as a whole. That's a strength. Challenges, senior services and programs. community education and self-help programming, housing for all, gentrification and displacement, the pedestrian safety improvements and code enforcement, economic development and opportunities, legacy, I'm sorry, I ran that. Yeah, leakage and lack of services, and then external law enforcement. So I just want to add to the external law enforcement, we were good with our own PD, but we're concerned about how external jurisdictions are interacting with our residents here in East Palata. Okay priorities and not a specific order because we didn't decide it thanks. Affordable housing and home ownership opportunities, emergency planning and management feel like it's very important because we're on the bailouts there's been some work done with the joint powers authority about making the creek safer, but there's concerns that we have about, you know, making sure that we can take care of ourselves and the event of another emergency. Services for seniors and home repairs for them. A lot of our seniors are aging in place, so we want to make sure their home is a comfortable space for them. Youth leadership and civic engagement, there's a history here of the leadership training academy we'd like to look at creating something like that so those of you that grow up here in community can sit behind that dius and continue to take care of our community. Traffic and pedestrian safety and partnerships across the board with CBOs, faith organizations, which we have numerous here in East Palo Alto and nonprofits in the school district. We have a great asset here. How can we coordinate to make the most of it for our residents? Thank you. Next through. So, let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Let's go. Next through. Got to come up. We did this a little bit different. So bear with us. Actually, we can't. Yep. There you go. Can you? No, I can't see it. Uh-huh. So step back. Step back here. So you can see it. There you go. Thank you. So the way that we structured this was we started with our priorities and we built off of the priorities into what the strength and challenges were. So our priorities are infrastructure, housing, government, community, facilities and location. So we're going to start from priorities to challenges and building off of our priorities, our first challenge, well this is sort of in, it's not not in a particular order But our first challenge is water improving our water in the city improving our streets having more of a diverse housing Opportunities and affordable housing units for different residents another challenge is displacement The Palo Alto airport and the pollution that it produces, street parking and the electrical wires. For our strengths, we have, you want to say our location? Location? Location? Location? 45 years in a real estate. You want to use my words? Why do you move it? Come to my scale. Oh, you can say it again. OK. Location, location, location. I noticed 30 years ago, we're in the heart of the peninsula. And I saw them eating around us. And they devoid coming in with living with us. And when they decided that it was more beneficial to them, then they start attacking East Palo Alto and underpricing. On 101 divides the affordability of it. There's a lot, $9 million in Palo Alto, cross over to Bridge. Some people can't even sell theirs for $600,000. On Sharifah? You got a lot over there. Okay. Keep going. And then our another we were tied between location and community as a strength. We have strong rent control ordinances, diversity and city community meetings. Thank you so much. That's two more groups. So we'll go this through first and then we'll have this group go to close us out. I don't want to break this. Can everybody hear me? Okay. We don't have a name, but where are the youth group? Because we're like the youth in the corner. Oh, Miss Donna, she's the youth too. I'm not saying, you know, I'm going to start with our strengths. So we have political engagement for our strengths, diversity, strong community, social housing policies and transportation. Good. We're doing the challenges. Very good. Oh, our challenges were housing of different kinds. Climate change, you develop me and senior support. Ms. Donna asked about, what is it in house services for our seniors, infrastructure, job training, and economic development. So for the last section here on priorities, one of the main ones that was automatically mentioned was housing and actually going back and thinking to the group that I believe Alexia was in specifically highlighting like tenant protections. The second one that came up was also jobs and workforce. We think that it's just a priority for our community. And then also we wanted to talk about fundraising or funding for programs. And this is different programs based on like immigration, youth seniors and infrastructure. You want to read the last three. The last three is also environmental justice issues. We want to prioritize since we do have a lot of environmental justice. We're frontline communities, especially. And the last we have, well, we just put transportation here because we do need to prioritize that and also more development for housing and business and more funding for a city of minute amenities and city structural deficit basically fixing it but yeah. Thank you. So we'll have the last group come up, but I also wanted to read some other feedback from the Zoom comments section. So in addition to what was included on that poster, this person wants to facilitate and support development of buildings and businesses for housing, raise revenues to replace old infrastructure. More development will provide more amenities and support for the city and residents and eliminate roadblocks for developers so they can pull out projects. Yeah, so more around building more things and housing that's both affordable and market rate was what this person shared. Okay, and go ahead. Thank you. Last group. So we mentioned, I think everybody mentioned it location was one of our main strengths. We also have a good community, a good diverse community of different types of people from all walks of life. The third one would be culture. We have also diverse culture and very deprooted culture. A lot of civic engagement, as you can see, there's a lot of folks here on a Saturday morning, so and there's a lot of more folks that want to be civically engaged as well. There's also a strong spirit of entrepreneurship, a lot of small business owners, a lot of working people that want to make it, yeah, in life and I think in general just a spirit of entrepreneurship, and a Strong faith communities. There's lots of church. I think faith is a really big part of East Palo Alto Some challenges we mentioned safety is a big challenge. I think just in general And then with that there's a parking as well as a big challenge. I think, you know, we've been, it's been pretty obvious. Third one is infrastructure, infrastructure needs. Fourth one, cost of living, it's very expensive to live here. Fifth is maintenance, I think in general, like maintenance of the park, the streets is a big challenge. And sixth is amenities. So like having entertainment, having stores that we can, you know, shop at and do groceries shopping. I think those are the main six. And in terms of priorities, we thought that reputation, our reputation, which should be a priority. I think East Palo Alto for a long time has had a reputation that we may not want to have. And I think a rebranding is probably in order. The second one is spacious to socialize, like Parks, Restaurants, Civic Center. And then also youth development. I think we don't want to leave the youth behind. And I think there's a lot of great work being done there. But I think that's a priority. Housing affordability. I think that's a big issue that we want to tackle. Economic development, slash job opportunities. A lot of opportunities for employment in the Silicon Valley, and I think East Palo Alto needs to be a part of that. And last but not least, basic needs, I think, under the kind of mentioning retail and places to shop at again, I think those are generally it, but yeah, thank you. I just have a quick comment. It occurred to me that we need to nominate and other people need to nominate too, which one is the most creative, most interesting, most useful, most relevant. And so far, the one I came up with is this group over here who said piping infrastructure. So the rest of you guys can step up to the challenge. All right, thank you so much. Well, we got some really great feedback. We had some really creative ideas. So thank you all so much for showing up today and sharing your ideas in the Saturday. It really means a lot. We have a couple next steps because you know, frankly, we had a couple hours' day, we could have more time to talk and we want to talk more about these issues. Is there a slide for the next? Okay. So in terms of next steps, we're going to record all your feedback, all the post-its, all the posters. City Council in this room are looking at your feedback and taking it into consideration as they put forth their thoughts and recommendations as well. And then we're going to go through a process to talk to the public about what are people's priorities based on the list of priorities that we come up with through this process, okay? So look out for a community survey where you can weigh in with your friends and family about what you think East Palazas top priorities should be. Yeah, so we're on the green one where you can fill out the survey. The the teal one of the blue one is again based on people's feedback out the survey. The teal one or the blue one is again, based on people's feedback from the survey, we're gonna put all that together and put forth a draft of priorities and projects that the City Council and the public can give their feedback on April 22nd, so mark them your calendars. I believe April 22nd is a Tuesday and it's gonna happen in the evening, so after nine to five business hours. We're then going to prepare a draft, strategic priorities and work plan based on people's feedback from April 22nds and then do some more engagement with the community before we come back with the final draft plan in June. So again, many different ways to give your feedback and thoughts. This is just the first part. And we just want to appreciate again everyone for coming out today and showing up, providing all these amazing ideas. So thank you. Oh, and before we you can see it. I'm not sure if you can see it. I'm not sure if you can see it. I'm not sure if you can see it. I'm not sure if you can see it. I'm not sure if you can see it. I'm not sure if you can see it. I'm not sure if you can see it. I'm not sure if you can see it. who only speak those languages so to get their voices as well I think it's important to have it in that language as well. Thank you for sharing that yeah I think we've heard that like in addition to Spanish, just Tongan and Simone and other languages that could be interpreted or translated into. Okay. Other thoughts before we close? One more, okay. So did include budget review as a question. I think actually we need to turn that one over to staff about whether the, the can't even see the screen here, the April 22nd, whether that's going to include a budget conversation. Also, I think that's going to be separate, correct? This, this process is wrapped into the budget process. So once we get projects,'ll have to have appropriate funding for those projects Actually right after this conversation we'll get a financial overview and kind of this the city's financial position in our ability to do different things are One of the things we want to consistently communicate throughout this process So good question about the finances again And we're going to do like a little budget report back in the afternoon or actually very soon so you can learn to do that. So we're going to be able to be able to do that. So we're going to be able to be able to do that. So we're going to be able to be able to do that. So we're going to be able to be able to do that. So we're going to be able to be able to do that. So we're going to be able to do that. So we're going to be able to do that. So please stay with us. Yep. So what we're going to do now is we're going to take about a five minute break. We're going to then have the council members come up. We're going to have a couple of presentations and then we're going to have a lunch break and then have discussion in the afternoon. So in the next couple minutes, if you'd like to stay, we would encourage you to do so. Again, this is, we're shifting to the council, presenting and conversation at this point, but again, the community's welcome to stay. If you don't wanna stay, ask you to kind of quietly, you know, step out in five minutes so we can continue the meeting today. Okay? And thank you very much. This was a great, great feedback. So we really appreciate it. Okay. Thank you. Five minute break. Five minute break. you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. strength to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. individually and please no interrupting, seek consensus, provide focused comments, and then stay within time limits. And this is actually an important one here because we're going to have time for each council member to speak. We'd like you to stay within those time limits. We have a lot that we need to get through. And so we wanna make sure that we are all respecting those time limits. Before we move on, are there any questions about the group agreements? Madam Mayor, is this work for you? This seems like a classroom and I love it. We'll do quiet coyote too. Yes. I think group agreements are well because I think it gives everyone a voice and it shows that we're being equitable as well. So thank you. Thank you. Okay. So we're going to now shift now and have two presentations. The first one is the progress on the previous strategic priorities and I believe Orley is going to give that presentation. Do you want to come over to here? I have it on the screen. I just need you to turn it over. Okay. Turn it over to Wichita. I, it's in a request to stop sharing. Yep. Oh, that one. All right. Thank you. One more time. All right. Good morning, everyone. My name is Orley Amy. I'm an assistant to the city manager. I'm here this morning to provide an update on our fiscal year 2023 through 2025 strategic priorities. So to refresh anyone's memory, as part of the 2023 to 2025 strategic priorities, we had seven of them. One is promote housing, economic and workforce, work for development, implement the comprehensive transportation and mobility plan, promote health and public safety, ensure our financial and organizational health, improve the city's water infrastructure, develop and implement a comprehensive facilities master plan, and enhance community services and parks for residents. So over the past two years, the city has undertaken an ambitious set of projects to advance these priorities. So across this two year work plan, we committed to a total of 94 projects that were aimed at strengthening housing, mobility, public safety, fiscal health, infrastructure and community services. So today we've successfully completed 21 projects and 57 are still in progress in the pipeline. And we wanted to clarify that many of these are multi-year efforts that require continued attention and funding. So additionally, eight projects are operational, meaning that they're now part of our ongoing city functions and eight other projects are currently on hold due to factors such as funding gaps, external coordination or shifts in priority. So some context for the 2023 through 2025 priorities progress in assessing the progress that we've made over the last two years. We want to recognize that many of these projects were never intended to be short-term efforts. So while we've completed 21 projects, a significant portion of our work, particularly work in infrastructure, housing and public safety, as I mentioned before, we're designed as multi-year initiatives that require face implementation, external coordination, and long-term funding strategies, which require coordination. So strategic prioritization has been a key factor in making sure that the most impactful projects continue to move forward, even as we're navigating challenges such as funding constraints, especially at the federal level, regulatory processes, and the evolving and continually changing needs of the community. Some of the projects that are still in progress, such as flood protection measures and transportation upgrades and affordable housing initiatives, are foundational efforts that will shape the city's future will be on the current two-year work plan. So with that in mind, our conversation today isn't just about looking back at what's been completed, but it will also guide us as staff to inform us how we should be approaching the next phase of this work. Some of these projects are going to require additional focus and resources to bring them to completion and others may just need to be re-evaluated based on shifting priorities that you all will decide. So this will be an opportunity to reflect on how we keep up this momentum and make sure that efforts continue to be aligned with the city's long-term vision and our capacity financially and capacity of stuff to complete the work. So for some major accomplishments of the 2023 to 2025 strategic priorities, we adopted the Ravenswood Business District specific plan. We have recently kicked off the economic development strategy planning. In progress our design updates and improvements to University Avenue safety. Sanitary District has been transitioned to City oversight. The city has completed its affordable housing strategy. We have implemented a new enterprise system to help us with our financial management and that's currently being implemented now. We adopted a new, in fact, impact fee program. We constructed restrooms at the Joel Davis Park and we also have been exploring increasing our federal appropriations and requesting more money from the federal government. And so we have a couple of federal earmarks and progress as listed on the screen for a couple of million dollars. So staff for the interest of time, like, should