City Council - Regular Meeting

Hi. Great.

Welcome all. I'd like to call to order our city council meeting on Tuesday, 05/05/2026. And I'd like to begin with a pledge to the flag by Grand View Elementary student, Chase Buxton.

Chase, please come right up. Good enough.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Thank you, Chase. I'd to invite your principal now, miss Griggs.

Welcome, miss Griggs. Hello.

Good evening. It is truly an honor to recognize Chase Buxton tonight on behalf of the Grand View Gators over at Grand View Elementary School. I've had the privilege of knowing Chase for the past five years. He was only in first grade when I first met him, and it has been incredibly special to watch his growth and maturity over time. Chase is a student who has developed into a deeply loyal friend and confidant, someone his peers trust and rely on.

He leads with a good heart, cares deeply about doing the right thing. I was just telling him, he makes doing the right thing look cool. Kids actually wanna follow him. And he consistently shows respect and appreciation for his teachers. What makes this recognition even more meaningful is that our entire fifth grade team unanimously selected Chase for this honor.

As his teacher, miss Kinzer shared, today, we are recognizing a student who consistently goes above and beyond in ways both big and small. His work his strong work ethic shows up every day. Whether he's tackling a challenging math problem or stepping in to support a classmate, he has a natural ability to understand math concepts quickly, and his confidence and skill are clear in the results he achieves. And if anybody knows miss Kinzer, a math compliment is a big deal. Math is her love language, so good job there.

Beyond academics, Chase is someone others can count on. He regularly supports both students and teachers with technology, offering his time and knowledge with patience and generosity. What truly sets him apart is his leadership and character. As a student council representative, he leads the give back group dedicating his time to helping others in meaningful ways. He's also helped build our school community by organizing and running volleyball and basketball tournaments during recess so that everyone feels included.

In the classroom, Chase is a calming steady presence often showing a level of maturity beyond his years. For his leadership, kindness, and commitment to excellence, we are incredibly proud to recognize Chase Buxton tonight. Congratulations.

Chase. Wow. I'm so impressed to hear about all the things you're doing. Do you have a favorite subject at this point?

Yeah. Definitely math.

Math. Well, you let your teachers already acknowledge. Here tonight with you, is there anybody that you'd like to acknowledge?

Yeah. My mom just right over there.

Fantastic. I love it. You have it down. On behalf of the city council the entire council in our city I want to present you with first and foremost a city pin and a certificate for having let us in the flag we will get a quick photo with you. Next move on to a roll call.

Council member Tarne? Here. Council member Sherrillian?

Here.

Council member Hohwer? Here. Mayor Pro Tem Franklin? Here. Mayor Lesser?

Here. Next move on now to our ceremonial calendar. We begin with a presentation of a certificate of recognition to the Sandpipers on the occasion of their ninety fifth anniversary. Just a few comments about the Sandpipers. Sandpipers is a voluntary organization that, as as indicated by their anniversary date, was established in 1931 during the Great Depression.

Their focus has been to help South Bay families and individuals in need, and they've given back enormously over the years. We're gonna invite down their leadership in a moment, and others that are present to talk about some of the things that they do, but it's a wide range of things from scholarships to gift baskets to just enormous amount that they do for South Bay residents. I'd like to bring down I believe it's the co president and other representatives of the Sandpiper's who are with us this evening. Hi. Can you introduce yourself and your titles and other women that are with you?

Sure.

We can I'm Laura Brojor. I'm co president of Sandpapers this year. This is McCall Weinberg. She's my fellow co president of this year. We've got Leslie Moody, our steering committee chair.

Diana Marron and Gigi O'Malley, our president select, co president select for next year. We also have Stevie Stearns, our marketing VP and Hom Min, our membership VP. And then we have the wonderful Joanne Hunter, who has been a member since Let's just leave the date unsaid, but is a fixture in our magnificent organization. So we are so proud because, you know, we have been a fixture in the DNA of the South Bay for so long. And I feel, you know, McColl and I, one of the best parts about this job is getting to continue to honor these incredible women who have come before us and given so generously since the nineteen thirties.

I mean, it's really remarkable when you look at the number of nonprofits that are here today and have been started over the last ninety five years in partnership with us. We, you know, giving them important funding and people to help run these programs that are still around today. I mean, that's what this is all about. Right? So I think between the incredible partnership with the community and all of you participating in our fundraisers like the Holiday Homes Tour that we do that we see, you know, thousands of people from the South Bay coming out and contributing and really being a part of our incredible challenge that we're trying to meet in the community and our mission. It's great.

So if somebody is watching this and might be interested in joining, how can one find out additional information?

Absolutely. Well, we've got Homine here, our membership VP, who I why don't I let you answer that?

Hi there. So our year starts July 1 and ends on June 30. And right now, we are accepting new members. If you'd like to be a member, please email me at membershipvp@sandpipers.org. That's membershipvp@sandpipers.org. We are having a prospective members reception next Thursday, May 14. Please email me for details, and then you'd have to get an invite to come on in. But, yeah, come join us or tell your friends. And if it's not for you right now, you're welcome to please support us with all our other events. Thank you.

Great. And our website is sandpipers.org to learn more about us. We do a lot of great things and would love to have you join us. And all of the many, many women, we're a lot. There's a lot of us. There's over 700 of us in the South Bay. 799. There you go. Plus, we have our high school and middle school groups as well or that are also part of San Pedro. So thank you so much for this honor. Great.

So hold on just a moment. Hold your applause. We actually have a certificate for you Great. Which our mayor Perthemalgam. Oh, you wanna get the he's gonna get the bling.

Oh, yeah. We like

And we have a certificate, which I'm pleased to give to you. And you bling, and then we'd love to get a photo with all of you.

Great. Thank you. Thank you.

You. Won't push our chairs in quite yet because we have one last ceremonial item, and that is a presentation of a proclamation to the Beach City's Health District declaring May 2026 as Mental Health Awareness Month. And we have Vanessa Poster, director who's here on behalf of the Beach City's Health District. Welcome. So why don't you tell us a little bit about what the Beach City's Health District is doing about mental health awareness and when we'll give a proclamation.

Thank you. And I have one for you as well, we can exchange proclamations. My name is Vanessa Poster, and I'm a member of the board of the Beach City's Health District. And I'd like to thank the mayor and the city council for having us here today, for giving us a proclamation, and for accepting one from us. Mental health awareness month is one of our big focuses during the year.

I'm wearing my mental health is health sweatshirt because mental health is part of being healthy, and we wanna provide opportunities for people. One of the things that just strikes me every time I look at these numbers, almost 20% of Beach City's residents report little or no connection to other people, and that is an unchanged number from a couple years ago when we first started asking people that. It's become so common national nationally that people are lonely that former US surgeon general Vivek Murphy called it an urgent public health concern. In observance of mental health awareness month, BCHD is encouraging the community to combat loneliness and foster meaningful social connections. Fulfilling relationships and connecting with each other are key to happiness, health, and longevity.

You can initiate conversations with strangers in line at the grocery store, walking down the street, just smiling and saying hello to a neighbor. Even that increases your health. For more information, you can visit bchd.orgmentalhealthawareness. And I'd also like to invite everyone to the groundbreaking. We're very exciting excited about this.

May from ten to eleven at the Beach City's Health District campus. We're doing a groundbreaking for a new home for All Cove, our youth mental health facility. And as we know, these problems are magnified among our youth and having a place where they can go safely and get the care they need saves lives. Thank you. Thank

you. So I guess this is well first a big box. Thank you. Thank you for bringing this very serious issue to our attention. So now we can trade certificates and then get a picture with all of our council colleagues. And do you have a city pin? Thank

you very much.

There you go. Okay. We'll move on now to item e, which is approval of agenda and waiver of full reading of ordinance. And I want to announce that I will be pulling item number six from the consent calendar. I see a motion by council member Howard with a second by mayor, Rich Tim Franklin.

Call for the questions.

Motion passes five zero.

We now move on to item f, which is city council and community organization announcements of upcoming events for up to one minute apiece. If any member of the public would care to make an announcement, welcome to do so from the podium or if you raise your hand, the city clerk's office can bring the microphone to you. Please welcome by.

Good evening, honorable mayor, mayor Poten, city council members, city officials. Hey, Jeff. Bobby Bell, educator and outreach for WM with recycling and organics. I know that I get to run into you guys a lot at the state of the city and the coordinating council lunches and the ribbon cuttings and all that stuff, but you don't really get to see everything else I do. So we just finished up Earth Month, Earth Week, Earth Day, I thought I'd give you just a quick view. First up was on Saturday, that was at Brittany's planting. I got to see some of you guys there. Next, I did touch a truck on Monday at Pacific Elementary. I like to get the kids nice and pumped up, send them back to their classroom. That was fun.

Tuesday, it was over at Penny Camp, get the kids all good and riled up, planting those seeds of proper organic and recycling, put the seeds in their head. Then I came here, that's a glamour shot. I only could see one chin, so I snagged that. Thank you, Ms. Haworth. Then on Friday, I was at Robinson Elementary, again, just getting those kids all good and riled up. Saturday, we had our first touch of truck, big shout out to the chief for sending out the police volunteers. We had over 200 cars and getting them lined up like they're waiting at Disneyland to go on the Matterhorn. That's what they take care of, and it's off awful great for them to do that. We also had some of our big city people down there.

We had Maureen. We had Rachel from to the chamber. And miss Kelly loves when I take pictures of her.

So she was there.

That was I'm so sorry. This is my granddaughter. I don't know how that picture got in there. Her birthday party was on Saturday, so I could not make the composting class on Saturday. I was with my granddaughter. I apologize. I will talk with my assistant on that one. That's all I got for you guys. Thank you so much for your time. Wishing you guys all God's blessings.

Oh my goodness.

Wow. Tough act to follow, Bobby. Kelly Struman, executive director for Downtown Manhattan Beach. I have two announcements tonight with a little help from our friends. Now open, Cuckoo on Manhattan Avenue, 1131 Manhattan Avenue. It's a wonderful neighborhood French bistro style restaurant open in the evenings from 4PM until the last martini is down. Martinis, oysters, lobster spaghetti, steak frites, chocolate mousse. Are you hungry yet? It's divine. So please go down.

It's in the space formerly occupied by Nando, if anybody's not familiar with that area. So we're thrilled that they're open, and they're off to a great start. And they are opening up for lunch on Mother's Day, so if you haven't made your reservations yet, they do have a few openings. Second, backed by popular demand on Mother's Day, we are doing the Build the Bouquet event from 11AM to 2PM. All these lovely locations will have flowers to give to the mom in your life or for kids to collect flowers throughout downtown, and then they can go to one of the pink locations there.

The highlighted pink locations will have wrapping, bows, paper, and everything to actually build a bouquet for their mother or for your significant mother or whatever you want. So I encourage everybody to come down, enjoy the day in Downtown Manhattan Beach. Thank you.

Thank you, Kelly.

Hello, Cassandra Sargent, Library Manager of Manhattan Beach Library. So we listened to the teens on their feedback and we are opening up our meeting room for them for their AP testing because we know that's very important times for a lot of the students. So it is through this week and then part of next week in the afternoon, we have a ton of snacks for them, space where they can study, they can hang out with their friends to take breaks, they can collaborate on work together. We try to open it a little earlier if we can, but otherwise they're welcome to use it for that entire time. And hopefully they all get A's. Thank you.

Mr. Mayor, can I ask for a question?

Cassandra. Excuse me. Cassandra. Cassandra. If you're willing, council member Howard has your question. Council member Howard.

Sorry. Quick question. Sure. Could you make these this graphic available for us? Because I'd like to push it out because we heard from the teens that not enough people know of all the wonderful things going on. So like I'd like to push

that Absolutely. So you want me to email it directly to you? Yeah.

Okay. Sure. Yeah. Thanks. Great. Sure.

Yes. Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you, Cassandra.

Evening Honorable Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem and members of the City Council. I'm Adam Feinstone, Planning Manager here. At the last City Council meeting So at the last City Council meeting, staff provided an update on the Project Pulse work effort, which is focused on the redevelopment of Parking Lot 3 And 400 Manhattan Beach Boulevard. This work effort began last August and we're just past the halfway mark on the year long community visioning and outreach process to determine the future uses of the properties. The next outreach events are hands on community workshops that will lead to the conceptual designs for the projects.

They will be on Saturday, May 30 from 2PM to 5PM and on Sunday, May 31 from 11AM to 2PM. Both workshops will be held at the Joslyn Center and the same activities for both properties will be conducted on both days to allow for maximum community involvement. Everyone is welcome whether you've participated in previous activities and or if this will be your first. We look forward to seeing you all at the events. Thank you.