I go through all of these deliverables or is it not enough to kind of glance through them? Okay. So we have for under our first pillar of promoting housing, economic and workforce development, we have five deliverables completed and 10 in progress for implementing the comprehensive transportation and mobility plan. We have five completed and 13 in progress. For promoting health and public safety, we have three completed and 12 in progress. Ensuring our financial and organizational health, six completed and six items still in progress. Improving the city's water infrastructure, six in progress. And as I mentioned, many of these are multi-year initiatives, which is why they're still in the works. Developing and implementing a comprehensive facilities plan, we have one completed and five in progress. And enhancing community services and parks or residents, we have one completed and five in progress. So for our next steps and continued momentum on this plan, as we look ahead, we want to continue to recognize that we have indeed made significant progress on this current plan, but we really do need to be intentional about where we're focusing our efforts next. So that will involve managing expectations and aligning our priorities and making sure that we have the capacity to deliver results. Those will all be key to keeping up this momentum. A couple of things to keep in mind moving forward. Here at the city, we will need to balance ambition with capacity. So as you see with the current plan, the city has taken on a large amount of work. And while we've accomplished a lot, we also need to be realistic about how much we can take on at once. Some of our biggest projects are multi-year efforts as you all have seen. So infrastructure, housing and public safety improvements, all of these things don't happen overnight. And while we are making progress toward these, some of these are going to take time to fully implement. Funding will continue to be a challenge. So while we've secured critical funding for key projects, there are still gaps, especially for larger efforts like the library and long-term infrastructure upgrades. And we'll continue to need to be flexible because circumstances change. Unexpected challenges and funding opportunities and community needs that are continually evolving will require us to make adjustments to our approach. On maintaining momentum on in-progress projects, we still have 57 projects so underway, so we'll have to find balance with ensuring that the key milestones of the current projects are met and balancing that with the addition of significant new initiatives as part of this new priority setting process. So to kind of bring this all to a end, we have accomplished a lot as a city and the role of staff today is just here to support the council in refining the city's priorities. So we hope that today's discussion will be an opportunity to consider a few things. One, which projects should remain the top priorities for completion? Are there any efforts that need to be adjusted, accelerated, or deprioritized based on staff's capacity and financial resources? And how do we ensure that our strategic planning remains in line with the city's long-term vision while being realistic about what can be achieved in this current planning cycle. So by working together and setting some clear expectations, we can continue to deliver meaningful progress for the residents of East Palo Alto and making sure that our efforts here at the city are focused and effective. And of course, none of this happens without the right financial resources in place. So to help frame our discussion, our finance director will now provide an overview of the city's financial outlook in our budget capacity so we can consider what's possible. Thank you. Thank you, Orley. We're going to move on. Orley, do you think we could have the progress, the completed and in progress items, print those out at lunch and hand those out. Yes. Okay, that'd be great. Thank you, thank you, Oli. My name is Tomo, finance director, good afternoon, everyone. You know, everybody have a really great aspiration and, you know, I don't want to break good energy here, but I want everyone to come back to the reality a little bit to, you know, talk about the money. So I wanted to talk about two things today. One is the fiscal caution and the Neifle Status Code Budget, and the other one is the reserve information. So, starting from the fiscal caution, I'm not just intentionally, you know, listing out the negative side of that, you know, next year, fiscal outlook. But to be honest, I cannot find anything positive, really good at it to the next year's fiscal outlook. So starting from the blip point, the first one, slow property tax growth. Looking at the past 10 years, the assessed value of the tax in Ispalato was growing very fast. In average, we are enjoying about 8% increase, but this year it slowed down to about 3.8%. And for the next year we are focusing a little bit below 3% or 3%. And looking at the cities finance, this is some community members you're not familiar but if you look at the general fund revenue source, property tax is about half of it. So the slowdown in the assessed value of the property tax is such a big deal for us. And the next one, 2.5 million dollars, shall fall in property tax in the real VLF. It's a property tax in the real VLF is a component of the tax revenue and then we are experiencing about 2.5 million dollars short for this year and next year, similar amount is projected. And, you know, sales tax revenue, we are, you know, projecting about $740,000 less revenue. This is more like a statewide trend plus target this leaving. So there are a lot of negative aspects we are projecting for the sales tax revenue. And low sort of 1.5 million dollars measure L, you know, measure JJ was passed in the last election. So we are shifting this revenue to the housing purposes. So we are losing 1.5 million dollars revenue in the general fund for that revenue. And the investment income, eventually decline because in the cities portfolio is very sensitive to the federal territory rates. It's been, you know, hiking, but now the feds is cutting the interest rate. So we're not going to have as much invested income next year. And business concentration risk. We have one hotel. We have the hotel tax revenue from one source. And if you look at the sales tax, we have two big retailers generating significant amount of the cell sucks for every year. So if one of them leaves like Target did, we are screwed basically. So that is important and you know, expenditures are escalating. You know, basically the expenditures are not waiting for the revenue growth. They are rising like inflation, coastal living. So these are all negative things, but you know, like I said, I cannot find anything positive for that next year's fiscal outlook. So this is the agenda of fund revenue projection. This is more for the council or the community member who are up to date in this information. So like I said, property tax revenue, sorry, so this table compared the 2526 general fund projection to last year's, I mean, sorry, two years ago, the audit financial statement, 2324. I don't want to go through everything, but the takeaway here is we are losing about 1.2 million dollars at properties. financial statement, 2324. I don't want to go through everything but the take RA here is we are losing about 1.2 million dollars at property tax revenue and then 1.5 million dollars measure L and the total we are we are short for 1.5 million dollars compared with the last audited financial statements. So that's a bad news, but we have, we have a lot of money. So this shows, this table shows, didn't fund reserve projection as of June 30, 2025. The first one we have covers for funding at 3.3 million dollars. This is communicated by the Council Action and this can be used to reduce the unfunded pension liability and information information technology, we have $3.7 million reserved and vehicle equipment, we have about $993,000. And lastly, an assigned reserve. This is after putting aside a contingency reserve, we have about 32.5 million dollars. This unassigned form balance is something that the council can use at their discretion. So we have other reserve, but these reserves are restricted for certain purposes. So you can see the program column, you know, what the restrictions are. So we have quite some money in the housing programs. We have 5.3 million dollars for housing in lieu, 2.3, housing TOT, and measure a change about 7.2 million dollars. And community TOT, we have 894,000 dollars. This is a 10% TOT goes to community such as used from these and senior services. And gas tax, this is restrictive for transportation and infrastructure program, but we have 3.6 million dollars, major A. It's a self-tax revenue coming from the county. We have 3.6 million dollars, major W 1.4 million dollars, lighting fund $6.1 million, and lastly, CIP, we have $12.8 million dollars reserve. Thank you. If you have any questions, I'd like to take any questions. But for the time being, maybe we should go on. Yeah, let me just sort of take up a, orally, thank you for the presentation of the summary of the strategic priorities and work plan. For this, Tomo, you went into a lot of detail and it was really helpful, but I want to see if there's sort of at the high level from someone who doesn't understand it. So is the takeaway that the city is getting less annual revenue coming in in taxes? So there's less money. Yet there is a fund of $32 million that you can spend, but that fund isn't being replenished. It is a reserve and once it's gone, it's gone. Is that correct? That's correct. Thank you for summarizing. That's exactly what I wanted to convey the message. Okay, great. And then the last one which was the last slide you showed are those funds, because there was a lot of money in there for lighting and sidewalks. Are those funds already allocated to projects or can they be allocated to projects? Yeah, thank you for the question. Yes, I subtracted the committed money and earmarked money, meaning like already budgeted items. So that's not that's available for this conversation. You know, so they are. So that list on the previous slide, if we could go up to it, is available for consideration. This list here is available for projects that slot within what they're allowed to be spent on. That's correct. Thank you. And that's in addition to the 32 million. Yes. Okay. Okay. Let's, so we are, we are, we are having a few minutes behind, but let's take a couple of questions. This is a question observation. I do want to point out that measure L, now measure JJ, measure L past by 70%. Measure JJ passed by 79.7%. I believe measure JJ provides the city 20% of its funds for administrative costs. So it's not a 1.5 million dollar hit It's not even a hit. It's 1.3 but remember both initiatives went to the city and the citizens as housing related initiatives, so I just want to make sure that folks know that the community twice voted to support that initiative. So, and by the way, it's been passed by the citizens, so it has to get changed. If you wanted to change it, you have to go back to the citizens, but it's very, I just want to make sure that there's a $200,000 discrepancy there because of 1.5 million that might, that will come into the, that has been coming in, to the general fund. $200,000 at a minimum has to go to the city to pay or, but shouldn in to the, to the general fund, to $200,000 that at a minimum has to go to the city to pay or but shouldn't say minimum. So shall go to the city to pay for administrative fees around housing. Okay, great. Mr. Vica. Just to clarify the, yeah, thanks, thanks for giving the kind of overall picture. So we have the unassigned reserves and that was 32. That doesn't include the reserves that we have for emergencies. That's it, because we have, we have a, as you might clarify, we have a certain percentage because the City Council designated a certain percent in case, you know, everything were to go bad that the city could function for a year or whatever, right? So I just want could you clarify where that is because I don't think it's part of the 32 research and it's important to understand that the city does have an emergency reserve and then in addition it has these reserves that potentially the council could assign for one thing or another. Could you just briefly summarize those numbers? Yes, thank you for the question. So yes, this $32.5 million doesn't include the contingency reserve, which is 30% of the general fund expenditure budget. So it's about a million is not included in this 32 million dollars. So yeah, so on top of this 32.5 million dollars, we have a million dollars, about a million dollars, set aside for the emergency. I think it'd be good to show that just because you know, when you get into finances, you have to repeat some things show them in different ways so that so the community understands there is an existing contingency, you know, emergency, and then on top of that there are some research which is a good news like you said, it is some good news for that. Yeah, thank you. It's correct and we can we can update the chart with that information and send that out. Other questions from the council. Yeah, it would be good to At least for the community sector for them to know what sort of restrictions apply to all the different funds You know, we have six million or so in lighting And what can that be used for you know, and all the other funds as well So if you could present that so that when we're discussing these priorities and funding, what these funds can be particularly useful if they're restricted. Yeah, and I think we'll be doing that moving forward once we get into the list of projects. We'll start lining those up. Vice mayor. Yeah, if you go to the previous slide. So to be clear of spoken with Tomo about this, the information technology money, 3.7 million is not, there's no plan to spend it. It was just set aside for information technology. That's essentially just general fund money that doesn't have any plan for spending and that has been set aside by the community. So we could effectively have 3.7 million on top of the 32 million. And strip it from somebody put it into a fund that said information technology, but there's no plan to spend it. There's no details on how we're going to spend it. It's just put it into a fund and they called it information technology. And from that actually from staff. Yes. This is the plan that we're putting together. There are very dire IT needs, and I don't want to, you're right, that it does not have to stay in that fund, but the city does have very, very serious IT needs that we're putting together plans for. Yeah, I mean, you can make the same argument in that way that we have needs for city hall. We have needs for a library. We have a ton of needs around the city. But my point is that when you're talking about information technology, I think anybody who's reading this would say that we have to spend that money on information technology, but you could come back and say, look, we want to buy a new laptop for everybody in the city. It's about 120 laptops. That's maybe $120,000. We want to buy some new software, SaaS, and it's going to be $10,000 a month. That's not going to come anywhere near $3.7 million. And obviously we have all the police stuff and we have all the different technology. But I think that's probably high for what we're actually going to be spending on it. And that there is no, it's very possible that our IT needs are going to be like 2 million. We're going to have 1.7 of that leftover. But until we have an actual idea of what we're spending it on, I don't think it's fair to just put it in there and say, yeah, 3.7 because we haven't voted anything. You don't have a plan to spend it. And until that point, it's basically, from where I'm standing, we have actually 3.7 million more in the unassigned- Nice to meet you. Sorry, could I interrupt for a second? You know, I wanna make sure that we're staying, we're not getting too deep in the weeds here. And we have big priorities. That was my point. I think you're right on the point, but let's keep it in mind in that there's some flexibility in a lot of these numbers with where they move. And there's some things that we saw on the slide after this with all of the funding that we could have signed. Yeah, it's an important point because that means we have 10% more than in our funds. I understand it, but we're not at that. we're going to get to that point. We're not in Europe and we have 1% more. Let's correct it. Yeah, the budget. I'm going to pull us back at a higher level here because we want to figure out priorities. And once we figure out priorities, this is the first step and then we start assigning budget to those priorities. So are there other questions about the existing strategic plan or the budget before we take a break and have lunch and then come back. Okay, so why don't we take about a 30 minute break? And this is for the community as well. It's lunch on your own. We are going to come back and then the afternoon is going to be much presentation at first, but then it's going to be more free flowing conversation. Now for the council members, you have a homework assignment during lunch. Sorry. It's not hard. You probably thought about it already. But what we would like you to think about, because we're going to get into this in the afternoon is think about three to five priorities that you think are priorities. And these are not necessarily specific projects, these are sort of higher level, like more affordable housing or improve infrastructure. So what are your top three to five priorities? And then what are projects, specific projects that support each of those priorities. So, and what we're going to do is we're going to have each council member present your ideas in five minutes, five minutes each, not five minutes total, that would be impossible. So, we're going to do that after we come back from lunch. So, we'd like you to sort of think about that now, so you're prepared to come up with some ideas. Okay, and you happy to come and talk to me during lunch if you have questions about that. Okay, great. Thank you. So we'll come back at just about, come back just before 