Thank you. Any other members of the public care to make a community announcement? Seeing none, Patty, is anybody on Zoom?

Yes. We have Dave Fratello.

Good evening, mister mayor, mayor Pro Tem, and the members of the council. Dave Fortello. I wear a few different hats in town, but I'm, checking in tonight in the capacity as director of the parents softball classic, our annual softball tournament that raises money, through MBX for the Costa girls softball team. This is parents playing against parents affiliated, by the different schools in town. We are play yes.

It's it's a friendly match all the way all the way across the board. We are playing on Sunday, May 31. Most of the teams are formed, but if anybody is interested, they can reach out to me. I'm really easy to find online. And we are celebrating our twentieth year this year. The tournament was founded in 2006 by Ross Kay. He directed the tournament for ten years. This is my tenth year. It is a super fun event even if you're not playing, even if you don't have family in it. It's a fun thing to come check out. Our, afternoon ceremony will be at around 3PM, right before the playoffs. So I encourage people to come check it out. It's a very unique Manhattan Beach event.

Thank you.

No further requests on Zoom.

Okay. I'll turn to colleagues. Any community announcements?

Yeah. Don't have a motion.

Council member Howard?

Yes. Sorry. I just I wanted to echo well, I see I see a lot of scouts here amongst other folks. And I I didn't wear my sash, but for those of you girl scouts, and, you know, I was a girl scout. So I'm glad you're here, but I really thought what a great opportunity that Kelly Stroman talked about Mother's Day coming up and the flowers that were available. And hopefully, all these kids who are here said, oh, there's an opportunity. I thought, I wish my kids were here, but they're 30 and 31 and in New York City. So we're not doing that together. So

Okay. Go

Council do it member community announcements organization. If not, we'll move

on to public comments.

This is an opportunity for members of the public to speak on any item within the subject matter jurisdiction of the city. In addition, if you care to speak on an item that might be coming up on our agenda, we would ask you to pick either speak now or wait for the item to be called not to speak twice. And finally, if you would like us to bring the microphone to you in your seat, just raise your hand. Please.

Good evening, mayor Lesser, members of the city council. Mike Jenkins, forty eight year resident of the city. As you know, some voices in the community have been advocating that the city become a charter city. The thinking behind this proposal is that doing so will better insulate the city from state housing laws. This is categorically untrue and these voices are misinformed.

You know that I speak with some credibility on this topic having served as a city attorney for multiple cities and having taught local government laws and adjunct professor at the USC Gould School of Law both for over forty years. The law is clear that state housing laws apply to charter cities and there is no conceivable future where the legislature will allow charter cities which include the largest and most populous cities in the state to escape their obligation to provide for affordable housing while imposing that obligation solely on general law cities. Fact is that over the years, the power of general law cities has expanded and there are few if any practical benefits to charter city status and none worth the energy and cost associated with Manhattan Beach writing and adopting a charter. To the extent that this misguided idea may be getting traction in the community, if only because it is being repeated ad nauseam in social media, you might consider scheduling a community meeting at which interested members of the community obtain the actual facts about this issue. And if the city is not interested in organizing such a meeting, MB United will gladly do it.

We would welcome the use of a city meeting room at no cost to do so. On the subject of the currently proposed high rise housing projects in the overlay zones, I know that you are acutely aware that some residents don't like being told that there's nothing we can do. I also know that you have lobbied our state legislators hard, but you and I both know that changing state law is an uphill battle. Given the critical shortage of housing in the state, especially affordable housing and the continuing problem of homelessness. I share the distaste most of you have for wasting taxpayer dollars on engaging in hopeless litigation, just so that you can say that a judge in addition to the state legislature is making us comply with those laws.

All of that said, a couple of months ago I suggested that the council create a citizen housing task force that could be devoted to focusing on this issue, being a sounding board for residents and exploring alternative ways of satisfying the city's affordable housing obligations with less impact on our single family neighborhoods including collaboration with the newly formed South Bay Regional Housing Trust which our city joined. I continue to think that this is a good idea and would urge you to agendize and consider it. Thank you. Have a good evening.

Hi, Mayor Lester and counsel. Thank you for the opportunity to talk about the Scout Head. The Scout Head has been a beloved part of our community and needs to grow as our community has grown. We are all so proud of the fact that it remains the home of the very first renowned Scout Soapbox Derby race in the country. Upon the announcement that a new scout hut was in the works, I convinced Sandpipers that this would be a good use of their building fund.

The building fund that was established in 2020 had never received anything close to an appropriate request for use of those funds. Sandpipers ended up giving you the whole kit caboodle of 50,000 in the fund, which is a huge gift from a totally volunteer organization. Since then, my husband and I also made a significant donation, trusting the city would indeed build the structure that they were soliciting donations for. Now today, I'm very concerned and distrustful if we have wasted the funds and have have and am even more concerned about the influence that I had personally on Sandpipers to go ahead with this. They signed a ten year contract with the city to use their original large space monthly starting in 2027, which is now looking more like 2000 2028 or 2029.

I hear you may reduce the size of the building. This is not what they signed up to use. They're a large organization, and they have their eye on the large room. Are you going to refund donors or just do a bait and switch? You should never have presented a project and solicited for donors if there was any chance you were unable to follow through. Shame on you.

Good evening, Mayor Lasser, Mayor Pro Tem Franklin and City Council. My name is Troy Woolwage. I'm the Scoutmaster of Troop eight forty nine here in Manhattan Beach. Hey, congratulations to the Beach Cities Health District on their groundbreaking. What an exciting concept. Troop eight forty nine runs on many things, enthusiasm, adult leaders who give their time, parents, alumni support.

And I don't know if you

know, but the scouting started here in Manhattan Beach in 1921. And the first Eagle Scout was 1924, gentleman by the name of John Condon. August has been around for seventy years. In fact, we're going to celebrate our seventieth anniversary here in a few weeks. And just about seventy three years ago was the very first Pinewood Derby and here's an article from the boys life of 1954 and you can find this in the National Scouting Museum, a nice display in New Mexico and maybe I might even see a young Joe Franklin sitting in that audience back there.

Wasn't bored.

August has been giving back to the community for a long time and dozens of scout leaders, parents all have donated time, resources to make it happen not only for the Boy Scouts, but for the Girl Scouts as well. All we ever wanted was a place to meet, to plan, to organize, to share, to learn, to celebrate and to have fun. Scouting, still I think the cheapest game in town. I think Little League and soccer easily $500 plus to get in just to register. Scouting is for Boy Scouts or Scouting America now it's $170 If you can't afford it, we'll find a way to make it work for you.

We all know that Scout House is falling apart. The plumbing, there's no heater AC, there's a giant hole in the ceiling, there's a rodent issue. I invite you over to use the restrooms anytime you want. I understand the complexities of the city budget and certainly the recent decision to remove the previously approved funding is a wee bit confusing, but we have a dedicated communities and for over a decade now they've been working toward this vision and we are so close. So I'm asking you to restore the $4,600,000 contribution in the capital budget to ensure the project moves forward without delay.

And I know the right decision will be made in restoring this funding. You are not only investing in the community of all the current scouts, but the future scouts and paying respect to all the other thousands of young men and women who have been involved in scouting since the 1920s. So thank you for your time.

Good evening, mayor and council members. I've been looking at the city's revenue and expense growth over two periods, the five years before COVID and the five years after. And I want to share a concern about where we may be headed. Before COVID from 2016 to 2021, revenue and expenses grew at about the same pace, just over 2% a year. That balance kept our finances stable and predictable.

Since 2021, both have increased much faster. Revenue has grown close to 10% annually and expenses are about 7%. That may sound positive, but it's well above historical norms and unlikely to continue. This concern is this, when revenue slows and they will especially given factors outside the city's control, expenses won't come down nearly as quickly. That's how structural deficits develop.

So as you head into the budget discussions tonight, I urge you to focus not just on revenue, but on managing expenses. I encourage you to ask your department directors the following questions. What are you doing to reduce costs? How are you improving productivity? What data supports current staffing levels?

How do you compare to similar cities? And work in technology including AI help do more with the same or fewer resources. Last year, most of the discussion I heard about was about increasing revenue. I hope this year to see equal attention given to controlling costs. And finally, you've said repeatedly that increasing personnel is necessary to deliver the level of service our residents expect. I would respectfully suggest a different approach. The best service doesn't come from larger payroll, it comes from better processes, higher productivity and smarter use of resources. Thank you.

Thank you.

Let me ask everyone to hold their applause because we really want people to feel that they can express their views without being judged one way or the other.

Good evening, councilman and mayor Lesser. Mayor Lesser. It's been forty two years since I sat there as mayor Lesser. I'm Russ Lesser. So I go way back with the Scout House because believe it or not, I was a Cub Scout when the Scout House was built. My dad was on the committee that advised it and helped get it built. And in retrospect, I don't think I was paid prevailing wage, by the way. So, anyway, it's On 09/12/1962, president John Kennedy said, we're gonna put a man on the moon within the decade. Seven and a half years later, Neil Armstrong was there. It was 2012 when we started making donations for the scout house.

That's fourteen years ago, twice what it took to put a man on the moon. And it's easy to find blame and and fall, but that's not important. What's important is a lot of the community wants this project. And, it's been an embarrassment, to be honest, because I've I've only been involved preferably, but I made a rather large donation, my wife Charlotte and I did. And we also sent out a lot of letters to people asking them to donate. And we recently, a few years ago, sent another one saying, once we get this donation, we're so close, we're gonna start immediately. I've had a few people say, you really didn't know what you were talking about. And unfortunately, they're correct. So where are we now? That's the question.

And I think the question is, I don't think we're gonna have a lot of luck raising more money from the community because of the way this has come over the last twelve years or fourteen years, excuse me. So it's up to the city to make a decision. And the decision, in my opinion, should be let's find the money in the capital account to build this project. The old Scout House is way overdue for its death, and we need this new facility for our community. So I would hope you would seriously consider finding the funds, putting back the funds that were sort of taken out, I don't know exactly how, and finding a way to build this project and get it going because I think the vast majority of the city wants it, and let's find a way to make it happen.

So on another subject, real quickly on the zoning. Several years ago, Bill Brand when the when the state took away the city's zoning rights, mayor Bill Brand of Redondo Beach, who was very four sided, started a group called Our Neighborhood Voices, and it was to get the zoning rights back to the cities. And unfortunately, he died, and it kinda lot people lost interest in this because they didn't really see what it was gonna be doing to their community. Now that people see what it's gonna do in their community, they wanna do something about it. The only way to do it is to get an initiative on the ballot.

And so and that takes money. So a group called Our Neighborhood Voices, if you go to ourneighborhoodvoices.com, if you can donate, that's gonna help put this ballot measure on the 28 ballot so we can get the zoning rights back to the city. So please consider contributing to that organization. Thank you.

Good evening, Honorable Mayor, members of the City Council, Louis Tamaro, architect. Think you probably remember me, I've been working on this project for quite a while. I thought tonight here we could give you an update at least where we're at with the city process and the approval process and just kind of talk for a few minutes about what we've done to the building to try to help get this back into some reasonable cost. Obviously, the city has been looking at the plans. We've obviously been working with them together.

As of today, we're a week and a half into our final round of plan checks. So with fingers crossed, we see this project being in a permit ready position probably in a couple of weeks. The process of plan check has been going very smoothly. We've kind of hashed out all the big issues. We've also received approval from the health department for the kitchen that is in the facility.

So we feel very comfortable about the plans that we have here tonight. There's been a number of changes that have happened and some things that we've done to kind of cut back on cost, adjusting door systems, relocating mechanical systems. I won't even I had them outlined here, but I know we're short on time. So I wanted to just say that we've really tried to do everything within our ability to help with the cost of this project. We've really pushed it forward and listened to the city about what they want to see in it, made adjustments to the plans and we're there. We're at the finish line with being ready to actually start construction. So, we'd like to see this project a reality. It's been a lot of hard work and a long journey for everybody. Thank you.

Julie Justice McGinnity, Friends of Senior and Scout Community Center. Thank you, Louie, for talking a little bit about where we are in the plan and design phase. We're there, we're ready. We need to get this building financed so we can get it out to bid and break ground. I want to take you through a little bit of a refresh on the planned uses of this space.

So the new community center will create additional meeting rooms for older adults, youth, and the general public. All of our meeting spaces are highly impacted. We need additional meeting space. This facility includes a demonstration kitchen. One of the things that we talked about last council meeting in the library consultants report is a really use that many communities are looking to grow.