1 o'clock, please. The patient showed this is sort of the strategic priorities are the tip of the iceberg. And there's 80% of what the city does that is that is happening all the time, which actually does support a whole wide range of city priorities. So the components of the proposed strategic strategic priorities and work plan are the following. One is a very brief one-to-two sentence vision statement, which we will discuss later today, assuming we have time. The second are a list of strategic priorities or goals that will focus and guide the city's direction for the next several years. The idea is to be more focused than the last strategic plan and to have up to five strategic priorities. The next is projects. And projects are things at tangible activities or processes that are carried out to achieve these the desired outcomes for each strategic priority area. So the goal is to have up to five, a maximum of five projects for each strategic priority. And then lastly, metrics to track progress and achievements of each strategic priority over time. Now I want to point out, I think that one thing that we should try to do with the strategic priorities is to balance out and make sure that the strategic priorities are at sort of the higher level and directional, can be topic but also be directional. And then that the projects are actually projects and your current strategic plan now has a lot of great information, but I think it probably has a couple of things that could be improved on. One is that some of the categories are overly broad and take multiple topics, and other strategic priorities are actually specific projects. So we sort of want to clean that up and actually having close to 100 projects for a two-year work plan for staff is a lot. And so we want able to focus that a little bit. Let me give an example. This is really just an example that's made up. An example, a priority could be a high-performing city government would have a phrase, and then a sentence, ensure that the city maintains a strong financial health, financial position financial health, financial position, and high performing organization that is efficient and responsive to community needs. Just an example. And then there could be example projects, an IT master plan, a new city hall. So these are things that could be example priority projects under the strategic priority. So this is where overall, not necessarily today of where we're trying to get to. So with that, I want to see if there's any questions or comments about the direction. And then I want to reiterate that what we are doing today is more in the realm of brainstorming and not in the making the final decision. So we're collecting ideas. We are going to come back. We're gonna go to the public with strategic priorities after this. Come back on April 22nd with the feedback from the public and then work on projects and come back in June with the draft work plan. So we have a couple of steps. Okay, questions. Yeah, just so currently over the last few years, I think these broad categories have been more of a, I've seen it as a framework. They're not like we're going to accomplish everything there. It was like a framework to organize goals and projects and processes and all of that. So are you suggesting like you said, right now there's too many, there's seven that had been identified. Are you saying like you want to have five or maybe combine them? You know, the reason I'm saying that is that, yeah, for brainstorming today, there's a lot of stuff that could be brainstormed and I almost feel like those broad categories from me, they're still okay, it all depends what else comes out. In fact, one of those strategic areas, I just call it more areas, really, because like a framework, the one that had promote health, public safety, it used to have an emergency preparedness. And somewhere along the line it got dropped, and I'm not sure why I don't remember. Because I know that's been a concern that's come out a lot. And so in some ways, it's like, anyway, so I'm just saying that that that, and you know, I try to do my homework, but that was big. Yeah. Eating and no, no, it's fine. So I, I mean, I'm prepared to do say some things, but as long as we're not trying to like change everything, no, we're not trying to change everything. No, we're not trying to change everything and you're right. And so we want the kind of the strategic priorities to be, they can be broad, but we want them to be, to try and get them to be directional. So we are going to have these broad buckets and given that there's five, they're probably a little bit broader, potentially broader and not as specific. But, you know, like the example that we gave, a high performing city government. That can be a bucket, and there's lots of things, lots of priorities that can go under that. But it's directional, right? So that's where we're trying to get to. And again, we're not getting there today, which is the important point. But we want to make sure we're getting the right, because we're the bright ideas in direction today. Other questions? Concerns, thoughts? Okay. Let's keep moving forward. All right, we're gonna go over quickly the community engagement and environmental scan that we did. I'm to spend probably less time on this than maybe we would have, because I think we got a huge amount of really good feedback that actually tracks pretty closely with what we heard previously. So start in there and I'm going to be working from two screens because I have notes on differences from what we heard. So you'll have to apologies, but you'll have to bear with me. So we did one of the tasks that we had was to look through city plans and documents, which is called an environmental scan in the in the lingo of strategic planning. And we pulled out six themes from this affordable housing. Actually, all housing, but really focus a lot on affordable housing, workforce and economic development, parks, open space and public facilities, public utilities and infrastructure, transportation and mobility, and then climate action and resilience. And there are plans for a lot of these topics. There's the Parks and Rec and Open Space Master Plan. There's an economic development strategy that's currently being developed. There's mobility plans. So we pulled a lot out of here. And this provides again a broad framework, I think, because Council Member Abrica was sort of talking about as sort of some of these broad categories. We also held a meeting with staff where we did essentially the same exercise that the community did this morning with the same categories, the same sticky note exercise. And there were strengths issues and priorities. And I'm just gonna kind of highlight on some of the priorities here that staff had, which was one, staffing and internal procedures, sort of improving streamlining, expanding staffing. Two, is improving city infrastructure and facilities, the recognition that there are real needs and those needs come with a very high price tag. We're doing infrastructure in the city of City Hall, a new library. The next is improving, expanding the range of city services provided in order to improve the quality of life for residents. The fourth was a broad category of housing and the need for diversity of housing in the city. The fifth is economic development and the recognition that a lot of the, especially the first three bullets of staffing, infrastructure facilities and city services are all dependent on revenue coming in as Tomo presented this morning and that the city needs economic development to increase ongoing revenues for the city to be able to improve services, build new infrastructure, and have a staffing level that the community desires. And then the last is workforce development, which is, you know, the stronger ties between moving residents from the city into jobs and jobs within the city and within the region. We also had a variety of meetings with community organizations and focus groups with residents and some of the businesses in the community. community and we asked some of the same questions that we asked we had exactly exactly the same questions of what people liked, what were the strengths, what were the weaknesses, and then what were priorities. And so I'm just gonna go through a couple of these, I think the strengths were actually pretty similar from this morning to what we had heard previously. Diversity comes up as really one of the, really the biggest ones, the regional location, the access to open space, the improvements in public safety. One thing that came up, I think a little bit clearer this morning was access to city staff and accessible staff. For the issues similar to what we saw this morning. There were more issues listed than strengths in the city sometimes, which is very common when you ask this question. But again, very similar for what some of the outcomes and some of the results were. There's probably more of an emphasis, a little bit more of an emphasis, or more clearly stated on housing and tenant protections today. And again, housing is the diversity of housing. More emphasis on pedestrian and bike infrastructure, public safety and safety in parks. And then some maybe new topics came up or came up in a slightly different way today for the issues and needs. Maintenance of infrastructure and public buildings, lack of code enforcement, workforce development, the lack of a downtown and places to shop, lack of spaces and programs for youth seniors and others with special needs, climate change and adaptation, and then regional relationships and improving regional relationships. Again, a variety of these really did come up as well, but maybe came up a little bit clearer today than we had heard previously. And then we have the summary of priorities from the public feedback. And so we spend a little bit more time on these next two slides, because this is really that overview and the summary of when you kind of pull it all together and you ask what the priorities are. And so I'm going to start with housing. Housing came up a lot and it came up in every single group and it's, we all know it's a critical issue for the city. And there were differences of opinion on housing. I think everyone wants housing and wants a balance of housing. I think that there's differences about where that balance lies. And so there's indeed for deeply affordable housing units. There's indeed for market rate housing units as a need for middle income housing units. And what's not up here is sort of the balance between rental housing as well as for sale housing to build wealth and equity. There's a desire for stronger tenant protections. The city already has very strong tenant protections compared to many other jurisdictions, but that doesn't mean that there's not more that can happen. And then there's a need to support the unhoused individuals, services, transitional housing, and the like. And again, that was pretty similar to what we heard today. I think today there was maybe a little bit more emphasis on protection against displacement. The next category that we have here is economic and workforce development. Topics that came up were economic development by creating supportive conditions to attract new businesses and jobs, supporting small and local business development. And then there were multiple conversations about vendors and the street vendors and how to address that. There were also other topics that came up today about a more and a greater diversity of retail. So small businesses as well as big, big box. And then of course the jobs and workforce development. For infrastructure and public services, a lot of the topics that came up in the meetings that we had previously were infrastructure, which came up quite a bit of the need to upgrade the city's infrastructure, water, stormwater, and wastewater water. The need for more community spaces and new community spaces, library city hall spaces for youth and seniors. Youth did come up quite a bit and that was really echoed today. Family centered programming and activities, parks, improving the quality of the existing parks and improving safety in parks. It's definitely a concern about safety in parks. Code enforcement came up quite a bit and maybe this isn't the right category for it, but I guess it is a public service. So a desire to really enforce the city's laws and create and really enforce what's on the books. And a lot of topics came up with this. Parking came up a lot and parking enforcement and neighborhood parking, as well as building code enforcement. But again, parking and enforcing the laws to change behavior came up multiple times. Sustainability, climate preparedness, came up, greening, sustainability hubs, emergency response, and adaptation, and even emergency preparedness, policing and safety. Again, it's a recognition that the city has made great strides, but there's a need to continue going in the direction that the city has been going. For transportation and parking, the next category, traffic congestion, especially along University Avenue, Pogas and Bay Road, accessible public transit, public safety and pedestrian safety came up a lot in terms of safe routes to schools, road improvements, sidewalk improvements and really quality of life in neighborhoods, and then parking which I already mentioned. The last category is the the high performing city government. There is a desire for greater staff retention and improved, kind of generally improved performance. There's also a recognition that staff is taking on a lot, and they're taking on a lot of projects with the limited staff. A desire for enhanced community relations, and this is sort of a broad category, expanding partnerships with nonprofit organizations. This was also one of the strengths that the city did have relationships, but there's a dire to expand with local businesses and developers, and then actually to be able to communicate what the city is doing to the community. Expanding public meeting access and events, translation, interpretation, improved transparency and efficiency in decision making, and then having diversified city revenues, new funding sources, investments, and external partnerships, and this being one of the more important ones in there. And again, a lot of these really came up again and they they came up today. A few other changes or a few other additions were environmental justice and remedied brownfield remediation. Not just social services but also really human services and health related services, mental health, youth leadership programs came up today that we hadn't heard as much and then noise mitigation, particularly on Highway 101 and from the airport. Okay, I'm going to pause here because that was a lot of information. We did a lot of work in the last month in talking to folks and trying to consolidate this. I guess I'd like to sort of turn it over to council members to see if you had any just overall thoughts or reflections on the workshop this morning and the results, kind of what was your impression and then were there any key takeaways that you felt you had? If we could go around and just curious about reflections. Well, I overall agree with a lot of the things. A lot of the issues that were raised are some of the things that I want to address. You know, as a council member that I campaigned about. So, I'm definitely well aware of a lot of those, challenges that we have. Yeah, so that's only common to have. Is there anything that was, I guess, when you're thinking about this, is there anything that you heard? Well, you didn't hear and that you thought was missing or anything that was mischaracterized in your opinion. That's for everybody as well. Well, I think one of the, I think someone mentions accessibility to staff. I think that can be improved. You know, we have some departments that might have varying hours. So we should, I think, have an approach that all of our offices should be open during regular business hours throughout the week. So that step, people can come, like when it comes to code enforcement and other things that people, that those offices are accessible and people can speak to somebody in person. So I think that's one thing that may have been missed. Thank you. Mayor. Oh, yes, I think I agree as well. I, with a lot of the things that were shared today, I also have here my little, I actually went ahead and did my homework, like you said, I had a time and ripped my own little priorities and little bullets but yes but I'm just saying that some of the things that I wrote that's also what I heard so I'm glad to see that we're all kind of you know noticing the same trends and the same needs in our community and just piggyback writing as well in what our council member Lincoln said about making sure that we have our staff here present physically so that we can better service our community is something that I think is very important. I think that would make our city even run smoother. So thank you. Okay, others? Yeah, nice mayor. Yeah, first of all, let us say thank everybody who's come out today. It's a beautiful day outside. You've taken time out, you care about your city and you've shared a lot of great ideas. So thank you very much. Having just run for office and knocked on several thousand doors and talked to hundreds and hundreds of people, I heard a lot of the same themes campaigning that I heard today. And it's reflected, you know, one of the things about campaigning is you hear stuff and then you include it into your campaign. So a lot of what I heard today from the public were things I'd heard many times before. People in East Pal also tend to know what's best for their own city, and they share very good ideas. But so thank you for coming out. I appreciate it. Yeah, so this is a little reflection. And I wasn't able to stay, but I did catch most of the presentations. And so I was very impressed by, I know people didn't have a lot of time, but I think they captured a lot of the different issues that are affecting us. Some of them short term, some long term, some that are much more difficult to address, but the fact that, you know, if we put our heads together, look at the things that have worked in the past and the things that need to be done. So I'd like to add that I think there was some some common themes across the groups, but each