This facility has it. Beach City's health district contributed $150,000 to this effort in order to do cooking demonstrations and nutrition classes in that space. It includes a maker space, another item that was talked about by the library consultant just last week. Sandpipers donated $50,000 to name the maker space. We have a thousand square feet dedicated for senior lounge.

This is drop in space for our seniors. Very, very important to give seniors the opportunity to come together and have opportunity for social time, getting away from being in their own homes. And it includes an outdoor courtyard. The space between the Jocelyn Center and the new building surrounding the historic pine tree, this creates the kind of outdoor space that you all, I think, are interested in and discussed at the meeting last week about two weeks ago about maybe putting at the top of Parking Lot 3. That space exists in the courtyard.

It does make sense to finance buildings that are going to serve our community for fifty years in the future with bonds that we're going to pay for over the course of thirty years. It's your choice. Do you put the cash back in the CIP and float a smaller bond or do you keep the money that you took out of the CIP last year and float a larger bond? That's your choice. But I think the fact of the matter is is that there is possible for you to work with bond counsel to protect your triple a bond rating.

You can marry these bonds with bonds for a revenue generating facility like Parking Lot 3. Just one more minute. And you can make this happen. It needs to happen tonight because any additional punt is more money. Thank you very much for your consideration. Thank you.

Hello, everyone. My name is Erica Netting. I've been a resident of Manhattan Beach for twenty six years and a Girl Scout leader in Manhattan Beach for twenty years. I have two daughters that were Girl Scouts and a son that was a Boy Scout. And I'm here tonight to ask just one thing, to reinstate the city's $4,600,000 commitment to the community center project in the 2627 capital improvement plan.

As we heard from Louie and Julie, the project is ready. The plans are complete. They've already gone through years of designing and redesigning and reducing costs and meeting requirements. There's really nothing left to figure out, just a decision to act. Meanwhile, the community, including myself, my two Girl Scout troops, and 47 other Girl Scout troops in Manhattan Beach, I'm sure a lot of the girls here tonight, have already delivered, raising $2,700,000 in good faith.

The city accepted those funds back in 2023 and has already spent a portion of them. Reallocating the city's contribution at this point is a break in the commitment with the girl scouts that donated their hard earned cookie money in exchange for a scout house that they hope to use. Additionally, three out of five current city council members supported the funding previously and are personally donors to the project. So this makes following through on this commitment even more important. As Julie said, delay is not saving money, it's costing money.

Material they tried to reduce materials cost in the last iteration, but labor cost and taxes are going up and will continue to do so. Also, the redesigning and downsizing of the project won't solve the problem. It decreases the scope slightly, but it increases the cost per square foot, and it restarts the clock. Our need is urgent. The current Scout House is beyond repair.

Just like Troy said, and I've experienced, and every Girl Scout and Boy Scout in this room has experienced, we've spent time there. The Jocelyn Center is also at capacity. These facilities just can't support the 500 Girl Scouts in Manhattan Beach who currently lack adequate space. And additionally, our older adult population is the fastest growing age group in our city, so we need programming space for both of these groups. As Julie said, this this project is not just a cost, it's also a revenue opportunity.

Expanded programming and rentals can generate ongoing income, which the Girl Scouts are willing to support. I've observed and personally participated in this decade long community supported effort to fill a need that was evident to me many years before that. How much longer will this drag on? Please restore the $4,600,000 contribution to this project and move forward to construction. Thank you.

Good evening. My name is Syrah Sadat, and I am a senior patrol leader at Scout Troop eight forty nine, and we need a new scout house. Our current scout house is in desperate need for repair and is used by many organizations. It has seen better days. While our troop is over 50 members, when everyone shows up, it's a full house, and when we are pushed to the edges.

I guess that's a good problem to have, but our troop needs a new place to meet, so do the Girl Scouts. When I joined the troop in 2021, there was a promise of a new scout house to be shared among the few organizations. The adult leaders and numerous supporters of scouting have been working on this effort for many years, and now here we are. I'm not sure why it's taking so long. I only know that a new scout house is needed for the community. Many current and future scouts, both boys and girls, will benefit from this new building. My hope is that we get this started. Thank you for your time.

Thank you.

Good

evening. My name is Leslie Moody. I've been a member of Sandpiper since 2008, and I'm the current chair of the Sandpiper South Bay Community Fund. And I'm here to speak in support of funding the senior and scout community center. In 2024, Sandpiper's entered into an agreement with the Friends of the Community Center and the city because the city had clearly committed to this project, including the 4,600,000 contribution alongside more than 2,300,000 in community donations.

Sandpiper believes so strongly in this community center that we contributed $50,000 from our community development fund as Joanne mentioned, a contribution that the city accepted and cashed. So tonight, it's deeply disappointing to see the city back away from that commitment by removing those funds from the community center plan. Community organizations and residents step forward in good faith because we believe the city was our partner in getting this done. Tonight, you honored Sandpipers for ninety five years of service, charitable giving, and community partnerships. We're proud of that partnership with Manhattan Beach and the Greater South Bay.

And now we ask that the city demonstrate that same commitment to its partners and this community by restoring the funds to the community center and moving this project forward. Thank you.

Thank you. Speaker, please. Hi.

Good evening good evening council members. My name is Susan Bettner. I'm a lifetime resident of Manhattan Beach, local realtor, and I've also raised my family here. The reason I'm here tonight is to ask that you please make rebuilding of the Joslyn Center and Scout House a real priority in this city's budget, in this year's budget. The project's been on the city's books now for some time, at least seven or eight years that I know of personally, and a lot of family scouts and seniors have continued believing that this project would eventually happen.

For my family, this is personal. My son Drew spent many hours in that scout house and is a proud Eagle Scout from troop eight forty nine. My daughter Renee's art was showcased for many years in the Jocelyn Center during the hometown fair art contests, and council member Haworth has also awarded her one time a contest for the Girl Scouts hundredth centennial badge. She won some some art award way back when. The Joslyn Center and the Scout House hold a lot of memories for many kids and families alike, but the reality is that both are very old structures and in need of major repair.

Years ago, when the idea was rebuilding was first being discussed, the Scouts were encouraged to buy commemorative bricks and submit quotes that would become part of the future building. Drew proudly bought one himself for $500 and for a kid, $500 was a lot back then and it's a lot now. He also wrote a really funny quote by the way. A lot of the other families donated as well. I also donated and as a realtor and community member, I personally encourage people to support the project because we believe the city was committed to making it happen.

People gave because they believed they were helping build something meaningful that future generations would someday enjoy. And I think that matters. And I think not just because money was raised, but because kids remember that when adults keep their word, and when they don't, and communities remember too. To me, the Scout House and Jocelyn Center are part of the heart of Manhattan Beach, a legacy piece much like Metlocks is. When the city bought the Metlock site and way back when, I think it was around five million dollars, you can even buy a new home for that now here, that likely felt like a big investment too, and now Metlocks is one of the most vibrant gathering places in the city.

To me, this isn't a vanity project, it's community infrastructure for seniors, scouts, families, community events, and future generations. As our city continues to grow and evolve, I just hope we place priority on investing in spaces that bring people together. I don't know if those Scout House quotes are still kept anywhere, but I really do hope so. I'm not even sure where the money went, but I do know my kids and their friends would love to come back and walk the hometown fair one day and show their families a place where their lives were shaped and their memories were made. To me, this is the kind of investment that keeps Manhattan Beach feeling like Manhattan Beach, and I respectfully ask that you make the Scout House Senior Center project a meaningful priority this year. Thank you.

Thank you.

Hello. My name is Liz Hallinan. I'm a second grade Grandview mom. I'm a Brownie troop leader, and I'm also the service unit manager for Girl Scouts at Manhattan Beach. What that means is I basically help create community and bring all the Girl Scouts troops together and make sure they have events that they can all come together and learn together. I guess I just wanted to talk about how I I understand that you guys probably have a million different priorities, and I do not envy the decisions you guys have to make for the city. I guess I'm really glad that Beach City's Health talked about how we have a problem with loneliness and with the idea of isolation because my argument to

you guys is you should

fund the Scout House because we need more places in Manhattan Beach where people can come together as a community. We teach our girls about civic civic engagement. It's not just about cookies. It's not just about being outdoors. It's about, as my second grade brownie would say, making the world a better place. And we need a place where the community can gather and learn how to be engaged with our community in a way that they're treated like residents, members, friends, and not just consumers. And so I'd really urge you guys to do what you can, make the hard decisions. I know it's not easy, but we really need a place like this. We need to see you guys investing in us as residents, as a community, to give us places where we can be people and not just spenders. Thank you.

Mister mayor, wasn't your daughter mayor for the day?

She was mayor for the day.

Her daughter. The little second grader when she was in first grade. Good

evening. Mayor Lester and council, my name is Doctor. Tom Cotton and I've been a resident on second street for fifty years. My wife and family moved here when we were in their twenties and like my neighbors, we haven't moved. I was most interested in what your father was talking about, about zoning rights.

Wait. Wait. Wait.

And I knew I knew back

in the Sir,

I'll I'll give you more time. Why there's some chuckles in the audience? Because fortunately, call Russ Lesser a very good friend, but we're actually not related. So that's the reason for the chuckles. I see.

I thought it

was kind of

an interesting joke. No, it's only that,

but please you may proceed with your Well, time

I'm new coming back here. I haven't been battling around since the late '80s. When Bob Holmes was there, Steve Littlegram or no, Littlegram was in planning commission and Napolitano was a pup on the lot. And I was struck as I was driving in here tonight to remember his quote, boy, did we ever make a mistake on business land? We'll never do that again.

So I'm strongly opposing that monolith that they are putting up or thinking about putting up on 2nd Street. I have a lot of people that feel the same way that are not here tonight, that we're too old or too difficult or whatever, but we feel very strongly, and I wanna go further. If anyone doesn't know 2nd Street, come down sometime and watch the nearest coast of traffic. And with no disparagement to our police officers, it is a nightmare. I live in the house where the stop sign is.

Out of 10 people, seven will slow down, three will stop, one will blow through like they don't even see it, and it's even more fun before six in the morning. So I'm suggesting that the idea of putting in a building of that magnitude is nuts. Furthermore, it's absolutely wrong and leaves us in a liability. I'm also a commercial pilot besides being a doctor. If I ever load that plane, we don't get off the ground.

If a plane then has that kind of manifest, the city would be manifest, would be also liable for that. I don't know if it's the governor that's pushing you or what or everybody's saying that we don't have the strength to do that. I don't believe it. I believe we have a lot of power and can do something. So I really hope that whatever is going on in your minds, why ever in the world we come down here to have to fight this stuff, There's a plan for the city. Why? Can you tell me is that always violated? Why do we have to spend our time frame down here convincing people? Well, yeah, the greed out there, is that pushing that hard? Yeah.

That's why we're here. And I hope sincerely that you take that in the quiet of your mind that this walks through for a while and maybe save Second Street. If that thing goes on up there, that street will become impassable for many hours of the day. I don't believe for a second it has a whole lot to do with lower income housing. That has to do with all the stuff in the high rise with a two ten degree view of the ocean. They're going to put all the lower income people in there really? Come on. So I ask you to be honest with yourself and help our community. We are all very lucky to live here. Any of us know that.

The sign down there in that little store says, you know, if you're in Manhattan Beach, you're lucky enough. There's a reason for that. We are the stewards of this place. The greedy, non thinking people would push this thing out of the ocean and cement it clear past the pier. So it's up to us to push hard and really hard and push till it breaks. Thank you for your time.

Thank you, Doug. Yes.

Hi there. My name is Kenneth Thompson. I've been a resident of this town way too long. And on behalf of the seniors in this group who are slowly inching towards expiration dates, I have with me a copy of a document that was the original MOU between the city and the senior and scouts that was with Mr. Lilligren here from 2011, at which point we thought the whole project was going to cost about $2,100,000 and that the completion date would be by 2014.

Well, as much as it's gone over everything in scope and budget, I still think it's a good idea. And I still think we're not getting any more space in the city, and it's still worth doing because every minute that we just keep going on is just one less minute we have to get her done. And that's it. That's all I got.

Thank you.

Good evening, Mayor and City Council. I'm Tim Lulligren, the one that was mentioned a couple times previous. And doctor Cotton, I remember you well.

It's a

k. But for full disclosure, I'm also the city current city treasurer. Also the treasurer of the Man Beach Property Owners Association that donated the $800,000 to get this project moving. Also was a parent of a past girl scout and boy scout. My son was this whole project started at a scout at a cub scout meeting with my son at the scout house.

It's a true story. He is now graduated from college and two years into the Navy. So soon to be promoted to a lieutenant. I'm also a former council member. So I've been in your position, and I have seen and I know how difficult the budgeting process is.