group had its own, you know, a sort of own little perspective. So that's good. I think that'll be helpful for us as we, you know, as we go through this process the next few months. And I think this part also about the staff, obviously we do have a little bit of separation of council members not telling specific staff what to do. That's a management issue, and I'm sure the City Manager, this is strategic priority setting for the Council, but it's really for the team, for the Council and the management in a way. So I'm sure that I think that will be part of the discussion that I'm looking forward to because if management needs to do, I don't know, some restructuring or some reconfiguration, that's something that the council, in other words, that's management's responsibility. And I think that's already been some progress this past year in trying to address at least to respond. Respond to people, to groups, to neighbors, to whatever that finding more and more ways to be able to communicate with the public so that if something can be done or not done right away or etc. Whatever it is that I think that that's probably you know whether we have a little bit of money or a lot of money it doesn't matter I think that's more of a customer service or You know maybe customer service and not the right answer but it's a a way to to interact with the public that has concerns that have issues that they bring to us. And sometimes the staff can just solve it. Sometimes they need to bring it to the council. So I think that's one thing I hear that maybe, you know, we get cut up on projects, which is good. We want to do this, want to do that, want to do the other. But then you have the part of the interaction of the staff with the public and how we can improve that too. And like I said, I think that's something that's really more on the management side, but we can work together on that. So, yeah. And then, you know, I saw how you organized this categories, I guess, you were trying to, for a way, to organize what the common was. But you're not suggesting that those are the strategic priorities, right? I do not, not at this point. No, right. Okay. Yeah. Because, because I think that's the part where I was mentioning before that I feel we had some good categories and there's no need to just throw them away because we cause, you know, if they can still serve a purpose. because one thing I saw that it's sort of scattered throughout is one of the priorities we set aside some years ago was like creating, creating a healthy and safe community, for example, right? And then it evolved into whatever this now health and public safety. And so I didn't see the work health in itself come out, but I think that the city has been committed to whatever we do. In any project that it does help to build the health of the community, which is really a broad concept is not just. Help people are feeling but what can they do what can people do given what the city is doing so yeah, that Now that was one example I'm saying that, you know, the words, but I guess we'll get to that later. Yeah, we'll get to that. Actually, we're gonna shift over to that, to shift over to that pretty soon. But you know, before we move on, and the next piece is actually starting to go through what those priorities are, and the topics and the projects. So is there any other thoughts on this area? Yeah, so I often lead with this concept around community economic development when I lecture on in classes. And that is that all city government in particular community economic development involves trade-offs. Just straight up. So you prioritize one thing, and in the process of prioritizing that one thing, indeed you may not be able to do another thing. I am fairly comfortable with some of the trade-offs and some of the prioritization that we've made already in terms of promoting those essential and consequential issues for people living in these Palo Alto over the last 40 some years since our establishment. Again, I want to point out that as a conservative, Irish philosopher once said, who I don't always agree with, but all politics is about bartering compromise. But I don't barter and compromise away the issues and concerns of folks who truly need it. that in the process of my thinking about these priorities, any type of rejiggering of these priorities, and I have messed around with them and have come up with five consolidated form, to me truly has to include and take into account trade-offs that might negatively impact folks in East Palo Alto who are underserved and who have been here and have borne some of the benefits of being a city but also been buffeted by an economy that doesn't pay attention to many of our needs. So I'm just stating clearly that I think that I will be using those principles and those concepts to help guide a if we go into a reformulation of priorities. Okay, great. Thank you. Any other thoughts? Because I think what we would like to do next on the agenda is actually hearing from each of you about, again, preliminary thoughts on priorities. This is not the end. This is the starting point. And then we'll sort of pull all of those together and discuss them. So, are we ready for that? Is there are there any questions before we move into that? Okay, we're ready. You all were so talkative right before lunch, what happened? You don't quiet now. Okay, who would like to start? And I just wanna say, Tiffany who facilitated earlier and Michelle who was in the back also from my team are taking notes. I'll be taking notes as well. Then after this, just so we know for the agenda, after you each go through, we may have a little bit of conversation, see if anything's missing. But then we're going to take another short break to allow us to organize. who would like to start? Okay. So these are my desired council priorities. They're not what we're gonna specifically do or adapt yet, but here we go. So I have five. So the first one, so I don't know if you want me to just list all five and then just kind of put the little Explain the little bullet points afterwards or explain as I say. I would say explain as you go along Probably be easier for us. And then again some of the things that I put here are things that we've been hearing and You know throughout this process as well. So the first one is emergency and disaster preparedness Identify and support vulnerable residents provide generators for different sections of the city, update the city's emergency plan, implement emergency communication apps, develop a comprehensive evacuation and shelter plan, ensure access to emergency supplies, including water and food. The second one is the economic development, and perhaps go back and revisit the RBD plan, explore ways to support small, mall and pop businesses, establish business incubators, creating a shared space where local vendors can operate offering dining areas with restroom access, climate action, mitigation, adaptation and resilience, continue the collaboration work with the JPA and the REACH projects that we have, quality and of life and recreation services, conducting city, white, review of the parking regulations, adapts or sorry, developed parks recreation strategic plan including addressing improvement of park maintenance and installation of public restrooms, presence of vendors during park events, organizational, this is number five, organizational strength and adaptable governance, foster innovation, collaboration and continuous improvement in city services, recruit, develop and retain top tier staff, maintain physical, physical responsibility and effective and governmental partnerships enhance communication and engagement with cities, multilingual community and a transparent and more inclusive manner. Sorry, I was trying to go fast so other people comfort you. You did. I want to make sure that we got them all down. So it's the first one just the title again emergency and disaster preparedness. Yes. Okay, the second one is economic development. Correct. Third is climate action planning and climate resilience. Oh, get that right. Yes. Okay. The fourth is quality of life. And the fifth is organizational strengths. Did I phrase that correctly? Organizational strength and accountable governance. And accountable government. Okay. Thank you. Hey, thank you. You were well under the five minutes you were allotted. We'll come back. Okay, who would like to go next? Do you want me just to call on someone? Okay, council member Lincoln, you're looking over here. All right. So, mine's kind of fall under kind of the same categories for economic development, like supporting a lot of small businesses. That includes like subsidized space, commercial space, a lot of our local entrepreneurs, streamlined permitting process for local vendors and food trucks, business incubators for startups, technical assistance in micro and micro loan programs for small businesses. That's under economic development for housing. If kind of this kind of two categories, which is one is hum ownership and two is for rental housing. Under hum ownership that includes, you know, creating a hum ownership opportunities here in the community through down payment assistance programs and then establishing funds for seniors for human improvements. And also making sure that we have our local preferences for a lot of affordable housing that we're building, at least to have a local preference for a lot of the people who underwent like foreclosure and predatory lending. And so under rental housing, I think that we already have are making progress on a rental registration program so that we know who's kind of living in our community. And I guess we've been having difficulties getting some of that information from some of our larger landlords. So I think a rental registration program is important. That includes, or might include maybe annual health and safety inspections for a lot of those rental units. We already have a lot of tenant protections and rental stabilization measures, but that's mostly for rental housing. There's also youth development, establishing programs to get our youth more involved in maybe governance and city government in this community and making them more aware of what's going on. Also, there's quality of life issues, code enforcement. We need to make sure that our code enforcement is proactive, instead of reactive. And we need to educate our community about code enforcement, or code requirements that we need to address kind of a lot of the legal street vending. And that includes providing them also pathways to become legal and do things the right way. And not just, you know, there's a lot of health and safety issues, especially when you're handling raw foods and not having bathrooms and places to wash your hands like most establishments have. Parking enforcement, we already have a residential parking permit program. That's going to be coming up. We need to address a lot of these RVs that are in the community. We need to have a homelessness response, because we do have a lot of encampments that pop up around the community that are health and safety issues. There's been fires and all kinds of stuff that has happened because of those encampments kind of get out of control and just improving the public space. In terms of governance, a lot of people have brought up that we need thermal limits for our elected officials. We need senior services and programs, emergency planning, and in terms of, all of the terms of governance, we need to focus on staff retention because that's an issue when we have so much turnover, at least in the past, I know we're trying to make progress on that and also looking at getting our staff more available to people in person. In terms of finances, we need to explore a valid measure to address a lot of our infrastructure issues and funding for city hall, library. A lot of things that you can find in a lot of other cities and also just increasing our city revenue so that means you know supporting development that can help benefit and provide you know those essential services that we need and last but not least is a health and wellness we need to support and make sure that a lot of our recreational facilities are accessible to everyone and and not a financial burden. Support and community wellness programs, mental health services, public health initiatives, food security, and things like that. So that's all I kinda have. I know that was a lot, so. That's all? Yeah. Can you just to make sure, I want to make sure I got the categories. Correct. Can you go through what the category headers are again? So economic development housing, which includes homeownership and rental housing, youth development, addressing a lot of our quality of life issues around like parking enforcement and code enforcement and governance, you know, potential looking at tarmed limits, financial sustainability and development as well as health and wellness. I think I actually got this down. My hand hurts from writing, but I got them. Okay, let's see. This is this. I think we're starting to kind of see some similarities here and we're actually gonna have a little conversation about this after Council Member Bricka. Your next? I'll go next, there. I think in here. So I'm gonna work off of the existing seven broad categories. That works better for me. So currently the first one is to promote housing, economic and workforce development. So to me that's still good. I would I would rephrase it a little bit, you know, as a broad category. So that's, you know, promoting housing, workforce development, and community economic development. I think, anyway, to me, that's important to keep a balance of kind of big development and development that benefits the community as much as possible. So I'm just going to go over the broad categories. Then I'm going to pick one with some very specific, you were saying like some projects, which I think people are doing that too. Yes. I think the comprehensive transportation and mobility plan is still a good one. It covers a lot of things that we're already doing. And promoting health and public safety. And in it, I would put back emergency preparedness there. You know, it could be a separate one, but to me, it's still important to promote health, public safety and emergency preparedness. And then since there are seven here, I feel like, you know, just like the picture you did of the iceberg, I guess, that often gets used to remind us that, you know, 80% of the work, it's what the day-to-day operations. So that, we don't wanna forget that because this is not like everything else is gonna drop and we're only to do what we want as a council. So keep the city running every day. That's 80% and so to me like ensuring financial and organizational health in some ways is like. It's a given. We have to, we just had a presentation on the finances. I think the city historically has done a good job of not only surviving financially, which in the old days people thought we shouldn't be a city because we're not going to survive. Well, we have survived and we've actually done well in maintaining fiscal stability and having reserves. But that's kind of a given. I mean, to me, I think that's That's what the staff is always doing, and that's why we're keeping track of. To me, it doesn't have to be a separate category. Also, as we've talked about staffing and those issues, again, I think that we can give direction to staff, but that's really a management issue of how recently they've come to us they've come to us saying we're having, you know, a hard time getting certain positions. Can you give us more, you know, we want to do an incentive. Okay, fine, but we really don't get involved in that day-to-day staffing thing. So I'm just saying that to me that could drop out and that's fine. If you're looking for five, I I don't know where we're gonna end up, but then the one that says, improve the city's water infrastructure, I would add improve the city's water and street infrastructure because transportation is a big area. And we're just finishing up another pedestrian bridge across the freeway with just a great accomplishment and I think we didn't put it in our list but we should put that on the list. You know when we started out with the accomplishments I forgot if it was there or not but it said university improvements but I think the little pedestrian bridge is separate. It's all by itself, aside from what's going on, and the Caltrans is doing that. So, yeah, I think the streets and the water infrastructure are really high, and so might as well name it out, even though there might be some overlap with the big category of transportation. And then, you know, the implementing the facilities master plan. So I think that one could also be left out in terms of it is a priority, but it's really another plan like we have the parks master plan and we have the water, you know, we have all these plans and so they're day to day we're drawing on that and I know that the staff is always looking to to perhaps find ways for us to have better facilities or have a new city hall or, you know, or something that's sort of an ongoing issue that we have to address. And then the last, so that one I guess to me it could be left outside of these council priorities but it's still part of the day-to-day work. And then the last one that's in the seven ones is enhanced community services for all age groups. Because I think that's where progress has been made to address the recreational needs of all age groups, starting with the little ones, the youth, you know, adults, seniors, and to try to balance that out more. So then as far as projects, just briefly, if I took, for example, the streets, now let's say, one one, one, this is just brainstorming. So to me would be improving the road, the street infrastructure. I think Hamza gave me the word the other day when I was talking about now that every time it rains, even if it's not a lot of rain, some potholes become like these craters in certain streets, not in all streets. And to me, that one should be taken care right away because it's like a rapid response. You know, the minute these pad holes, big pad holes begin to show up, it shouldn't wait for weeks and months. It should be done as soon as feasible. So under projects would be to do these intermediate projects that, you know, we may have