But while we're on council, I'm going to this is a little bit of a challenge for you. While we're on council, the state of Apolitano also, we purchased and constructed the Marines Marine Avenue Park. We purchased Metlocks and got that flowing. That's a partnership with a private entity though. We planned and rebuilt the police fire station.

We purchased the LA County Library on Man Beach Boulevard which is now the Arts Center. But it came at a cost. We ignored the buildings, the existing buildings. And my fear is, my thought is that they've been ignored ever since. The Scout House need a replacing when we were when I was on council back in the nineties.

And today, you've heard testimony, it is just it's in terrible tailbone shape. If you haven't been in it, I'll take you on a tour because anyway. Now, today, the five year CIP has the page for the Scout House. It has 2,100,000 that the Friends of donated. The rest of the five years is blank.

It tells me it is not a priority at this point in time with the city. What I'm asking you to do tonight and what your what other people speakers are asking you to do tonight is make it a priority. If a council under the same relatively same financial situation as you have now did all these other things, there is a way to make this 7,000 square foot building work. So I'm asking you to ignore the reasons why it can't and concentrate on making it work. Thank you. Good

evening honorable mayor, mayor pro tem and distinguished council members. Tonight, I'm actually wearing two hats, the Manhattan Beach Community Emergency Response Team, known as CERT, and, of course, the Scout House. So first, CERT. How many CERT members do we have in the audience? Raise your hand.

And we have to get some council members in the program. I'm the cofounder of the CERT program nineteen years ago, and I can attest personally that over the years there have been many lives saved, either family members or neighbors that suffered a stroke or a heart attack or they were first on scene of an accident, whether at work, home, or an auto accident. You know, just saving one life is money well spent. So I urge you to support the $10,000 allocation in the current year operating budget. Okay.

Now the scout house. Seniorscout house or community center. You know, I take friends to the hometown fair, and people say, oh, we have to go to the bathroom, and they want to go into the Scout House. Some of them do. And the first comment that they and our residents say, that filthy, disgusting looking building, this is Manhattan Beach.

What a disgrace. And I know Louie tomorrow would tell you, or anybody will tell you, it's not seismically sound. God forbid, I hope no one is in there when we have the big one. Mayor Lesser had doctor Lucy Jones in his mayor town hall meeting, and she was talking about it's not a matter of if, but when. Okay.

So all of you know that I'm a former two term council member and mayor, but I learned my leadership skills as an Eagle Scout. And I know we have these fine Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts and Cub Scouts and Weeblows. It's actually all now one, scouting. It develops community leaders. Well, what are we telling them? And what are we telling our senior citizens? Oh, and by the way, I serve on the city's senior advisory committee. You know, what statement are we making when this thing keeps getting kicked, the gets kicked down the road? You know, and as that's happening, costs are escalating. We all know that.

So I would implore you all to put the project back at the top instead of on the back burner of the CIP. Thank you.

Mayor Lesser and Councilman and Women. My name is Dave Salzman, I'm a real estate broker and I joined scouting program in 1959. I joined the Earth in 1953, so that puts me as both a scout and a senior. So I have a double interest in seeing this project go, okay? I'm not going to tell you why you should do it because we all know it should be done.

The question seems to be money. Doesn't it always come down to money? And I understand the problems that we are facing here in terms of coming up with the dough. I've heard budgets anywhere from 9,600,000 to $16,000,000 I don't know what the current budget is, whatever it is, it's a big number. I'm not here to tell you why you should do it, we all know why we should do it.

The question is how do we pay for it and how does it come to be such a gigantic number, okay? So I had I thought I'd give a little bit of a different perspective than telling you why you need to do it and instead talk about alternatives. And these are not real alternatives, these are financial alternatives. Just around the corner, 624 14th Street, by the way you know I'm a realtor, right, okay, is a 7,000 foot lot in a 5,800 square foot house sold for $9,300,000 We could have bought that. Now should we?

Probably not. My point is, what is how is it possible for the budget of this project to accelerate to the point where you can build a house on the Strand for less money than you can build. By the way, these numbers include the land and the Scout House does not include the land. The budget number and I know I'm telling you things you already know, but I think we need to get them on the pay on paper and in front of the public is the price is really the limiting factor for otherwise accomplishing a mission that the entire community wants to accomplish. My question is how could this possibly have occurred?

I do have one example for you. I was I'm from Scottsdale, Arizona. My dad built a HUD project, HUD spec required in Scottsdale, Arizona, a 10 foot snow load. That building is sitting there now with a 10 foot snow load in Scottsdale, Arizona, okay. There was no way to avoid it. So I understand the problems here. I've experienced them myself. I'm on my one hundred and ninety ninth building project, okay? And I know these costs can accelerate something fierce. Somehow, someway, we have to figure out a way to kind of rein in the cost here to the extent that we can. To the extent that I can help, I'll be happy to do it. I'm Dave Salzman. Thank you for your time.

Good evening, Mayor Lesser and City Council members. My name is Bonnie Schwartz. I'm a longtime resident of Manhattan Beach, a parent of three former scouts, and I've been on the board of Friends and Seniors Scout Community Center for nine years. During those years, I've seen the small group of volunteer board members rally together to support a seemingly simple cause, evolve the current disintegrated facility at 1617 North Valley to a larger, more functional space designed to serve two important groups, our beloved seniors who cherish the older adults program being offered, and our scouting community who represent the future, an intergenerational space which provides a house for two key growing populations. On the surface, this appears to be a very straightforward objective that has generated wide community support.

However, due to the complexities of the public private partnership, this task has proven to be much more bureaucratic than anyone could have imagined, and as a result has taken an inordinate amount of time and resources. In compliance with the signed agreement, our small but mighty board has been able to raise $2,800,000 to fund the design and support construction costs. We have been relentless in our quest to fulfill our obligation and have been soliciting donors for over ten years. There are five twenty unique donors ranging from 8 and 40,804 thousand dollars to $5 Our donors consist of local entrepreneurs, community groups, scouting groups, as well as many senior residents and local corporations. Many current and previous council members and mayors are among those donors, and some have assisted in our fundraising efforts.

As Julie said, we are ready to go. We understand that costs have increased over the past ten years and that the city has multiple projects that need funding. But the key issue here, I believe, is not money. As has been mentioned before, the key issue is priorities. A long time ago, the city decided replacing this building was a priority and set up conditions to make that happen.

The city needs to prioritize this project in the CIP now, restore the original budget line item, and figure out funding opportunities for that balance. We owe it to our seniors, many of whom are concerned they won't be alive to take advantage of this beautiful new building. We owe it to our scouting community who needs an up to date structure to continue their important youth programs. And finally, we owe it to all of our donors who dug deep and said, this cause is important to me and I want to support it. They have been so very patient over the years, but they're getting less patient every day we wait and are finding our explanations for why it's taking so long and less believable.

Council members, I implore you to instruct staff to proceed with the current plans, focus on this project, and prioritize the funding so that Manhattan Beach can finally get the building we all need. Thank you for your time.

Good evening, counsel. My name is Hugo Firth. I am the Committee Chair at Troop eight forty nine, a position I've held for about a dozen years. I've been active in the scouting program for over twenty years and lived in Manhattan Beach for nearly forty years. And I was privy to some of the early discussions with Julie when Tim Lilligrand's group donated the money with Bonnie, and so I've seen it come.

And I used a kid that I supported the program for my three kids as a scout parent, but I'm gonna end up using it as a senior. I'm not even sure I'm going to get to do that now. But what I wanted to tell you tonight because you've heard all the voices and they seem to be pretty unanimous is that in my position, I get asked often, what is going on with the Scout House? And my answer is always a very embarrassing, I have no idea. Okay. I used to kid that Gringo's had a sign that said free beer tomorrow. And I tell people, well, that's when the Scout House is gonna be built next year. So please, as everyone else has said, I implore you to make this the priority that the community feels it should be. Thank you.

Good evening, mayor Lesser, mayor Pro Tem Franklin, and esteemed council members, thank you for your service. I came to talk about the budget and the salaries tonight, but I have to pause for a moment and say that I was a boy scout many years ago, and I had an alcoholic father who never mentored me. He never took me to lunch once in my entire life to tell me about what life was about. But Dick Carper, Mr. Blumenfeld and Mr.

Doran in my sculpture showed me what wholesome male leadership looks like. And so not only is the city on the hook for some integrity by accepting money early in earlier years, but you have no idea the lives that you'll touch with this facility. Let me talk just briefly about salaries and with all due respect to the esteemed staff here. Paul Wafer has recently published that we have 34 employees earning over 100 excuse me, dollars 300,000 a year, and nine of those 34 are in excess of $400,000 a year. So that puts them in the top 2% to 3% of income nationally, And we're of a small city of 32,000 people.

We currently are on the hook for Chief Abel's pension, and I understand we don't pay all of it. Some of it comes from CalPERS. Chief Johnson has indicated desire to retire in about two years. So we'll be on the hook for 90% of her salary, would be in the neighborhood of 300,000, and then we get the privilege of hiring a third chief for one position. So basically, we're paying three salaries for one position.

And it's just quite simply not sustainable. Trustee Charillian rolled over our obligation of pensions into a long term bond, and we can keep our strong rating. But ultimately, that idea is not sustainable. So I'd like to invite the council to take a serious look at not just revenue, but where can we cut expenses to make this city fiscally healthy. Thank you.

Good evening, mayor, mayor tem, and council members. My name is Christopher Richardson. I am the president of the Manhattan Beach Community Response Team, or also known as MBCERT. I'm here tonight along with other CERT members to thank you for allowing us to submit a funding request, which I believe is number nine on tonight's agenda. MVCERT is an all volunteer organization committed to enhance disaster preparedness and response in our city.

Now since our inception, we have trained over 700 residents. We teach the twenty hour FEMA approved curriculum that covers basic skills we all need to take care of ourselves, our families, and neighbors in case of a disaster. Now these classes are free to those who live and work in Manhattan Beach. They are hands on and include disaster preparedness, and in case of an emergency, how and when to turn off our gas and water, fire suppression, and basic first aid. And if requested by the city during a disaster, we can activate to two preset locations in the city and deploy teams to collect information to forward via radio to the emergency operations center.

Now we teach Red Cross certified CPR AED first aid classes six times a year and have trained more than 1,700 students. We also offer medical and radio communication classes each year to our members. We have a role in the city's emergency operations plan and the annual Great Shakeout Drill. And for the past thirteen years, our volunteers have provided medical standby services for local community events, including the six man volleyball tournament, hometown fair and the Chevron Grand Prix bike race. In conjunction with Neighborhood Watch and the Manhattan Beach Fire Department, we are reinvigorating the Map Your Neighborhood program, which complements the longer cert class.

That's a one point five hour presentation created to help our neighbors customize a plan for their blocks to help one another in a disaster until first responders can arrive. We make it easy to implement. All we need is someone on a block to host the meeting. We then provide a coordinator to guide the host through all the steps and provide paperwork needed such as suggestions to facilitate the meeting and invitations, telephone, email, tree forms, and special skills anyone might have. And we have trainers to run the meeting.

For more information, please visit our website at mbcerta.org. That's mbcerta.org. I thank you again for your time and consideration regarding our funding request.

Good evening, mayor Lesser and council members. My name is Steve Debates. I have been on the senior advisory committee since 2013. And then in 2016, I joined the Friends group also. So I've been been doing both of them. And I wanted to give you a look, a little insight into the senior programming at Jocelyn. Right after COVID, we saw a big up spike in activity at the senior center, at Joslyn Center. And it has just continued to grow and grow and grow. I also lead a discussion group on Monday mornings, and I'm the moderator of that. We started out with seven people.

We are now up to 35 to 40. We have an exercise class that started out one day a week, had 10 people in it. They run it three days a week and have over 90 people in it. Every one of our classes is just bulging. We need more space.

We did in November '4 run a survey, a satisfaction survey of all of our seniors. And we asked them in each class how satisfied they are with the class. And we had a 94% positive response to all the classes. And so the classes and the programs that we are offering there are meeting the needs of our seniors. One thing we hear when we do the Hometown Fair every year is it's not only seniors, but it's adults that come up to our table at the Hometown Fair and say, need to get my parent out of the house.

They watch TV all day long. And hearing the stats from the Beach City's health district of twenty percent having mental health issues because of not being involved. We are the place where they could be involved. We want them to come. We invite them to come. And I have a program here or a monthly our monthly newsletter, and I'd like to pass it out to you. It is chock full of classes that we offer. I have been to other cities and looked at their programming. They have one or two pages for an entire city, three times ours. You know, three times the size of ours.

Ours has, what, 16 pages? It's chock full of activities from from trips to discussion groups to exercise classes to yoga to, you know, and everything you could wanna do. But we need more space. We need more space for our seniors. We need more space for our public. And we need more space for our scouts. Thank you. Thank you.

Hi. My name is Heather Kim. When Manhattan Beach adopted its housing plan, we were flying blind because we had no idea what our neighbor cities had negotiated with the state. What did Carmel get away with, and what did Coronado figure out? What did Hermosa Beach do when Sacramento came a knocking? Nobody knew because nobody was finished. Well, now every single city in California has turned in their housing homework which is public information. Hundreds of approved plans have been stamped and blessed by the same state agency that approved our crappy plan. It's like finally getting to see everyone else's test answers after the exam. But here's the catch, there are tens of thousands of pages of it.

A typical housing element runs 300 to 600 pages and multiply that by all the cities and you have a lot of documents that will take a team of lawyers a year to read and nobody has time for that. But AI does and that changes everything. What used to cost $400,000 and take six months can now be done in days. And you can actually read what other cities negotiated and you can find things that our original plan completely missed. Legal tools that HCD has already said yes to.

Last year at the community forum at Joslyn Center, I overheard a current city council person say to a constituent, We can't amend our plan or will trigger builders remedy. And I want to address that directly because that's utter BS. In July 2024, Carmel City's, Carmel's City Council passed a formal resolution directing staff to develop alternative housing sites specifically to remove some sensitive properties from their plan. They didn't hide from HCD. They walked right up to them and said, we want to amend our certified plan.

Here's our replacement strategy. Please review it. They submitted a draft amendment, and it is currently in the sixty day review period. There is no builder's remedy, no decertification, no apocalypse. Just a city doing exactly what any reasonable city should do when their plan isn't working the way they intended and fixing it through the proper process. Carmel is doing exactly that now in protecting its small count town character, avoiding high rises and working with the state to replace problem sites with church properties, hotel conversions, ADUs, and small live workspaces, four stories max anywhere in the city. And the state is reviewing it seriously because the numbers and strategies legally sound. The safety aspect makes this urgent for Manhattan Beach. Many people have died on Sepulveda. Let that sink in.

That's something that should keep you up at night. The city is in active meetings, regarding all these safety issues with the state. And California housing law has an explicit exception for exactly the situation. So here's what I wanna know. Why weren't our city planners using the same AI tools that developers are using? And basically, I'm not gonna have time to finish the rest of it, but I really want a response about AI usage in the city, and we don't need to hire deputy to do anything. We need to utilize AI. I'm just a a stay at home housewife, mom works a little bit, and I was able to Google this and use Chatuchiki and other AI forums to figure some of this out.

Thank

you. Oh, and I have some

boba I would like to share with all of you

guys. So you guys worked so hard for us.

So I'm gonna leave this box

here. There's like frozen smoothies,

meals very nice.

So please help yourself.

Thank you, Ms. Kim. Maybe we could put it to the side of the podium because there might be some other speakers, but thank you very much. Thank you.

That's very kind, Heather.

Thank you. Are there any other speakers in chambers that would care to address counsel during public comment?

Anyone have milkshakes, ice cream,

cookies? Anyone else in chambers? Would you like to speak?

No. She's ready.

Would you like to

No. In which case, Patty, is anybody on Zoom that would care to provide a public comment?

Yes. First, we have Jim Burton.

Good evening, mister mayor, member of council. I wanted to speak tonight on the budget issue. And I think like one of the earlier callers concerned about the increases in expenditures not being sustainable, and I think he provided some statistics over the last five years. Certainly, our revenue has gone up, but expenditures have gone up. And I'm not gonna belabor a bunch of points here, but as you get into it, really look at what it takes to cut some of these expenditures.

I I I don't know that there's a need for additional staff. I think there were six new positions or something. I did appreciate the comment from one of the callers or one of the individuals there in chamber just about we're paying city staff and just to the perish commitments for the same position multiple times. I mean, I think that there's a lot of new things that are happening that the city is is, faced with, and just what really want to tighten the budget, be fiscally responsible. Yet at the same time, I'm listening to the the scout house folks and all of that discussion.

I think we need to live up to our commitment for what we said we were gonna do way back when. And instead of new things, we have all these new ideas and new technologies and things that are being implemented. How about support whatever our initial commitment was back to this particular feature within the heart of downtown because it it is it is a community project that I think would would benefit the community. I'm gonna leave it at that. Thank you very much for your time.

Thank you. Next,

we have Michael Tober.

Your honorable mayor and city council members, my name is Michael Talber. My wife and I have been residents since 1978 and raised our three sons within the Manhattan Beach school system. They were active members of Manhattan Beach Boy Scouts troop eight forty nine, where I was an assistant Boy Scout leader and committee chair of the troop. Currently, I'm the committee chair for the Friends of the Senior and Scout Community Center, an organization dedicated to raising funds to rebuild the structure known as the Scout House. We are also a five zero one c three.

Our current active committee board members are Beth Gessner, Julie Justice Mckinney, Bonnie Schwartz, and Steve Debates. We have been very active in this endeavor for many years now, and we would like to see its completion expedited. In 2010, we floated the idea of rebuilding the current Stout House. Many members of the troop eight forty nine approached community leaders and spoke to members of the city council. They were all in agreement with the positive feedback to explore and move forward, and we did.

Through fundraising and community input, we developed an idea to be an all inclusive community center with provisions for a dedicated space for a senior center. The plans of a new senior and scout community center would be a multigenerational facility providing new additional programs. Since 2013, our committee has raised $2,800,000. The city council agreed to provide additional funding in 2019, 2022, and 2023 committing to a total of $4,700,000 in the CIP, but have continually stalled the progress of this project. Our committee, our and our donors, and many of the community are frustrated that the building has not broken ground yet.

We have completed and complied with all of the city's requests, including construction ready plans. The project has been pushed down the road too many years and need to be completed now. We believe the current programs through parks and recreation offered by the city are at its capacity. With a new community center, it could provide an expansion of activities, generating revenues into the future. Let's get this done. Thank you.

No further requests on Zoom.

Okay. Any further

public comments in chamber? Seeing none, we'll close public comment. There has been a request for a very brief recess. So we will stand in recess for five minutes. Thank you all.

Really appreciate it.

Didn't even do was

like, fill my eyes.

Pegasus. Pegasus, we're ready to go live. I feel I can it's better. I won't be drinking.

I'd to call back to order our city council meeting of Tuesday, May 5, and we'll now proceed with item number h, the consent calendar. Their motion to approve all items on the consent calendar except for item number six.

There's a

motion by council member Howard with the second by council member Sherrilli,

you can

call for

the question.

I'm glad you pulled.

Motion passes five zero.

Thank you. We now move on to item number, excuse me, items pulled from the consent calendar. I pulled item number six. Just a few questions and then I will make a motion. Once there's public comment. Chief, this item number six is consideration of a first reading of an ordinance amending the Manhattan Beach municipal code related to bicycles to supplement safety and operational requirements for electric and motorized bicycles and institute a juvenile diversion program. And one of the key components has to do with writing in a dangerous manner. And I wanted to better understand for the you explain for the public what that actually means.

Certainly. Good evening. Mayor Lester, members of city council, Rachel Johnson, your police chief. And in the code, the proposed code, that dangerous driving dangerous riding would be defined as intentionally lifting one or more wheels of a bicycle, electric bicycle, or motorized bicycle into the air while riding on a street, lane, or bike path, intentionally swerving or riding around stopped or slowed traffic, attempting to perform any acrobatic trick or stunt, and finally operating a bicycle, electric bicycle, or motorized bicycle in any manner that endangers the operator, passengers, other motorists, other riders, or pedestrians in the area.

Okay. That's just reading the language, but that seems relatively straightforward with regard to the culpability of parents for the actions parents or guardians for the actions of juveniles. Can you explain how it applies?

Certainly, when a juvenile offender receives a citation, we always include the contact information for the parents on the citation, and we notify the parents just letting the parents know that their child received a citation and the and the circumstances involved therein. With regard to the juvenile diversion program for these bicycle citations, parental participation is an important component of it. So there's not only a financial impact should they just elect to pay for the citation, but also there is a there it's impacts for the parents as well when it comes to diversion they have to attend as well and learn about bike safety with their child.

Thank you. And then finally, how would a proposed diversion program work? It's just for juveniles at this point?

Yes, Mayor. Would be just for juveniles at this point and really aimed at first time offenders for any provisions of our municipal code where we would divert them to diversion program again like I discussed it's a full eight hour day of diversion and the parents are required to participate as well with the goal of having them understand the nature of their violation, why it's dangerous and how they can move forward in a safer manner.

Thank you chief. I'm moving quickly just because we have a few other items on the agenda tonight. Council member, any other questions at this point? Thank you, chief. Open this item up for public comment. Any members of the public that care to address this item that are in chamber? Seeing none, Patty, is anybody on Zoom for item number six?

No requests on Zoom.

In which case, close public comment, I have made a motion to accept this. We are all seeing every day from my comments, these sort of actions particularly among miners on electronic bicycles. Our city has been taking a leading role in revising its old old code and updating it with regard to capturing some of conduct that's occurring today and this is the next step. I very much support of moving forward with further regulation within the law. And so that is why I've made a motion to approve it. Other council colleagues?

I'm glad you I pulled was actually going to pull it to highlight exactly the same things that we I don't think it's that we should stop. We have to keep looking for ways to keep folks safe and to encourage safe usage. So appreciate the work we're doing.

Thank you. Any other comments? Yes,

I may. So, the Chief and I, had a one on one, earlier this week and, I believe she's doing that with all the council members and my focus is this brings into focus the responsibility of the parent. I think we all had kids where we'd say, hey, don't do that, don't do that. They say yes, yes, yes. And they walk down the street, and they do that. Okay. I have one that successfully made it through the marine corps. I don't know how because he didn't really pay too much attention to authority figures. But I think that's important. And that's what I think this does.

We do it already. We do get the parent involved. It, you know, provides an opportunity for the whole family to learn how important it is for safety. The last thing we want is a report of a child being hurt, if not worse on an e bicycle. So thank you colleagues for and the Chief and City Manager for providing these new ordinances. Great. Thank you.

Any other comments?

If not, we'll call for the question. Is there a second? There is a second. Excuse me, I've made a motion and that has been seconded by Mayor Per Tem Franklin.

And so I'll read the title. Ordinance number 20 six -seven, an ordinance of the City Of Manhattan Beach amending Manhattan Beach Municipal Code Chapter 3.01 related to electric and motorized bicycles and making an environmental determination pursuant to the California Environmental Quality Act.

Thank you.

Motion passes, five-zero.

Thank you. We now move on to our general business calendar. We begin with Item number eight, consideration of Sepulveda Boulevard Traffic Study and Potential Safety Measures.

Good evening, Mayor Lesser and members of the City Council. Eric Zandvillit, the City's traffic engineer will be providing the staff report on this important matter and which is discussion and action on safety measures on St. Paul Blitt Boulevard. Thank you.

Thank you. Good evening, mayor and members of the City Council. I'm Eric Zandleith, the city traffic engineer. Looking forward to presenting this safety study to you today. It's been a long time in coming, and I think there's a lot of good things that we can get out of it.

By way of background, Sepulveda Boulevard is a two mile stretch of six lane arterial highway owned by the state of California. There are 10 signalized intersections and 20 unsignalized intersections along that way and lots and lots of driveways as well. We had a series of fatal collisions in a less than a six month period last year. Fatal collision on February '41 on 01/08/2025, and the latest one, 05/04/2025, just over a year ago. The city council immediately asked for us to conduct a safety study at their next city council meeting.

And we after the first after the second collision, we had reached out to Caltrans to initiate a conversation with them in the hopes of starting a study. We conducted our safety analysis jointly with the state of California and the city from June 2025 through February. And then we brought those findings to the PPIC at the March 26, that's a typo, meeting a month or two ago. Immediately after we started the study and findings, found that we can do some things right away. Our police department increased the traffic and speed enforcement, doubled the number of citations that they issued in a one year period, and over almost tripled the number of speeding citations that they issued in the from that point on through the end of the year.

The police department also deployed surveillance cameras. You didn't know that they were there because they were hidden, but that was an enforcement action to find out what types of violations were going on, when they were going on, what how they can focus their resources towards treating that. The city the police department also rejiggered their DUI checkpoint and, held a Checkpoint, on Sepulveda Boulevard in July 2025, and they are looking for more locations and times this year. We also deployed the changeable message boards along Sepulveda. We're also doing it on Rosecrans Avenue to inform the public about the need to drive safely.