big plans for the future. It's going to cost millions of dollars. But we shouldn't be able, we shouldn't just say, well, we can't do anything because, you know, we're, we got a big project coming up in 10 years. Like noate projects, like doing the potholes, maybe putting some pavement in certain streets, even though I know it's not permanent, but it's that I feel like some areas need to have temporary progress while we work on the more permanent progress, and not just leave them like that. And so, you know, other things like people have mentioned the circles or those ones that go around, I forget what they're called. Round of events and council member Rickard, I'm going to speed up. Speed bumps in certain areas that, you know, we shouldn't wait until people sign petitions for certain areas. They have to need to speed bumps. And also corners, some corners for disabilities, people on disabilities. I see more and more people who are walking with a cane or walkers. And in some areas, I think, you know, doesn't have to be everywhere, but in some areas. Thank you. Great. Thank you. And we can come back to more ideas as well. We'll have more time for that. Okay. Let's see. By Smeyer Dynan, would you like to go next? I get afternoon everyone. In terms of priorities, the city has a lot. We can only get so much done. My priorities, I think the number one thing is emergency preparedness. We have a study session coming up on March 25th, I believe, and I think I encourage everybody to do a tent. If you attend this, you will realize how much work we have to do on emergency preparedness. If there is a 7.0 earthquake that hits and we don't have power or sewage or water for a couple of weeks to a couple of months, we need to be ready for that and understand where we're up against. So that's a huge priority and I echo Mayor Barragans' sentiments on that, where that's all stood her top priority. All the of life, code enforcement, parking regulations, these are all coming in front of council shortly, and I hope we can take, you know, action on this, enforcement of laws, littering garbage cleanups, beautification, traffic calming, more roundabouts and speed humps. They've been very successful and people like them. I'd like to expand their use of security cameras, whether it's in the parks or whether it's for the creek dumping or dumping hotspots. Let's make our police officers more efficient and using IT. We're all on camera anyway. So let's get to use that. Parks and Rec. We need to form a Parks and Rec department. We got rid of it a few years ago. And we need to bring it back. I'd like to see, you know, in this category, music in the parks. Get a dog park. There's one right next to MLK. It's a logical spot. Let's try it out and see if it works. We can have snack shacks or cafes and Martin Luther King Park, Kool-E landing, Jack Farrell. Lighting in the parks. We have six million dollars in our budget just for lighting. Love to get field lighting so kids can practice after four o'clock in the winter. Animal services. We already pay a lot for animal services. I think it's 550,000 a year. I'd like to see much better you know animal services from San Mateo County That's and then You know, I'd say in terms of parks and rec. I really want to focus on this about 15 years ago 16 years ago We had the Bell Street gym and the Bell Street pool and it was taken over by the YMCA and they built a beautiful Rucks Center. I went swimming there this morning This is a Rucks Center that was built on public land With private money we need to revive the private public partnership Right now it's the YMCA is only accessible for people who can either pay a lot of money like I do or For youth where I think it's 20 bucks a month and so you see a lot of people like me can either pay a lot of money, like I do, or for youth, where I think it's 20 bucks a month. And so you see a lot of people like me, and you see a lot of kids working out, but you don't see the community. It definitely, we need to step it up as a city and give funding to the YMCA and make sure that everybody has access to that. And we can talk about the numbers, but I'd like to see a substantial investment in the gym we already have. I mean, if we wanted to rebuild a rec center and staff it, it would cost, you know, $50 million. We have one here, let's fund it, let's get access for the community, let's get access for everybody and take advantage of what we already have. And my screen just died on my computer, where is it? Okay, parks and Rec. Senior Services. We need better senior services in these pall also. Again, there's some like quality of life issues. You know, as well, I think I already went over those. Give me one second. While you're doing that, was senior services a separate category at the level of parks and rec and quality of life, or was it under parks and rec? You know, and that's a good question. But I mean, I think, you know, our senior service is Mrs. Grant is great, but I think she's in our 80s. We need to have a succession plan and we need to have a plan moving forward. Infrastructure and buildings, this is a separate category. We have money. the roads. We've've got streets that are in dire condition. We need to invest in, you know, paving our streets, also safe street infrastructure for safe routes to school. That's also bicycling and walking for pedestrians everywhere. There's water and sewage infrastructure that's not as sexy or obvious to people, but we need to take care of it. And we also have under infrastructure and buildings, we have the Reach 2, which is the San Francisco Creep JPA. I think this stuff is kind of happening, whether it's a city priority or not, but we're going to need to budget for it and I strongly support it. We also have the library, city hall, and police station that we need to take care of. The other thing I'd like to say is that we should be looking to acquire Palo Alto on the ton of land in East Palo Alto and we should be doing what we can to acquire this land because there's no reason why Palo Alto should own the Bay Trail in East Palo Alto or the land of adjacent to it. There's also some parkland adjacent to the creek which we've been in discussions about right near Daphne that I'd like to see the city acquire and Develop into a park that's not expensive But it's something we need to actually take action on in terms of economic development and I'll guess I'll throw housing in there I mean I support our continued efforts on affordable housing But I think we need to make a special effort to get more market rate housing build. East Palo Alto has a $104,000 median income. We need more market rate housing and we need to make it easier for people to build housing in East Palo, so that is our property taxes. Moving on, in terms of economic development, space for small businesses, and also just the encouragement of getting businesses and business space built. You need small alto that brings in the stuff that people use every day that could be grocery stores, banks, restaurants, clubs, bars, nightclubs, movie theaters, all the services you use every day, you know, oil change place, out of body stores. And then I don't know where this would fall, but I think we should invest some of our reserves in ESL training. I think this, you know, if you look around, there is some ESL in EPA, but we can do a better job. A lot of people would benefit in terms of economic development from speaking English and writing English. And then I'd also support the city investing in small business training, things to help small businesses like restaurants do marketing, accounting, regulation, insurance, things like that. And then I'll end. And this is kind of a painful topic for me because I'm kind of contemplating limiting my own potential here. But I think we should do terminal mits. I don't think anybody in this room wants to see me on council in 25 years. And I think it makes sense to explore a reasonable terminal mits, you know, eight years and two years out and do what other cities in this area do. We have great people on our commissions who could step up and be on council. And there's no need for us to have people on council for more than eight years. You have eight years to get your stuff done. If you don't get it done move on and move out move up move over to the Ravens you know school board but kind of painful because I kind of like the idea of being in power in 25 years here but I think it's good to put limits on yourself yourself and say, I as a council member have at most eight years to get what I need done and move on from there. Thanks, everybody. Thank you very much. Okay. Council member Romero. Yeah, so this will be really fast for my priority buckets. I'm gonna leave it there. So I would have a priority that was basically focusing on city infrastructure. That's water sewer roads, the whole nine yards, within that we'll throw in the projects that we want to prioritize. Two, I would do a public civic structure, civic structures, kind of development one, which is really the facilities plan piece incorporated into that. Obviously we're talking about the potential city hall, the library that is potentially moving on and a potential police department. We'll see how that works. Number three, the other priority area would be, I would just call it promote health and public safety is a very important part of the public safety. The public safety is a very important part of the public safety. The public safety is a very important part of the public safety. The public safety is a very important part of the public safety. The public safety is a very important part of the public safety. The public safety is a very important part of the public safety. The public safety is a very mean including his wording on that would be fine. I would bring into that third item the community service and park priority that we already have. It's one of our seven priorities. So I would incorporate that into that priority. I just mentioned fourth priority would be a housing economic development priority. So standing alone, and then I would concur with Councilman Brabadi-Kah that I think the financial organizational health piece is really intrinsic to governance. So it's not a priority, just has to happen and guided by staff and the city manager, it gets implemented because as I said, it's just intrinsic. It's endemic to good municipal government. So I would then, my fifth priority would be protect vulnerable communities, legacy communities, seniors in our city. I think that should be a priority. It should be spoken and we should work in unison to make sure that indeed we are protecting those folks and not necessarily creating the avenues and methods for people to get displaced from East Palo Alto. That's it. Okay. Thank you. Can I ask a quick follow-up question? The housing and economic development, can you maybe expand a little bit why those are together or is that just because you were given five and you wanted both of them in? Does the sort of the connection between the two or should they really be separate if we have sex? So look, I think economic development is actually housing job creation in commerce, right? So I lumped them together that way. You know, a six economic development one would be fine. Your only did half of what you instructed, but your rule here, we were governing under five. So, government under five, so I give you five. I did not give you the specific priorities, but I think we wind up, or the specific programs, but I think we wind up talking about that later. Okay, great. Thank you. All right, so I actually want to maybe ask you all to help in what our next task is internally for our team, which is, you all heard what each other said. Where do you think there are a lot of similarities with what you came up with in terms of priorities? This is free-flowing conversation here. Well, I think that a lot of community members and a lot of our council members, I think like the parking is like a really important issue in the community. It's been too long that we haven't addressed that. And so I think that's we have something coming later this month, at least in terms of adopting an ordinance, but also working on improving enforcement. I know that we've made progress, but we still have more progress to make. I think that's one in particular that a lot of people have brought up. Okay, what are others? Frankly, I didn't really hear any differences or opposing views. I think that the categories, however, we organize and address a lot of the issues that all of us mentioned in one way or another. And so I think, I think it's going to come down to, I think, maybe you're going to get a little bit into that. But, you know, we have, I think this year you are introducing this concept of like a four year plan. Well, that's like a long time in a way. But it's good to be looking at it because some, some things are going to take a while. and then the other one that we have used Recently is like this two-year plan And I think what we're missing because I didn't see it there Is within the two-year plan is like a one-year plan and maybe it is incorporated and the idea of a two-year plan because that means some things we want to get going this year and it might take two years. Other things have been going on and we're going to finish them this year. And I think that's where at some point that's what along with the resources. I think that's where we need to spend some time to say, you know, some of the things already in motion, but do we want to like do them this year instead of waiting two years? And if we say we want to do them this year, then I think the staff needs to tell us, okay, well, then I have to wait for something else. So I think that's where the trade-off, maybe that, you know, comes from Rometo's talking, it. It's always the trade-off because there are so many things to do. You can do the mall. And if we set some, I think it is important to set one year goals to, right? And they may be part of a two year plan, but that's the only part that I saw that was missing in this presentation is that, because if we because if we're talking about like, okay, we got to do something right away. Well, that's like a one year, is within a one year. And if people are thinking we're waiting two years, they're not going to like that. And I agree, you know, some things like, but I was meant, some of the things I was mentioning in other people, we don't need to wait a year or two years, we should just go do it next month or, and if that is a priority for the year, then we should just do it. And then balance it with what else might have to wait or something. So, I mean, I personally, I think I don't have any disagreements with all the things that everybody said. I think we're all want to keep moving forward and maybe reshuffling some things, etc. Great. I mean, you know, there's something, and before Vice Mayor Dynan speaks, you know, there's something that actually came up that came up a little bit in your conversations, but came up in the public as well, which was to think in these multiple kind of time periods, where some are going to be much longer term building a city hall. then there's a lot of things that the city can do in the short term, which are short term wins, which impact the quality of life and that the strategic priorities really need to balance and the projects need to balance both of those to get the momentum from some of these short term wins and these small things to then help build the momentum for more. That's what I'm calling intermediate. Yeah. Yeah, and that's that was echoed in multiple public comments as well in our discussions. Vice Mayor. Yeah, I mean, there's a couple things. One, I sort of presume like our affordable housing program is going forward. We're going to be building and pursuing more affordable housing. I also presume that a lot of the city efficiencies, things around office hours and things like that. I agree with Council Member Romero. I sort of think that's just kind of an inherent part of government and that these priorities should be focused on things that are not currently on the radar, maybe slightly readjusting the focus of city staff. I see us doing that already, with some of the priorities that I mentioned, like code enforcement, like parking. That's coming up, it's happening. There's some things we don't have control over. A lot of the economic development and the RBD is not feasible. Today, it's not going to be feasible tomorrow. Nothing's going to get built, you know, in terms of like property tax paying office space for probably the next five years or so. So some of that is beyond our control. What I'd like to, you know, have us recognize what is in our control and kind of have, you know, to Councilmember Obrika's point, have a short term like this is what we're focusing on this year. And hopefully if we fix something this year, we don't have to focus on it next year. And parking and code enforcement, I think would be two of those issues that once we get the policies, procedures, and you know, spend the time, effort, and energy on these issues that we're not gonna have to deal with them next year. they're not a four year goal. I hope we just fix them and we'll move on. But overall, I think you know what I've heard emergency preparedness and we've already you know we have a study session for that on March 25th and For me, I mean, I think a lot of this stuff. It's gonna come down to the budget It's understanding what money we have and what we can spend responsibly. And for emergency preparedness, how much is council going to budget to actually try to fix this problem and get us prepared and invest in staff time getting trained and community resources and just buying supplies. So it's all going to come down to the budget. And so that's coming up. Overall, I think this this is a useful exercise, and there's actually broad agreement. I mean, I think we all agree we can invest in our streets. We can invest in our infrastructure. And everybody, I hope, wants a new library. I mean, I just wanted to say thank you for coming today to help us be more focused. I know that sometimes it could be a little bit overwhelming all the work we have to do as a city and with our city employees as well. But I think what we're trying to get to hear are like smart