Our communications team rolled in and also promoted public safety awareness through our social media and other platforms. We also found some money, and we purchased two speed feedback signs, and those will be installed soon on Sepulveda Boulevard. And we finished up the comprehensive safety analysis. If you'll notice the red parentheses are are kind of like the the categories of safety measures that we're doing. There's actually four of them, that we are going to show you tonight.

One is a policy safety measure. Another one is an educational safety measure. Also, an enforcement safety measure. And then lastly, engineering safety measures. They all work together.

It's part of a comprehensive safety analysis. We follow the state and the national safety protocols now. It's called the safe systems approach. It's a looking for safer roadways, part of the Vision Zero, if you've heard of it before, type of way to make our roadways safer. There's also several documents that are in your package talking about proven countermeasures to that have been shown to reduce collisions and severity of collisions as well.

We met with Caltrans in on July 6, and we walked the entire street. We looked at all the existing conditions. We looked to see what deficiencies there may be from a pedestrian standpoint, bicycle standpoint, and a and a roadway standpoint. That helped build our existing conditions inventory, and then we also backed that up with the most recent speed survey that this Caltrans had done in 2023. The city conducted an extensive crash history analysis, and some of that information is detailed in maps and tables in your report as well.

We reviewed all the different types of proven countermeasures that can be taken, and we applied those to Sepulveda Boulevard where we felt, that there are, a high rate of accidents or the potential for accidents. We looked not just at pedestrian accidents. We looked at all different types of road users and especially the vulnerable road users. The engineering and traffic survey that Caltrans had done, it's two miles. The traffic volumes ranged from 41,500 at the south end of the city to 56,000 at the north end and determined that the speed limit should be 35 miles an hour within the city of Manhattan Beach.

It's actually 45 in El Segundo and a portion of that because of the long stretches and the wide streets there. Our street lanes are actually narrower than standard. And so that actually is an advantage because it helps dampen or slow down some of the speeds on the street. You'll see the eighty fifth percentile speeds on the table in front of you. That indicates that there are that's the speed at which 85% of the people are driving that speed or less.

So that also means that 15% of the speed the drivers are driving faster than that. We did note some fast speeds along the street, and those are the ones that we wanna target. The 10 mile an hour pace is a little different. That's the 10 mile an hour range where most of the people are driving. That's the with that 10 mile an hour range.

It helps identify what the safe speed is and what the what most drivers who we would consider safe drivers are driving. Lots of detail about the crash history in here. This is focused on fatal and injury collisions. There's lots and lots of other collisions, property damage and nondamaged traffic collisions that occur. But this is where we feel that we can do the most good and focus on those.

If you'll notice in the bottom right hand corner, when you're looking at fatal crashes per million vehicle miles, that's metric that is normalizes how many vehicles and how far they're driving on the length of street that they have. So if you have a large freeway, the million vehicle miles is much higher, but also the exposure to coalitions are higher as well. If you'll notice the last two years, the fatal collisions are 280,000 vehicle miles and 0.56. These are both higher than the statewide average. So for the past two years, we've had a higher than normal or standard statewide average.

That's what we want to focus on. Crash history map, I won't get into too many details about this other than showing you where they occurred based in the injury crashes being blue dots and the fatal crashes being the red dots. This is for a four and a four and three quarter year period from 2021. If you'll remember, during COVID, all of the traffic volumes and all of the speeds went wacko and because of the what was happening. And so it became kind of an odd year.

It didn't it was hard to track. This is the entire stretch of the two mile section of Sapova Boulevard. It was interesting also to note that there aren't as many accidents at the signalized intersections as I as I would have expected. So a lot of these accidents are happening at uncontrolled intersections where people are making turns. So I want to focus first on the policy related strategies that are on our potential safety measure list.

You'll see that potential safety measure list has over 50 possible measures that we're putting forth in front of you today. Some of them have been implemented, some of them are being proposed and are currently under construction because of several things that we've been doing, both on a Caltrans standpoint and from a city end. And then some need further study, and those are identified in the study as to be determined. Firstly, the state last year initiated a state priority corridor initiative. Malibu's Go Safely PCH campaign is part of that.

There are two pilot projects in, the Southern California area. We have reached out to our legislators and asked, and are pursuing, making Sepulveda Boulevard as a priority safety corridor too. This helps increase the amount of fines. This gives you added, incentive or ability to obtain grants, state grants, for infrastructure improvements. It also opens up the door for possible speed camera enforcement.

Specifically for speed camera enforcement, AB six forty five was passed. The legislation identifies designated jurisdictions as those jurisdictions being allowed to have a limited number of speed enforcement cameras on a pilot project. One of those cities is Los Angeles, and another one is Long Beach, also San Francisco. We have also reached out to the legislators in asking to have them write new legislations for our city's segment of Sapocha Boulevard to be added. Other policy related strategies that we look we'd like to look into is a community based e bike safety advisory group that can piggyback onto some of the bicycle enforcement and the ordinances that we're looking into now.

And also to help prioritize what we want to focus on from an e bike standpoint, from an e bike safety standpoint and from an e bike enforcement standpoint. Also, there's a lot we can do from the standpoint of social media and online education. Piggybacking with that, you can always we have our school resources team on our police department that can do a lot of good work for that. So these are policy related strategies. Let's move on to enforcement.

Enforcement safety measures, these are ongoing and will be continuing. We're targeting the police department is targeting our speed enforcement along Sapoota Boulevard. We're also conducting more DUI checkpoints. These are if you realize or maybe not may not realize, the DUI checkpoints are really an educational tool and not necessarily an enforcement tool. They are advertised.

Everyone knows where they are. That's on purpose so that people get it into their head to be driving safely all the time. From an education standpoint, we've deployed changeable message boards to get the word out on the street. There's also safety information that we can provide in a lot of different ways, a repeat of the social media and online education campaigns that we can build on. We can build logos and identities for our campaign.

Also, what was suggested by the Parking and Public Improvements Commission was something that I'm very familiar with is an Operation Prom Night. It's not buying prom dresses. It's a demonstration that's presented to the high school students, mainly juniors and seniors, as as a scenario to show what happens when when people drink and drive. The ones I were involved with were quite elaborate and included all of the police department and fire departments, and staged a crash. The the victims were airlifted out with a helicopter, from in front of the school.

And then there was repercussions that went through the school afterwards that really impacted how the effects of drinking and driving can have a lifelong effect. I'm almost choked up. Okay. So engineering is the last of the four. We call them the three e's, engineering, education, and enforcement.

These are broken down into several different categories, and we've looked at different places where we could actually do infrastructure improvements or do physical things for along man along Sepulveda Boulevard. Access management, that's to reduce the number of or the points of impact or potential points of conflict. If you reduce the number of turns, you reduce the potential for people getting into collisions. If you were looking at constructing medians or firstly, just prohibiting the turn with signs at high conflict turning movements, this is where some of these accidents had happened. Using advanced technologies such as the speed feedback signs, which are in process, also traffic monitoring sensors, Caltrans has actually installed quite a few traffic sensors along the the roadway.

They can determine how long it takes to get from one point to another, how the turns are being made, how fast people are following each other, and all that. From a bicyclist standpoint, to improve the safety of these road users, we're looking at an extensive network of bicycle lanes and sharrows and bicycle detection to make sure that we can get these bicyclists crossing the Bolivar Boulevard safely. Delineation is another one to help channelize those cars, to keep them in their lanes, and to make it clear which where they need to be in the lane. There's some intersections along the way, especially Artesia And Marine Avenue that have a shift in the lanes as you go over from one side of the intersection to the other. And so we need some guidance lines for that.

Thankfully, Caltrans has a roadway refurbishing project that's going on right now. It's starting at the north end, and it'll be coming down, where the entire roadway will be resurfaced. With that comes, new striping, and the new striping will be very clear. It'll be in contrast to the dark pavement. It's going to look a lot better.

It'll also be a lot safer because people will know how to make the moves movements and how to stay in their lanes. That project also includes a large number of pedestrian ramps. These are directional ramps to have people cross the side streets and not cross Sapulveda Boulevard. And also, every single intersection along Sapoveda Boulevard will be will be striped with a crosswalk, an actual crosswalk. So I took care of delineation.

From an intersection geometry standpoint, we have an existing project on the books right now at Manhattan Beach Boulevard to add dual left turns. We wanna make sure that people are making the turns at the signalized intersection at Manhattan Beach Boulevard and not trying to filter through the neighborhoods, trying to make ways around the intersection itself. Also, certainly channelizing islands to prohibit the turns that are already illegal. Let's just not let them do that. At the intersections themselves to help reduce help improve the pedestrian safety,

we

or not we. I guess it's we. Caltrans has retimed the signals so that there's a leading pedestrian signal green walk phase before any of the signals turn green so that you can have the pedestrians get out into the street so people could see them before anyone tries to make turns and and drive through. Also, additional vehicle detection is at those signalized intersections so that the signal is more responsive, smarter, if you will, to what's happening at the intersection. There is the potential for prohibiting some left turns at some of these unsignalized intersections.

These would looked into further through a couple of our existing neighborhood plans that we've got on the books and under underway right now, particularly the Gelson's Market area has a neighborhood traffic calming plan. And the Skechers development has funded $200,000 towards, traffic calming measures around that area as well. So if the residents in those neighborhoods, we'll we would bring this in this up to them and say, is this something that you want? It can reduce the amount of cut through traffic in the neighborhoods, but it also may impede some access to you or to your homes. You might have to come in from a different direction or certain times of the day.

So that's something that we would pursue or we would further study. We're not saying we're gonna do it yet. And then retiming the signals to rest in red at night. This is an interesting, easy, low cost type of thing that addresses the nighttime problem. And so at several intersections along Sepulveda Boulevard, Caltrans has committed to saying, we're going to let that signal rest in red on Sepulveda.

You have to come up to a stop before you're gonna continue through. So we're gonna test that out and see how that works. From a pedestrian standpoint, a lot of things are are under construction actually. As I mentioned, the high visibility crosswalks at all of the side streets, constructing sidewalks and removing barriers. We've got some designs for gaps in the sidewalk and places that you have fire hydrants or utility poles that are just blocking the blocking the way.

And people then try to get around it or across mid block. The directional access ramps that I was talking about, ADA compliant ramps so that we're we're making access for everybody. Right? And installing pedestrian crossing prohibition signs under at certain locations where, really, you shouldn't be doing it. And then installing mid block roadway lighting.

This was also added as part of the PPIC's recommendation. Not not the entire stretch of Sepulveda Boulevard is lit up at night, and so that's another safety measure for nighttime pedestrians. Pavement condition. Very simply, if you're resurfacing the roadway, you're gonna make a better roadway. It's gonna you're gonna be able to stop faster, quicker along with the high visibility, striping.

On the shoulders, there's a couple of locations where we can, where Caltrans will be striping out the extra space so that you're not drifting out and gonna hit a hit a curb somewhere. From a sign standpoint, there's several places for pedestrian crossing prohibition signs. Eventually, we may look at putting that into more permanency with a landscaping project so the medians along Sepulveda Boulevard can be re landscaped with low water use landscaping, but also prevent people from crossing and using the medians as their stepping stone to get across the street. Something thorny, I would say. Also installing additional speed limit signs to make sure everyone knows the speed limit.

That is under construction, and that's part of that resurfacing project. And as I and as I mentioned, speed feedback signs. We have two speed feedback signs on the street already, one near 10th Street and one near 2nd Street. No. Sorry.

4th Street. And we'll be adding two more in these high conflict areas on the downhill side of these slopes. We did map this out on a concept plan. I won't spend too much time on the concept plan, but just to highlight, there are lots and lots of places where we can do some good. Some of the all of the measures are identified here with some kind of symbol, whether it's a crosswalk symbol or a pedestrian access ramp or or changes in the medians.

What we would do if the neighborhoods are in favor of it, we would stripe out certain intersections so that left turns, say, for instance, out of the neighborhood and onto Sepulveda Boulevard, which is uncontrolled, would be prohibited. And we would first do that with a sign and some striping. If it works, we don't see a problem with access to the neighborhood, then we would then pursue a future project to actually build a raised median there and make it permanent. So that's the idea behind this. So there's lots of stretches.

2nd Street and 8th Street would be more formalized with the bicycle bikes bike lanes, and so those would be the places where we'd want people to cross with their bicycles. And in order to do that, you wanna encourage and feed that with bicycle lanes towards those signalized cross crossings. And then moving on farther north, we did notice that there's the segment North Of Manhattan Beach is the speeds are a little bit faster than the speeds to the South of Manhattan Beach Boulevard. Also, we want to pursue a capital project for connecting a bicycle path under the bridge, the new bridge at by the mall, and connect one side of the one side of the city with the other without having to cross, through Sepulveda Boulevard. So these are concepts.

The table is in your report. Also in front of you here, there's three different policy measures, two different enforcement safety measures, three educational safety measures, and almost 40 engineering safety measures that we are putting forth in front of you tonight. Some of them have a high cost and would take a little bit longer to do, and we would put those into capital projects for future years. And some of them can be done short term and at lower cost, and we would prioritize those, of course, because that's more bang for your money, if you will, the low hanging fruit. So I'm sure you've had a chance to take a look at that.

We did a lot of outreach to ask for comments and participation and suggestions. We've received hundreds of emails over the course of this study. We brought it forth in front of the PPIC where we had a number of people that were participated in our discussion there and had some good ideas that actually came in and are reflected in the latest set of safety measures. We also outreached to the Chamber of Commerce and the DBPA so that we could use their network of resources to get the word out as well. What we'd like you to do tonight is to review the safety study that's actually part of the staff report and to approve the list of potential measures.

Some of them need further study, they were identified. And some of them can be pursued to be implemented. The larger items, as I mentioned, would be ones that we would put into a capital project or something like that and start searching and and and applying for grants and money and and funding for that. If you have any particular questions about safety measures, I'd be happy to answer those. If you do not wanna do a particular potential safety measure, then we can remove that from the list.

So and then with that, I think that's my last slide. I know it was a big pack agenda package for you Wanted to make sure that you had all the information that you need in order to make your decision about this item tonight. If you have any questions,

I'd be happy

to answer those.

Thank you very much, Eric. First up, mayor Pertem Franklin

has some questions. Yes. Thank you, mayor. And thank you, Eric, and your team. And thank you, everybody who was involved with reaching out to Caltrans. We've it just seemed that had been a mantra for decades, and it seems like they've been very responsive.

I will say that they have been very, very responsive, and they're very supportive of any that we want to try to do.

Okay. Great. So I didn't see I saw the dollar signs, but how is what we've done already and planning to do being paid? Is it coming from our budget, from Caltrans budget?

The answer is yes. So Caltrans, it's a multimillion dollar project that they've piggybacked a lot of this information onto after the fact. So they actually have change orders that they're building into their After getting through the contract. It's it's three or four mill about $3,000,000 worth of work that's going into this. We, as a city, already have about a million and a half dollars of projects that are committed to this work that was part of our previous capital projects already. And then the rest of it, we're going to be pursuing grants and special transportation funds for that.

Okay. I wanna get a make sure I understand slide number six, the crash history. We you know, I I understand, like, in the middle, you know, fatal. We see number of injured. We see pedestrian, bicycle, motorcycle. I just wanted to go all the way down the, end, the bottom to start. Is is this saying that fatal crashes per million vehicle miles? So our the the ratio for us is point zero eight four.

Correct? That's on average over the last three and three quarter years.

Okay. And then for the state average, it's point zero one three.

Correct.

So I put my super, math powers, to work. And that's we are six and a half times higher than the state in terms of

In terms of fatal collision.

That's fatalities. Mhmm. Okay.

And that's the leverage that we're going to be pushing to for some of our policy measures.

Okay. Great. Okay. I just wanted to understand that. I see one thing that may serve multiple purposes is the bicycle. So it's back down about two thirds. Mhmm. We see that there, I don't know which one says it's fade. Oh, I can't. Anyway, so there there have been a number of of bicycle injuries and deaths during those

We haven't had a bicycle death.

No? Okay. No. We got

a motorcycle death in 2011, and then these three here, two pedestrians and a person in

a car.

Okay. So I saw, you know, in in in the report, access across crossing Sepulveda for bicycles. Is and and how about I mean, I don't know how anybody would ever do it Mhmm. But to actually ride their bicycles on Sepulveda, and you said it was a more narrow highway than others. And where would you get the room? So Sure. There's a turtle what's that turtle logo program?

Oh, so yeah. We have a local travel network that's being promoted by the South Bay COG.

Okay. Have we looked at potentially doing North South corridors so that a cyclist could stay off of Sepulveda but not go too far out of their way, like Meadows or something like that?

Yes. So the the we have a a network map proposed for Manhattan Beach that includes North South Parallel streets for the local travel network that could be promoted or implemented. We would encourage that on a lower slow speed street rather than have the bicycles or e bikes on Sepulveda Boulevard.

Right. Okay. And then just one last question, and then I'll open it to my colleagues is there was a extremely horrible fatal accident at Marine at Sepulveda in November 2021 where three people were killed, including an infant. It

was I think it had

to do some speeding, and they were at the intersection or someone was coming from behind a marine westbound, but did they I I didn't see it in the report. So is that not considered a Sepulveda related accident?

And you said it was in 2021? Yeah. Yeah. 2021. I I don't know if that was considered on Sepulveda Boulevard, if it was considered outside of Sepulveda Boulevard for purposes of the the collision history.

Okay. Great. Thank you.

Thank you. Councilmember Howarth.

Thank you, mister mayor. And, yeah, Eric, I know for years we've struggled with getting Caltrans attention. And sadly, these statistics, the six times as many fatalities. I think I was actually mayor, and we and Ben Allen is the one who got We we were in the room and I think it was the chief and Kelly Benjamin and some other folks. Toline was there and the head of Caltrans and then the regional person and we were mad.

Mhmm. And I was gratified. I mean, I act I told people, I think they're actually listening and the fact that they came down and walked it with you Yeah. Finally. So I'm I'm happy that that's happened, but, you know, it's a little too late for some. So I was very intrigued. First of all, it's also great news that they're funding so much of this work. It's really that this is huge. They're taking a they're taking responsibility and but they're doing some really meaningful things. One of the things I think that you mentioned, I also really appreciate the the engineering education enforcement kind of rubric.

That's really good. Under pedestrian, you know, engineering safety measure measures to install pedestrian crossing prohibition signs intrigued me because I was I was just I was in London and sometimes they make it really difficult to cross the street in London. They have these fences. They're attractive fences that you kind of have to figure out where where to go and then sometimes you have to backtrack in order to then cross street. And then sometimes down the bigger roads, not maybe one of the more picturesque roads, they will actually have the fence in the middle, like on the median.

Mhmm. Was that kind of and and when I say fence, I don't lose your mind folks. I mean, it's attractive but it's a metal fence and that would really help sort of that trying to dart across Sepulveda that, you know, I see joggers do it all the time and I just wanna and these are grown joggers. Mhmm. So is was there any consideration for fence

We actually did talk a lot about what to do with the median and preventing pedestrians just from crossing anywhere. Mhmm. And actually actually, Caltrans made a good good point. Yes. We could consider fences or something like that.

You see them sometimes near high schools to keep the students from crossing mid block. Two issues with the fences is that, first of all, they can become an accident hazard if someone hits them and damage the car even worse. But they also are view impediments. They also restrict the view of the driver from what's happening across the other side of the median. What was what we're suggesting here is that we build hedges and then use those as virtual fences.

Yeah. Real hedges, not just Real hedges. Like, not just grasses.

Right. Not just grass.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. That's that's that's really smart. I miss the I heard the mayor chuckle when mayor pro tem was talking about, are there alternative North South corridors identified for bicycles? And we we were on council before when we were talking about the bicycle coalition plan and regional transit, you know, having people use their bicycles. And and people at the time were just like, oh, that's oh, we don't need that and that's not gonna happen and forget, you know, Vision Zero and all of that. If things come around. Right?

Well, they have to use it.

Well, it's it it but it would people anyway, it doesn't matter. But couple of last things. One let's see. No. I think it's great that you bring it up. I'm just saying that before, people were just incredulous. Oh, no. No one will use that. Prom night. I know what you're talking about because my when my son was in high school, they did the program and his best friend was one of the victims and they he went to the hotel. What's the hotel with the bridge across the The Belamar. Belamar. Belamar, Barbies, whatever. Mhmm. Depending on how long you've lived here.

Mhmm.

You know, so the kids would have to stay in a hotel. They had written a letter to their parents. The parents wrote a letter to them. I mean, it was just really moving. But here's what but it costs a lot of money. Do you I mean, like, it's, like, $15,000?

Or It it because of the extra labor and the costs and the and the mobilization, it does cost money. It's also something that you can apply for an Office of Traffic Safety grant. So an OTS grant could also

be paid for that. I would wanna see I mean, I thought it was impactful, but I would wanna see if there's any information or data that, like, this does deter behavior. The other piece of it is not just the kids. I mean, was done the whole school had to come out and witness it. Right? There's also education that has to be done for parents. And I'm wondering if as part of this, are considering more like not more, but educating, doing more education, social media awareness, whatever about social host rules and the dangers associated with that. Could you answer that, or do I need to get the chief, or how how do you

It's definitely something that we want to pursue through our school resources program or or our public communications from police department. I don't know if the police department wants to chime in anymore about that, but that's that's where we would take this.

Yeah. Because I I I feel like the behave you know, all of this is about changing behavior. Right? And and and the fact that Caltrans is willing to do that red red light resting Mhmm. That to me I'll try to frame it as a question. When let me say it this way. When they did the speeds, the average speed, the 85% of the people are traveling 31 to 34 miles per hour, what time of day were those numbers gathered?

Sure. It's that's a great question. So for yes. Absolutely. For so for the purposes of of setting speed limits, those the the speed measurements were taken during a non peak time during the day. Okay? Right. Because you wanna find the volume of cars that are going through, but not being impeded because it's too congested. Right.

And that's Caltrans doing this survey. This

is not us.

That's that's state standard.

That's state that's state standard and it's Caltrans.

And we follow that as well as the city.

Right. But they they provided us with that information because that's what struck me is that, well, sure, if everybody's going 31 miles an hour, you probably have time to break or you probably have time to put your left turn signal on and move over. But our issues are, you know, terrible issues have happened at night when there's not as much traffic so the cars can go faster and maybe, you know, are engaged in bad behavior. That red light resting could make a real difference. So thank you for that.

Done?

I'm done.

Councilmember Charnay.

Thank you. Thank you, Eric. I just wanted to acknowledge, I know that this has been a long process and that you've had a lot of just a lot of input from our community, especially I know the Savella family. It's been a really, you know, we're talking about numbers, we're talking about measures, but But we lost boys in the community. And so, you know, I am heartened to see our community engaged in this process and people committed to to making it safer for all of us.

And, sorry. I have actual questions, and And I know that it's a very difficult, frustrating process, especially for the families who've lost their kids. And so, first of all, Jim, you know, I know you've been to all the meetings and have to sit through these just crunchy numbers and and us talking in terms that really reduces this process to to something that, you know, I just want you to recognize and realize that at the heart of it is wanting to prevent, you know, the deaths of Ford and Braun and and to just not not have anybody else suffer the way that you all have. So thank you for continuing to be a part of this really, really painful process. I know sitting through these meetings.

And I know that the challenges that the families that face the the are are very different. I know we're doing, and I appreciate us going through and doing an inventory of our city and the corridors that are dangerous and doing what we can to make it safer for our pedestrians or for our cyclists and for for our drivers. And I think one of the things that I'm most concerned about is because in these accidents, it was because of people who were out there not following the law. It wasn't because our speed is too high. It wasn't because it was because they were driving on in at unsafe speed.

There was alcohol involved. So I think enforcement is gonna have to be a big component of what we do, especially down that that Sepulveda Corridor Mhmm. And especially at nighttime after people have been drinking and out. So can you speak to us more about the speed camera enforcement? If someone is driving, I was just thinking, you know, the driver that that killed Ford, he was driving, I think, in excess of a 100 miles.

Mhmm.

And so if we had a speed camera, and I may have to call our police chief down to ask talk about if maybe with conjunction conjunction with speed camera and the drones, if we can use that to stop these these drivers who are out there driving a weapon at that point.

So much of it is the preventive part of this. And so if the public knows that there is a speed enforcement camera on Sapulveda Boulevard, first of all, they'll they'll slow down or not use it or think twice about driving inebriated. That's the education part of it. Yes. You'll you will get we will get us violators, and we can cite them for that.

It's not a it's a different type of citation. It's not like it's DUI type of violation where you have points against your record and and really significant fines. It's a different it's a different type of citation. But as I mentioned, that's that's the point is the point is to be out there, be visible with it, and so that is the is the the deterrent.

Thank you. And so is it something that we can use in conjunction with our drones as first responder for and from the enforcement side and actually catching these people who may be using our our our corridor as for racing or just, driving drunkenly at a high speed?