goals, right? Some that are specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time bound. And so having that multi-tier versus the long, like short-term goals versus long-term goals, I think would give more specific direction and will make those smart goals more attainable in a timely manner. So I really do appreciate helping us hone everything down and like making it more strategic. So thank you. Thank you, but we haven't done it yet. Thank us at the end. Okay. And then other thoughts on similar is sort of another question for you all if there's not more thoughts on this. And we're going to come back to this. There's a couple of different ways of doing this. And this and I think some of what you all have said is actually I think really an interesting way to think about this which is there's things that the city is already doing and should already be doing which are not special priorities, but they should probably be called out and the city should recognize that and and this strategic priorities and work plan actually can do that but maybe in a separate way. You know,. One thing that Councilmember Brica talked about is sort of the buckets. There's a couple of different ways of doing that. One is to have the buckets really broad and then have specific projects under that. The other is to hone in a little bit more and make each of those buckets more refined with and and really make some of the prioritization in the sort of in the categories, the broad categories, right? And I'm going to just point out what council member Romero said, which was, you know, commuting, you know, housing and economic development as one. Well, you know, we could refine that and make that more specific. And I'm sort of wondering how this council, it's a little bit of a difficult question, but how this council feels about is it better to have sort of broad categories or is it and have more specificity in the projects or should we have more specificity in the categories themselves to identify like what would be the most helpful for the council in order for you to do your prioritization over the next one, two, and four years? Did I confuse you all with that question? You know, I'll start just briefly my thoughts on this. So I think that the broad categories, I think are more useful. And I'll tell you why. You know, over the years, including this year, we set up certain priorities, right? And then things happen. Things happen. And either the staff or council members bring an issue that for whatever reason we didn't think about or I don't care how broad the discussion is, they're always blind spots or things happen. When things happen, then they get added to the agenda and they have to fit somewhere because we're not in the business of saying, we're not going to do anything about that. If the majority of the council wants to do so, or the community feels like, hey, this is something, you know, you didn't put it in there, but this has now has become a problem. Okay, so we have to put it in there. And it's better to me to have a broader category because it fits more. That's my opinion. And we don't lose anything by having a broad category, because the other part is that if you get too refined and too focused, then we miss other things that we could be doing under that category. So, you know, I, that's just my opinion. I think that I appreciate that. A broad of categories have served as well, and we could always put stuff in there or not put them in there. And you know I think as even several people have said some things are sort of a given you know that the city has to do certain things the management has to take care of certain things we don't need to be you know spelling them out all the time so I mean that would be my rationale that we don't lose anything by having broader categories. We can still put things underneath. What are others thoughts from others? Yeah, so I agree. But then there's like different policies of how we address those overall priorities. Like for instance, like, you know, a lot of community members are concerned about housing. So how do we address that? You know, there's brinsel housing, there's low income housing, tenant protections, you know, when it comes to real home ownership is probably the best option. But how do we get people to that point to be able to on a home in East ball I'll tell or to stay or you know help their kids and their grandkids or whatever So we need to have these broad categories, but we need to have specific ways of addressing them and how we can align on those specific policies. In the past, when you talk about housing, there's, I think, you know, we had a proposed, like, TOPA, OPA, you know, that might not have been successful because there's not a whole alignment on that issue, but we need to find those issues under these categories that we do align on. So I think we do need to be able to have those specific issues under these categories that we do align on. So I think we do need to be able to have those specific issues under these broad categories. So it sounds like broad categories with some directionality of those categories? Yes. Yeah, I agree because I think that if we just have it pretty broad, then again, I feel that if we want to maximize our teams, work load and productivity, we need to be very specific and intentional in some of those areas. Not saying that we're not going to, if something arises and we need to put it in the agenda that we're not going to do so, we will find a way how to address it. But I think that, you know, we should give some specific direction in guidance. Yeah, I think of what staff and the city manager trying to do is create, but for us to create a more manageable set of projects and programs, it probably makes sense to have that battle within these categories that are possibly more encompassing of issues. I mean, that's really where the discussion is going to happen, not within these categories. It's, you know, do you want to incentivize, let's say, you know, commercial development by, you know, subsidizing developers and then what's the trade off with that, right? So maybe not as much affordable housing or maybe not as much assistance to small developers in exchange you say you're going to get more taxes. So those are the, which I disagree,, but I mean, those are the discussions we're gonna have, I think that will provide staff with direction project and project by project program, by program within those categories. I mean, one of the things I'm concerned about is that if you have too many priorities, you have no priorities, and very much in the philosophy of get stuff done. And I think we have to recognize the moment we're in and maybe recognize what can we get done in the next four years. So maybe economic development with the conditions that they are. It's not saying that we're not going to focus on getting something in the office depot building, but just the idea that we're not going to focus necessarily on new office space if nobody's going to build it. I don't know, this is the first time I'm doing this, so I'll be a little bit humble. I'm not sure what we can do, but I know from a business perspective, if you try to do everything, you get nothing done. And I'd rather have us knock out certain things this year. And I think we're on the road to that with emergency preparedness and quality of life issues like code enforcement and parking and some other things. And just sort of recognize what is staff capable of. Because asking Melvin and his team to do everything and getting nothing done well is not helpful for us. But getting a few things done and doing them well would be the flaw. I think this is more of a philosophy discussion, almost like what should our attitude be towards these issues. But for me, the hard priority is emergency preparedness and the quality of life stuff that we're already on the agenda. I would love to get parks and rec established and funded with the YMCA and all these other ideas that I have. But I also think there's a lot of stuff happening just on the background. Like the San Francisco CretaceCritic APA is going to happen whether it's a priority or not. All we have to do is kind of stroke a check. But I guess that's also your spending as your priority. That comes under all sorts of different categories. Flood protection is emergency preparedness. Flood protection is economic development because it's also, I mean, you know, for a levy and for the REACH to project, I think if people realize that if we get these things built, you won't have to pay flood insurance if you're a homeowner. That's kind of a big deal if we get it FEMA certified. And that's, you know, something that is, I don't know, is that economic development not having people have a thousand dollar bill? I don't know. But again, in terms of prioritization, I would like to think that if an opportunity presents itself, we're not saying no to it just because it's not on a list of very small priorities. But I'll defer to the expertise of staff because I know Melvin and Shuri have been at other cities and they've seen what's worked and what hasn't worked so you tell us. Through the chair, excuse me Matt, thank you all for all that input. I think you all are, you all understand, I believe, what staff is trying to get you all to do, which is help us to help you. Help us to understand what your priorities are so that we know where to put resources, where I know what gaps I have in order to deliver upon council's priorities. As far as how broad the priorities go, it's okay to have broad priorities. And as councilmember Romero said, it's really the projects that we're going to be kind of boiling down and saying we only have capacity to do so much. However, as a starting point, the more focused that your overarching priorities are, it's still more helpful. But the real resource trade-off will come when we're discussing projects. Yeah. And so what I'm hearing from the group is sort of a, again, agreement that broad categories, but focus projects limit the number of projects to make sure that you're getting something, you're prioritizing the efforts, identifying both short and long-term projects so that there are some short wins, and then allow for flexibility in order to be able to add and then to be able to revisit to make sure that there are priorities. So there's general agreement on that. I'm seeing heads nodding. Yeah. Okay. So I think what we'd like to do now is take a short break. We're going to kind of try and come up with some of these categories. And then I guess before we do that, I have a question to the council members, which is you all went through your projects and ideas. Are there more in your mind about what we should do? Should we spend some more time today listing out the specific projects that you think could be in the priorities? Because we can actually do a little bit of what the community did, which was identify the categories by topics, and then you all can write them down so we make sure we have them and then just review them, or can speak them either way works. Well, partially the prioritization of that is on the 22nd, but what would be and the big priors, but we want to make sure we're getting the full universe of your ideas today. I'm just speaking for myself if, says you were giving us homework, if there's an option of submitting something later on, because sometimes I don't mind brainstorming, but other times I'd take more time and think through my own stuff before I say this and that. So, I don't necessarily wanna do it today anymore, but I would put him in writing and send him, and then when we have that next meeting, I think we could. I mean, between all five of us, I think we covered a lot of stuff, a lot of good things. I think you have more priorities than you can do between. You probably have more priorities already than what you can do. Right. But you know, if you're asking us, if you're asking us for more, I'm sure we can come up with more. But I'm just saying for me, I want to reserve the option of maybe not doing it today. But I will submit, I can submit other stuff and probably other people too, just like the public and I were like we said, if somebody tomorrow who wasn't here wants to submit, they should be able to submit it to them. Yeah, we definitely don't want to constrain you to today and this is your only opportunity. That's not the intent. So we can certainly maybe we can finish by 330. That'd be good too. So I'm hearing a desire to keep this moving forward. Actually, can I, you know, while we're here, I mean, what is your energy level now? you'd like to try and end in an hour, we can do some things later. How are you all feeling? Yes, please. I have two kids at home. So yes. Okay. How's it others? I feel good. Okay. I'm happy to continue this discussion on another day. I'd like 330 with Marta. I would go to four, but I'd respect for colleagues if they want to end their leads fine. Okay, and again, this is not the only time to talk about this. So I just want to make sure we're using our time efficiently and I know we run out of energy at time. So why don't we take a maybe a 10 minute break and I'm going to sort of get with my team get with my team and we'll figure out what those next steps are that we want to do today and move on from there. Okay. So 10 minutes. maybe a 10 minute break and I'm gonna sort of get with my team and we'll figure out what those next steps are that we want to do today and move on from there. Okay. So 10 minutes, 335, 235, not 335, 235. Okay. Thank you. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. you you you you you you you I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. Thank you. Members of the public, quick question. If anyone would like to make a public comment, can you please fill out a comment card so we know how many people? That'd be great. Thank you. you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you I'm sorry. you you you you you I'm going to go back to order. Meeting back to order. Excuse me. I like to call the meeting back to order, please. We're almost there, guys. So if we can hurry back, hopefully we can make it by 330. So we're going to go ahead and continue with our meeting. Yeah, so I think we're talking about sort of next steps and we're going to break a little from the agenda. We were going to do a report back and then a visioning exercise. But I think what we'd like to propose is that I feel like we've gotten a lot of information. I think there's a lot of direction that the council has given us at this point that we need to go back and sort through. As multiple of you have said, the categories are not as important as the specific projects that get done and that's where the time should be. So what I'd like to propose is that we do the following. We move into public comment because the public has been here for some folks since nine charity this morning, nine this morning. So I want to make sure the public has an opportunity to speak again and share their ideas. And then are we having a trans interpretation? Okay, you got it now. Okay, good. And then maybe just give us sort of an opportunity for the council to share any additional thoughts that may have come up about next steps and then we can close the meeting today. How does that sound? That sounds perfect. Okay, great. So let's move into public comment. Oh, and one other announcement, there's lots of food in the back. Please eat or grab an orange to take home. Oh, with that. Bring more food. Do we have anyone on Zoom? James at this time that we like to do public comment? Not on Zoom, but we did receive some speaker syllabus. Okay, perfect. So for time's sake, we're going to go ahead and start, so the first speaker, Isaac Stevenson, followed by Rebecca Durran and Stuart Highland. So Mr. Isaac Stevenson. Yeah. Yeah. Can I come back later? Sure. Um, let's put like this. I'm a senior. I've been diagnosed with all timers and dementia. I just set my phone down and, uh, can't find it. And I left because I had my wife's phone and I know I came back. So I want to make that priority if you can move me in again. And I'm on the senior advisory board. So I do have some things to say about how we could help her seniors. Okay. Is your phone in the room? Do you want to tell us what it looks like so people can look for it? Thank you. Next speaker, Rebecca Durand, followed by Stuart Highland and Gail Wilkerson. Good afternoon. I'm Rebecca Durand, executive director for the Lewis and Joan Platt East Palo Alto family YMCA. I'm heartened to hear the comments about exploring potential strengthening of the partnership with the city of East Palo Alto. And I just thought I'd just say a couple kind of broad things that might be helpful for everyone to consider. One is that the why in East Palo Alto currently serves about well more than 4,000 individuals each year and 3,000 of them are residents of East Palo Alto more than 3,000 of them. So that's kind of where we're at right now. These programs are primarily through membership, but also through swim lessons, team programs like youth and government, youth spreads, after school, programming, summer day camp, and early learning readiness, which serves ages 0 to 5 in their caregivers. The majority of people who use the Y receive financial assistance or benefit from subsidized, highly subsidized rates at our branch. Something that many people may not realize is that since the Y opened in 2007, it has always been budgeted as a deficit. So we don't have everything we need to do as much as we would like to do. The budget has always been budgeted by YMCA of Silicon Valley, our association. And that's sort of the story of the last 17 years. And I think the question before us is, what is the next chapter? And we're happy to have dialogue about strategic partnership expansion city of East Palo Alto because I envision what if instead of serving 3,000 East Palo Alto residents we could serve 6,000? That would be an amazing impact where youth, seniors, families could have increased access, benefit from the physical and mental health, tremendous outcomes, and have a stronger community. Thank you. Next speaker, Stuart Highland, followed by Gil Wilkerson and Michael Francois. Good evening, Stuart Highland, 124 Isaiah Drive. I was encouraged by some consensus on the city council, which is helpful. I just wanna point out some points that are a little bit, not quite aligned, but in the general same direction. In regards to housing, Vice mayor Mark Dynan talked about more market rate housing and council member Carlos Romero was talking about housing for those in the most need. One model which hasn't been used since the development and I forget the name of it, I'm gonna say Peninsula Park apartments was a mixed income which was 50% tiered subsidized income on top of market rate. So you were able to have 50%, basically a 50% affordable housing development that was also partially funded by market rate apartments. And you had the great thing of building community of market rate tenants with subsidized rate tenants living in the same area and sharing the same community facilities of the of the complex. Around code enforcement I was heartening to hear Webster LinkedIn say be proactive and once again I would however we may act on that would be with the idea of those with the most need. A lot of our vendors are folks that are secondary, maybe English speakers or primary language that's not English. And so as you approach them, approach them in a way that you could provide the understanding in the language where they understand. and with the of There may be some subsidized help or or an approach that would help them align with what Business fees and that sort of thing and also health and safety and again with compassion for folks and not just punitively. Thank you Thank you next speaker Gail Wilkerson, followed by Michael Francois and, sorry, Mello. Miss Wilkerson? Okay. Thank you. I heard a lot of stuff that I've been here and rehash, rehash over and over again. He says something about turn limits. And I figure, like he said, eight years you get to do it, I see stuff being gone out for five years I should have been done in one year. And all of a sudden, well, he said it, under the serve communities. You don't do that, you'd be concentrating on one sector, one demograph. Don't think people are stupid, okay? We could notice that stuff. You've got to take care of everybody in East Palo Alto. The cannabis, what that was voted in, is you tend to ignore that. And Oakland, they're bringing in 20 to 30 million dollars a year. We're 2.5 square miles. We could use that money. Why don't you keep kicking the can down the road there about that? That's money. You have to see how Redwood City is flourishing. They managed to control. Are you saying you're not wise enough? can't learn enough to do that to bring in $20 million a year. And he said, oh, that's out of my control. That's where I've heard that three times that's I've been here and I've heard it before. Things are not out of your control if you don't educate yourself about it. And that's the thing that pisses me off the most about when I come to a meeting, somebody said, oh, that our hands are tied, we can't do that. And it sounds like you don't know the hell you're doing. I'm sorry, I don't know what other word. The landlords, the landlords are getting away with murder. They're devaluing the property. They're making a lot of money off the properties. And you won't do anything about it. It sounds like you don't know. You should take real estate classes at least one hour a week mandatory. And if your staff do anything about it. It sounds like you don't know. You should take real estate classes, at least one hour a week mandatory. And if your staff does your work for, send them to real estate school. What else I have? Well, I don't wanna talk about poverty pimping because I get so my nerves. More than poor people live here. We have some people that struggling. Even people with money struggle. Stop leaning on that all the time, that same old line. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, Michael, Francois, followed by me, Michael and Umuali Satoride. Thank you all for letting me speak. I'll try to say this real fast. Just hear me out. These are my concerns. As far as if you're this is like building a house. Build cities like building a house. When you're going to build a house, you check out your infrastructure. You put your pipes in, you build your frame, you build your building. That's what you should be doing here. Your pipes should be in. This city's pipes are old. They need to be rebuilt. Every time you go to Washington, you ask for money to do the streets. I would get tired if I'm the person signed to check. Every time you come, you ask for money to repaid the street. Then in five years, you come back or ten years, you're going to come back, you're going to want to repaid the whole city. Why didn't you tell us at the time when we were issued a new check? We're going to do a street and a pipe, a street and a pipe, enterprise, a street enterprise. What you're doing here is doing patchwork. That shows you what people like. That makes this city look bad. Look bad. As far as the holes in the street, you can put cement over it. I've done it many times. Put cement over it and put that patch over it. It will hold. You can get those patch that cement right from Home Depot. 75% are bad. Don't be talking as million dollar stuff. It doesn't cost that. And that will hold until you're able to get through the street. You go to watch then, ask for serious money. Street pipe, street pipe, and they all will be done. The newest pipe in the street is down Cooley Landing. That's the only pipe you've been in. Steady's been in business for 40 years and you got one new pipe. That is sad. The second of all, as far as I'm, I got it down here, what parking? When that part, when that, the shopping center was built over there. A section that was supposed to be for whiskey gold people who had businesses on the other side. So part of that belongs to East Palo Alto. I told you guys, people bring their business trucks home. You can pay the security guard. It's over there next to $3 an hour to just patrol if they park their trucks over there and they can come and get them in the morning. Then those people can put their cars in their driveways. And in fact, this is working. I just want you to know the parking thing is working because people are slowing down because the cars are coming in closer to the street, which makes the chiefs over their job. He needs help. Thank you, Mr. Franswell. I just, you know, he needs help because you can't get people, if their emergency comes up, and I need an ambulance, or somebody's fighting. Thank you, sorry, we get two minutes for each speaker. But he needs help, somebody's gonna die. The city's gonna lose that lawsuit. They're gonna lose it because he needs a motor. Have you ever seen it? Thank you. Thank you. Around six o'clock in the morning, you cannot get through this city. Thank you. Thank you. Next. because he needs a motorbike. Have you ever seen it? In the morning, I'm going to go to the office. I'm going to go to the office. I'm going to go to the office. I'm going to go to the office. I'm going to go to the office. I'm going to go to the office. I'm going to go to the office. I'm going to go to the office. I'm going to go to the office. I'm going to go to the office. and diversity of background, interest, opinion, I just think it's want to compliment you. I think we have a great city council. And the diversity of background, interest, opinion, I just think it's going to benefit the city over the long haul. So in a sense, a state of course. I know that you are now shifting from two to four year priorities, but I want you to put front and center as individual council members and as a council of a whole, the decisions that you make now are not just for two to four years. They're going to lay the conditions for what the city is like 50 years from now. And so I want you to take into consideration a decision making process that allows you to lay the kind of foundation that will continue to allow us to be a community that's led by people of color and where people of color have agency and voice in the life of the city. That's why it's important for you to invest in youth development, youth leadership development, a youth leadership development program that connects young people to the city. Imagine youth leadership development program that would engage a broad cross section of community youth who could carry the torch of cityhood for decades to come. Imagine a youth leadership development program where youth and young adults get involved, run for office, serve on a board commission, attend city council meetings, and have a voice in shaping the destiny of our community. If we are not intentional about creating projects, if you will, with this emphasis and focus, then there's a possibility that two rejects from now we will lean from life. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, Mario. I'll change the way of interpretation. Hello everyone. Okay. I just want to give you a second so you can do the interpretation. I listen to what you want to do with the properties, but the material is like a car, the contrasts are expensive. the the city, the city gives you the permits the cars, the taxes do not leave you. How do you think of the properties and if everything is expensive and very low, when you do not know that they want to remove the base of the strength of you? With the prices of the power. The second thing is that the parks where we go, no one wants a party, a park, that you are here and you here, no one wants a party here, no one wants a party here, no one wants a party here, no one wants a party here, no one wants a party here, no one wants a party here, no one wants a party here, no one wants a party here, no one wants a party here, no one wants a party here, no one wants a party here, no one wants a party here, no one wants a party here, vendors who are selling the corners, so low outside of the law, I am going to put an window in my house, I need a permission and I can't put it there, they can do it. If you They think you think in are going to rule a place why not take them out and then the rules they will sell them but the first ones are selling and they are going to rule. I don't know what to do. There are many leaders. The politicians. The barredor. The practice. Pas líderes, no políticos. La barrera. Anai l'interesa. Asuras, tabajo los carros. When you have a racist, Adialto, in the cantarillas. Because nobody in the law. How can all are the same. We need leaders that apply the laws. We don't have to be more lawy-minded. We apply the laws that are already there. They make agreements under the income. And they fill the middle of the road of cars. because going to the houses can not even be parked. And all full. You can give me a little more time to interpret it. And then, Van and Parquea in a car, and then before moving, bring it to another and Papua El Valle, to another. And we are already finished with freedom, but we are not. Because the street is free, but for that, for me. So, I invite you to do a lecture on all leaders. What you are spread to you? It is becoming more slaves to the government. And it starts to give you, it starts to make slaves of generations, generations. People will never come out of going to go to a city and fall into the same thing. What we have to do is to think about us, to go to survive and not be a load for the government. Because there is nothing free. Everyone has to pay it. Someone is paying him. So if you don't use the state to give him to the people, because they give him to the people and they give him to the people who work. They give him because they are slaves and some because they pay more taxes. that the proposal to the judges, but all the talent that you give here can work. Thank you. Next speaker, Isaac Stevenson. I'm not sure if Mr. Stevenson's ready. Followed by Robert Jones and Lauderdrobeo. I'll bring my phone with me. First, I'd like to say thank you for being here. I'm glad I could join you. I've been in East Palo Alto since 1955. When I was five, we were the third black family to live on West Minister. My parents got our first mayor, Barbara Muton, to move to the city. My dad started St. Vincent de Paul. And I knew the Kavanaugh's. Of course, Kavanaugh's donated the land that we're Kavanaugh, Green Oaks, and all that area around to the schools and to the church. and it was a tax write off and I was blessed to take a course in San Mateo County history by Dr. Frank Stanger when I came back. And I've been blessed because I was con Tafelabanda de la Madina. I toured all the South America except Serenam, French, Ghana, and Ghana. And Ecuador, I was sung at the General's home in La Paz, Bolivia, and entertained, but I keep thinking we are in the best place in the United States. I've been studying gentrification on the East Coast in Jacksonville, Florida, Greenville, South Carolina, Charleston, South Carolina, and up and down the course. And I look at us heading that way. Again, third black family on West Minister, a lot and a half cost $13,000. My mom wanted me to buy a two acre lot on runnymead for just, there was a little under $20,000. And I'm looking at now gentrification, working with Bob, and how do we get, it took me 15 minutes to get from my home to Pogas During the commute how can we escape we need a plan? I'm just support our police officers. I look at the roundabouts and how they're tearing them up I wish we had cameras or we could do something to to support our Police even more I look at the stop signs and how people won't stop in a corner. I feel like I'm in Europe because they roll through those, through the stops. And they need some support. I'm a county on Budsman and a senior advocate. We've gone from three clothes. I used to monitor, well, I'll stay at two minutes in fall the rules. But there's a lot of things we need to do and I hope we have a fly over one day I don't know if you all remember the tunnel that used to go under the Bay Shore freeway when there was two lanes over over into whiskey Gulch and Thank you, sir. I'm blessed to live here, and this is the only place in the world I'd wanna live. Thank you, sir, appreciate it. Next speaker, Robert Jones, followed by Laura Rubio and Donna Rutherford. Thank you for listening to all of us. Thank you for your patience. Thank you for your tall talent challenge you have before you. Because creating a strategic plan is very hard. I've been there, done that in another situation. There's two things I want to outline. One is I want to thank you for seeing like just consistency on the council regarding disaster preparedness. And I'll march to 23th of a month. Hopefully you make a presentation further my thoughts and share the review about disaster preparedness. But it sounds like the council is ready for this. You see the need and there is a twin is need. I was thinking about last night as I always do around 11 or 12 o'clock at night, imagining what a disaster if they're earth are shaking, what would we do at 12 o'clock at night? I also thought about, well, what about something sort of happening around 12 o'clock, doing the day when there's maybe rush hour traffic. How are we going to respond as a community? And that really keeps me up at night. But the second thing I want to talk about and applaud you about, you got a tall challenge in understanding and trying to figure out where the resources you're going to come up with with a declining sort of income base, where are you going to get that from? And I hate to say, I used to be a real estate agent for years back. I know that when houses are built, there's property tax that is being, that you have a have to pay. And the client in that property tax line item that I heard today kind of concern me. And I was awarded that the fail short. I don't know how many brand new single payment homes we have built here in the community. I don't have the exact number. but that's part of some income that could be, that could be looked at in that creates a different type of strategy for developing houses amongst subter. Thank you. Next speaker, Laura Rubio, followed by Donna Rutherford and Adrian Bryant on Zoom. I'm going to try some points that are not reached to the leaves in the workshop that we had. For me, the main point is to avoid the displacement to all costs. To other points, assign the 40% of the funds of oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, the chapter of the West Side, the plan, the plan general. Because I told you this. Maybe you heard my comment or did not have my comment on Tuesday. But there were 160 families in the Euclid project. And now that finally these families moved only to 55 families who could be protected. I tell you because I was in a bad way with the the the the the the Thank you. because in our general plan, specifically in the West Side, we had no clause that said that they could not move until the plan was not approved. I Is that the duels started a started a mobile phone with anticipation. This reinforces my petition that they review the chapter of the website and that we take into consideration what happened with the the Euclid project. To avoid this in the future with the others. And to see that. Staff. I'm glad to be here because this is a very important area for us to talk about strategic planning for our city for the next several years. I know you have to make some hard decisions and I would just say everything that I've heard I agree with. We've had parking issues before we've had streets that need repair. We've had housing issues. But I can say that through the years we have made a lot of positive changes. And certainly it has affected long-term residents who were displaced by some of the redevelopment. Redevelopment is good on one hand, but then there are some negative sides to it also. And we know that times are certainly they have changed, but I do support investing in our youth, and I don't mean just sports programs and fun things like that, but I mean training in how to become future council members, super boarded supervisors, and even having some input, a first young person on the council in an advisory position, because I hear young folks say that the older generation doesn't understand them. And so we need to listen. My children are grown now, so I don't have that inside view where I can ask them what this means. I don't have that anymore. But it's important that we, you prioritize what you've heard today, make those tough decisions, and money is a factor, a big factor. Thank you so much. Thank you. Next speaker, Adrian Bryant, followed by a comment from Jack Kiga-Yegos, which I'll be reading out loud. Thank you, Adrian Bryant. And I have been here, which which you guys since this morning, and I would like to give some creedals to our city manager because process I know there was a little bit of pushback. I was kind of apprehensive myself because it came a little late than we usually do these strategic priority meetings and also Aligning the budget with it. Maybe a little bit apprehensive, but I think it is a good way to get the community feedback. And I'm so pleased to see the people who have turned out in person. I wish you would have made it more clear that we could participate remotely. I just happened to say, let me try to see if this link works. And it did. Said, in your rate, I want to echo some of the sentiments. I've. A lot of the things I was originally going to say I won't say because people have already said it. I'm just so tickled that even people I don't know are experiencing and have the same ideas as me. But I do want to because it's important to me. You've heard me speak out about this before specifically with the ARPA funds. I'd like to see that $50,000 that is already earmarked for youth activities or development. I'd like to see some sort of youth commission. I'm not sure if the consultant has given you some ideas. I'd like to see a presentation sometime in your future specifically regarding the cost and what we can do. $1,000 is not a lot of money. Also the set aside are for the senior housing repairs. I like to prioritize our legacy residents, give a little bit more weight to people who have been here a long time because their homes are older and they've been paying their property taxes for a number of years. Last thing I want to say is say because the clock is ticking down on me. I would like to, and I brought this up before in terms of paying for all of these things, exploring and enhance infrastructure financing district. I can't go into details about that. have some apprehensive considering you don't have people who live in that area except for developers who be only people voting on that. Getting a little bit extra time please so I can speak a little bit more slowly so you can hear me. Please if you can find a time, set aside some time and explore that financing opportunity and of course as always we need help Our small businesses need some help. That's all, thank you. Thank you. Next speaker from the Zoom webinar chat from Jackie Gallego's. Hi, my name is Jacqueline. I would like to address the tension between homeowners and tenants slash renters. There needs to be a workshop so that we can all mutually respect each other and have education slash more clarity on topics. In addition, I believe there needs to be additional funds awarded to Board Program to focus on more areas like displacement. More staffing is necessary to support these amazing ladies. And that was our last speaker. James, could you read Isabelle Lopez comments as well? Because that was on chat. I don't think a lot of people saw the comment from Miss Lopez earlier. We it was during the community workshop and we documented all of her comments and placed them on the priority boards and they were wrapped into the report back. Hey, guess it's back to me. All right, I think what we're going to do at this point is, is move into sort of the closing and wrap up. before we get into that, I want to give council members the opportunity. If anything else has come up, any other thoughts following public comment, any responses want to give an opportunity to respond to public comment or to share additional ideas about priorities before we go into the final steps. Well, one thing that I was thinking about was potentially exploring like a vacancy tax. So properties that are being intentionally left vacant and not being improved, they don't contribute really to the community and they lead to blight. So potentially exploring something around vacancy tax. I'm like, we've had businesses that are just been sitting vacant for six years. And we tend to incentivize them to, you know, bring our bring-in businesses or whatever they need to do. I know a lot of offices are vacant. That's probably a little bit more difficult to address, but I think that it's something that we should consider. Because there's also a lot of speculative processes when it comes to housing. It's like, oh yeah, we have a project being planned. Let's just keep it vacant and not rent it out until, so that was the things that we should consider and see where we can fund some alignment on that. I think we should like support a lot of like the or provide more resources to like parking and code enforcement some more funding to address those issues. I think that was brought up and I think that I think that we I agree with a lot of the comments that were made today. So I look forward to getting these priorities straightened out. Yeah, I just want to reflect a little bit on what Dr. Moale said a wide mention because On the one hand, yeah, you know, we want some things done for tomorrow for next month and I'm for that So that's why I mentioned like a one year we should focus on this year and of course we got like four years, I think the process of building up our community has been going on for decades many decades and you know many of the people and I think of someone like I said Steven soon as you mentioned are no longer. And of course, some of us are on our way. And the future generations that have grown up in East Palo Alto, I think, hopefully, will continue. The legacy of a community that is proud of itself, that is determined to be self-sufficient, control its own political destiny, and not be used by certain forces that are out there sometimes that have done that. And yeah, so I definitely appreciate almost comment to remind us so that we, even if it's a little planned, but we really are planning for the future generations. And a lot of work needs to be done, but I think this has been a good exercise and it's going to continue, at least for the next couple months, to have as many people to contribute their ideas, their comments. And I do have to reflect a little bit on when we became a city. Unfortunately, at the same time, we had a federal government that cut back on revenue sharing, that did a lot of destructive policies for local governments, for communities like ours. And I think now we're back in that space. And we have to just stick together, keep building, will survive fine and then keep planning for better times altogether. So thank you very much everybody. Just wanna say this. There's one specific thing I think we should look at. It's our business license tax, especially around small businesses. I'm a small business owner. And the business license tax that East Palo Alto has is really different from a business license tax in Palo Alto, Memeloparque, and I'd like to see us have parity. If you are a small business owner, you shouldn't be encumbered by the bureaucracy of this. And I have some very specific critiques, but I'd like to look at that and try to make it a little bit more friendly for small businesses because we have a ton of small businesses, whether they're gardeners or house cleaning services or I work from home. And the way I feel is like I'm penalized for being entrepreneurial as opposed to a city that's supporting small businesses. And I'd probably have to recuse on discussions like that. But you know, that's that. The other in terms of objectives, I think this is like, I don't know when this could happen, but I'd like to see us looking at more progressive zoning codes. East Palo Alto, it's illegal to build apartment buildings and most single-family home neighborhoods. And if you travel at all, you know, it's totally normal and other places to have small apartment buildings in residential neighborhoods. And here it's illegal in most of our residential neighborhoods. So I think that's something we could look at. I don't know if that would be a priority to day or tomorrow, or just the next time we're addressing this. But we kind of, I believe, copy and pasted our zoning codes in, you know, from Palo Alto and other regional cities. There's inherent inequity in these codes and a bias towards more expensive single family home. Zoning, yeah, I mean, I could go on and keep, you know, a billion priorities, but without ever achieving any of them. So I'll just stop there. Okay, anyone else? Okay, going to switch on the screen and talk about next steps. And, you know, as I think I said, we're the sort of the flow of the meeting is a little bit fluid. And so we are in that vein. We skipped a couple of items. But what I would like to do is go over the next steps and think about a few other next steps that we want to kind of came up today. Let me see. I'm going to just move down here. I haven't trouble with Zoom today apologies. Okay. So we are to the left of this first red, red box here. So after this meeting, we're going to summarize the results and develop the list of strategic priorities, the buckets, the broad buckets that we talked about with specific projects that you all came up with. What we'd like to do is give the community as well as the council an opportunity to weigh in and contribute to that. And then from there, we'll submit a survey out to the community to get some priorities and a sense of prioritization of those projects. And so we'll do that. We'll put together some materials in what we heard sort of organize the thoughts that you gave us today and send that back out and ask for some comment and feedback as well as some ideas for additional specific projects. Again, that will go to a community survey and then our target is to come back to the city council on April 22nd and discuss that and begin to do more of a prioritization exercise. from there will complete the draft strategic priorities and work plan, which will involve more more time from staff coming and identifying the relative costs of the different projects and what, you know, what their staffs ideas are for implementing some of the ideas that you have as well. We will then do continue with community engagement after that, after that next council meeting, and then we will come back to you, I believe in June, date TBD for comment and approval of the strategic priorities and work plan. So that's the process that we have moving forward. Again, it's targeted at really balancing allowing this council to provide specific ideas and direction, but also to get feedback from the community as we're moving forward through in this process. And again, we heard a lot of great information today about what you want the plan to achieve in your priorities broadly and specific projects and even how you want the plan structured to allow for flexibility moving forward. So that's our proposed approach for for moving this forward. And I guess I'd like to turn to over and ask the council if there's any questions thoughts concerns about this before we close for the day. So Matt, you'll be incorporating any additional, I know it comes when we're already, and I want to send our actual priorities to you by email. You'll be incorporating those into what you heard today, correct? Yes, correct. Thank you. And we'll try and I think what we'd like to do is put together what we've heard on what the broad buckets are, the topics, so that you can begin to respond to that as well as to put additional priorities in. Could you briefly explain a little more on the community survey, what you're thinking, or how's that going to work? It's going to be online. have an an opportunity to do on paper too, or yeah, the community survey part. You're just too working on that. Yeah, you know, but we are still working on that. What we'd like to do is to do a priority, get the sort of at least a range of what we think, what we've heard so far, and get feedback and prioritization from the community. And I think that would most likely be the easiest format for that, is really an online survey, but we could make paper copies available. And then, so it is to sort of get that feedback. We'd have a few weeks to do that if we're gonna make the April 22nd deadline. Again, we can move that April 22nd with discussions with staff. Yeah, I would recommend that you also do it on paper and hopefully it's not too long. But I think on line, obviously it's great. But the fact of the matter is there's still many people who may prefer to just get and maybe there could be a box upstairs kind of like the voting, you know where it's it's not like you're not handing it over to somebody but you could drop it by or at the senior center some places where people could have that and drop it in. Yeah, we can work on that and I think what we'd really like to do is make the survey relatively straightforward so you don't need a lot of Yeah, yeah, work on that. And I think what we'd really like to do is make the survey relatively straightforward so you don't need a lot of, yeah, just trying to make it work. But don't limit it only to online. Okay. So it's otherwise we'll hear back and rightly so the community is gonna say, well, you know, what? And then, yeah. And then what we like is, you know, I think you all can talk to your constituents and we can distribute it if you pay for copies and have it come back to us so we can then incorporate it. When you say the survey will be rolled out, will it be in a specific area on our webpage or will you, like how will, I guess also maybe what the council member is saying, what will be the rollout process, your methodology of making sure that every, is it gonna be every citizen in the community that's gonna be able to take the survey, a sample of the community, or how will you do that? We can elaborate. Yeah, thanks. It will be a, what we call an opt-in survey. And so we will put it out, It means it's not statistically significant. Unless there's a desire to do that, that lengthens out the process quite a bit and is relatively costly. So what we'll do is we'll put it out and we'll probably have it online, but also ask people only to take it once. And so there's some tools and techniques we have for that. We will announce it. We have lots of email distribution lists. There's organizations that we've met with. You all have your constituents. So we'll send it out in that way. We'll send the information out. And if someone wants a paper copy, we can have those available in certain places. Again, we want to keep moving this forward because this has to tie to your budget and so there's a time constraint here too. So, you know, I, obviously not everyone in the community will get, will, will take the survey and we can have demographic questions in there so we can understand differences between individuals and what their responses are for different constituent groups. That would be great because I wanna make sure that we cover ourselves as well because sometimes people will say, I'm never part of these surveys. So. Yeah, you know, again, what we wanna do. I'm sure that they are. Well, we wanna give people everybody the option to take the survey, make sure they know about it. Yeah, maybe following up the mayor's comment and just thinking, obviously we can't do like a representative sample, I understand. So this is, but I think every which way that people know that they can take the survey, I think. So I think on the website, highlight it. These are the ways you can do one online. You can do that. Maybe have a few posters at the entrance. Just waste so that people know. And we're not like, well, we did advertise it a lot. It's kind of advertising that people can, if they like, they can do that. And then as you mentioned, there's a lot of groupings and so they can, if they want to request some or, yeah, I think that will be important to communicate that a lot. Great. Great. Yeah, I was going to say, yeah, thank you guys for putting this on. I know that you've gotten a lot of feedback and there's a lot of work to try going to go into prioritizing and putting all this together. So that's all I'm going to say. Thank you. Okay. Well, all right. So if we're going to close, I'm going to turn it over to the city manager in a moment to do the final closing, but I'd like to first start by thanking the community. Not only today, but in the time leading up to today, we did meet with a number of organizations, and it was extremely helpful, very direct, great feedback. We got it again today, and really it's a long day for everyone. So thank you all for coming out. I think it's really important, and this is a different process than the city has done for this before. And I, you know, it seems like having engagement is really successful. And then I want to thank the the city council for your time today. I know it is a long day. You said you wanted to end at 330. It is 329 right now. So we're going to we're going to meet that. And then with that, we'll just be back in touch and and you'll hear from us very soon. No one? I don't have much to add other than echoing the thanks from the council and ecu for the staff team as well as reiterating your thanks Matt to the public for participating in this process. What I said earlier is your input will will you help us to shape the city's priorities and how our resources, including our staff time, are allocated. Also wanna thank the council and the public for participating in this different process that's a little different than what we've done in a recent history. And it's a process that we're learning from. So thank you for going on this journey with us and we hope to continually improve this when we bring it back to you in the future. So thank you and pass it to the mayor to close out the meeting. So thank you and I know I'm probably going to sound pretty well. I'll just say you know this is a very old saying that we've all heard it takes a village, right, to raise the child. So I think it also takes a village to create a good and positive city that's thriving. So thank you everyone that, you know, participated today here in person also online. So with that, we're going to conclude our study session at 3.30 and have a wonderful rest of your Saturday and enjoy tomorrow as well. Thank you. Yeah, thank you, everybody, too.