The answer is it depends. Rachel Johnson, your Police Chief again. So with the speed camera it's much like a red light camera where it's not in the moment like the camera will capture the speeding vehicle in the moment but then that violation has to be reviewed by a staff member established that it is a violation and then a citation is mailed to the offender. So like Eric part of it and part of the education return effect is folks knowing that there is a speed camera and that they will they can receive a ticket and they'll slow down. Now the other part of the it depends is if we receive a report of someone speeding, yes, we could use our drone to get overhead and, you know, follow them and and, you know, help the officer link up with them.

But that has to be for things that are reported to us. It's not the speed the speed camera data is not a real time thing. We're using that for patrol. It's more of a deterrent for people who would speed down Sepulveda.

Okay. Alright. Thank you. Certainly. And then, Eric, with regards to the crosswalks that we're planning on adding, because I do agree we need a crosswalk every at every intersection where people can cross the street, are we thinking where those are all where someone pushes and it's a flashing light, or is it just striped?

No. These are these are striped crosswalks to tell people this is about where we want you to cross rather than where we don't want you to cross. We're not suggesting or recommending, and neither is Caltrans, any flashing crosswalks to cross Sepulveda Boulevard. It's six lanes, you don't want to have someone exposed out there for that long with a flashing crosswalk. We both agreed to say if you're going to do that, we're going to go full signal.

Okay. Thank you. And then I'm really interested in learning more about kind of the the the bike routes. Right? Because I I do agree with the mayor pro tem with encouraging where we can have students, especially I see students crossing 2nd And 8th Street going between the East Side and West Side to get to school. Are we working with the cog on that local travel network side of it?

Thank you for the question Councilmember Tarney. We did bring that I think as you heard from Councilmember Haworth, the staff that present that the council few years ago. At that time there was no desire to pursue the local travel network, but it is still something that is available to us if the council would like to direct us to go back to the cog and reengage in bringing that to our city.

The funding is there for it. It's part of the measure M sub regional funds that can be used if we apply for it.

All right. Thank you. And that's all

I have.

Councilmember Sheridan, thank you.

Thank you. First and foremost, Eric and Masa and Taleen, thank you for being responsive to the community and city council. I think one fatality is too many and we've had, you know, our share and and just yeah. I wanna follow-up on some council member Tarne said about the the high visibility crosswalks. So I know they're not gonna be lighted.

I I never thought that they would for the six lanes, but they look nice and large here and fluorescent in the map. Are they gonna be any wider, or are is there any kind of reflective some or is it or is it your just typical white crosswalk? These look really nice. They look for layers of black and yellow.

Yeah. Are high visibility, and so they're made with a thermoplastic reflective surface. So at night, you they really pop. Okay. And and they are definitely wider than Gotcha. Typical.

Well, hence, the picture kinda shows that. Thank you for that. And as far as the the crosswalks, are they gonna be at every crosswalk that we add, are they gonna be APS? Obviously, it's just accessible red signals that speak.

At every signalized intersection, there they will have audible push buttons.

Got you. Is there a way to do that for the crosswalks as well instead of

All of the signalized crosswalks will

have that. Right. But, yeah, but you're putting crosswalks in

Those will be in front of stop signs, so that's not part of the you don't have an you don't have a push button to

push for that. Gotcha. And then the rest in red at night, and that's so that's something that it will stay red until it picks up a vehicle coming and then it turns green, so they have to actually stop, or does it pick it up as it's accelerating?

Like Yeah. No. It's not meant to say, okay. Like, slow down far enough. Slow enough so it turns green. Right. You have to come up to the sensor that's at the stop bar in order for you to trigger us to go forward.

That's wonderful. Yeah. Then, yeah, I think, again, compliments moving this along, and I appreciate what you said about Caltrans picking up the bill and being reactive for all the efforts that you guys put forth with our state level. Thank you for that. That's all I have there.

For my questions, I want to pick up on the priority safety corridor concept. It's something that I've been working on extensively as mayor. And I want you to perhaps one more time describe picking up on the notion of funding and the steps we have to go through to implement some of these recommendations. What does that designation allow

us

to do? And what must we do to qualify for it?

Sure. The qualifying for it is a little bit harder, but what it what the prior safety priority order will do is it allows you to have, say, instance, double fines for certain types of violations. You can you can post that and show people that, you know, this is a safety corridor. You're if you get if you if you're a violator, you're going to be double fined. It allows for certain higher ranking if you're applying for funding for anything that's safety related along Sepulved Boulevard.

And you'll basically get ahead of others that would otherwise, you know, applied for the, you know, limited funding. And then thirdly, it does allow for certain special programs such as the speed enforcement cameras to be a qualifier for that. As far as being eligible for it, there's some criteria that are we have to pursue. One of them is, unfortunately, accident rates. And so that's why we're that's why we focused on some of the data. We want to make it data driven in a way so that we can convince others to provide the funding and we can do something about it. I want

to pick up with the city manager because we have been working with our legislators to try and get legislation through the legislature which will allow us to get this designation because it means money to pay for some of these things that we're going be talking about and deterrence like these cameras which we cannot get. So let me let the city manager talk about some of the steps we've been through that council and maybe the public does not even know that we've been working As on the last

you heard from Eric, the way the law is written right now, there are certain criteria that we would have to meet in order to qualify as a safety corridor. We currently do not meet that criteria. So we all put our heads together and came up with some draft legislation as and in terms of can the can some of the criteria be changed in such a manner that we then would qualify for the safety corridor. So that was one of the things we did. We drafted the language.

I personally have been reaching out to our legislators and as have you in an attempt to get them to support this bill. We currently do not have that support for this cycle, but we are going to continue to pursue that legislation for next cycle. The second thing we did is we followed in line with Malibu. What they did is they asked for some changes that senator Ben Allen pushed through in 2024 I believe that allowed some changes in the law which then allowed Malibu to have five speed cameras along PCH. And so what we are trying to do again with our state legislators is to attempt to have one of them push through a similar bill that would then allow two speed cameras for our two mile stretch of Sepulveda.

Because we could not get legislation carried by the deadline, I think it would not be appropriate then to get direction from the full council. This is just questions now, but to continue those efforts going forward. I wanted to ask you about topography. I didn't see that referenced in the staff report. And I think many of us anecdotally note how the hills create blind spots, particularly for vehicles moving at high rates of speed.

And I'm wondering what sort of calming measures, if any, would be appropriate, particularly as Councilmember Tarne noted, that those that are most culpable in these horrific fatalities were knowingly violating the law. So I'm not sure what sort of timing measures of traffic lights is going to mean to someone who is intentionally violating the law, but what from an engineering standpoint, could we undertake?

Sure. And that's why you need a suite of things for treating the symptoms of the problem or the the the problem itself. Some of it is some of it is human behavior. So if the person driving doesn't feel like they can drive very fast, and they won't, that can be done with a number of things, whether it's landscaping on the side of the road to make the road feel narrower, traffic signals spaced at certain distances with timing that's we're we're proposing, those kinds of things. If you, say, instance, drive down a a rural highway with a canopy of trees over it, you don't tend to drive as fast as if it's a big wide six lane highway.

Those kinds of things help. But it also has to be backed up by the enforcement and the engine and the education part to say and it this becomes more policy related, trying to get to those people that would do that before they do that. Right? And tell them this is not you shouldn't be doing this or there's you know, you we we are a city that strictly enforces, and that get that word gets out. Those kinds of things.

Finally, I wanna circle back to what direction specifically staff is seeking this evening, given that we have the budget and our capital improvement project still ahead. What direction would be most helpful this evening?

Sure. Your our ask is very simple, is for you to approve moving forward with our list of potential measures. It's as simple as that. We will take it upon ourselves at that point to say, we will implement what we can do administratively. We will pursue the policy matters to the nth degree that we can, and we'll add in capital projects for you to look at in the future, in our future CIP programs, not this year, but, you know, moving forward, and and pursue funding.

Thank you.

And anything that needs to have approvals will then come back to you later.

Thank you. Mayor Tim Franklin.

Oh, sorry. He you actually asked my question about the hills. Very concerned, particularly the hill at, 19th And Sepulveda where you have middle school children going to and from school and drivers can't really. I mean, they can see the red light, hopefully, but just

you know, if there's

a special calming then at night, I think at one other meeting, one earlier meeting, a resident indicated that the headlights don't really shine Okay. Correctly on a on a on a crosswalk ahead because it's pointed down. So I don't know if that can be addressed or If

I may just add to that point, that is actually one of the things that we are requesting gets added to the criteria for traffic safety corridor because our topography is hilly along Sepulveda and that makes the conditions even more dangerous than if you were to be considering it on a straight road. And so as as part of our legislative request, we did ask for that criteria to be changed so that essentially we get more points because our topography is the way that

it is.

And I'll speak from an engineering standpoint. There are some things that can be done for that, and we are pursuing those. Say, for instance, the high visibility visibility striping that's going on that will go on to Sapoota Boulevard will be able to be seen from much farther away and from a lot lower lighting level. So those as you mentioned as as one of the residents mentioned, the the angle of the head new headlights are much more focused and narrow, and so you don't see the the light splash as you used to. So, yes, some of some of those things will be done. Also, if we're illuminating the street more uniformly, you'll be able to see the conditions that are ahead.

Right. Thank you. I'd like to open this item up for public comment. Do a member of the public in chambers care to address this item on the agenda? Please.

Steve Hackwood. Just a couple questions. Thank you for asking the question on cost. I just kept on seeing dollar signs up there and I didn't quite understand. And I'm glad we're going to get most of the money from Caltrans, at least that's what I thought I heard.

I did not see any of our future plans in the city for Sepulveda and what I'm thinking of is right now we have heard about four potential high rise buildings that are opening up and I'm assuming will open up into Sepulveda for egress and everything else. I didn't see anything and maybe I missed it, I could have dozed off for a little bit, but I did not see how we were going to be handling that type of flow because they want to get out of where they are and I'm sure they're going to be pulling out as fast as they can to beat the traffic coming from a stop sign or whatever. So I didn't see it and I would like that address somehow as you move forward. Thank

you. Thank you. Any other comments in council chambers? Patty, is there anybody on Zoom?

No request on Zoom.

In which case I'll close public comment And if there's no objection to colleagues, maybe I will pose a question. It might be for our community development director or for our c manager. Help tie this to what residents have been asking me anyway, and I suspect my colleagues about the nexus between the multi tenant residential projects that are proposed in our residential overlay district and traffic issues on Sepulveda Boulevard. To what extent can staff even explore those or consider those given the by right huge challenges that we face as a city. It's really upsetting where we do not have discretion to look at issues like this.

Explain how we're able to explore issues of safety, basic safety on Sepulveda Boulevard.

It's complex question, Mayor Lester. But yes, you are right, the by right nature of these, which the city has been sort of pushed into through the housing element process and the legislation that's

on the books

that we do have to approve these projects on a ministerial basis. That leads to us not being able to study them as part of the discretionary process. We do have on our municipal code books some certain safety measures that when we do plan check these, we evaluate the driveway visibility triangles, make sure that there's clear space that and visible space for the entrance points onto Sepulveda. And there are some certain other safety standards that we do have on the books, like you cannot back out onto Sepulveda, you have to enter forward. But in the maybe prior cases of discretionary review, there was that ability to do traffic studies.

Although I have to say that as state law has changed, the ability to evaluate level of service, amounts of traffic, that's been stripped away from all projects. So there's really no going back to maybe the old way of evaluating stuff. We can rely on, at this point, what we have on the books for safety standards.

Councilmember Horwitz.

Thank you, mister mayor. I'm I'm gonna let my colleagues who have made a motion make the make the motion, but also, you know, I'm sure you'll have a meaningful statement. But I wanted to add that, you know, I appreciate your efforts and the city manager's efforts with the legislators. But I I feel that we we have an opportunity oh, gosh. I hate using that word.

But if we when you look at the public comments that we've received over the last eight, nine, ten months, right, from residents, if I'm a legislator and I get this many comments, this many letters, this many emails, that makes a difference into whether I can, you know, try to put it on the docket. So whether it's our legislative acting committee or I will take it upon myself, I can just see this as a contest between the schools. I can see I can see the elementary schools drawing pictures. I can see, let's make this a community project and let's let these young men who lost their lives not be forgotten and and let the kids understand that they can make this better.

Thank you. Thank you. Council member Schroeder?

Thank you. I'll make a really short Eric, if I can ask a quick question. I know there's a lot of competing projects. As far as timeline for some of these items, I know they're broad and there's multiple items. But is there something that the community can track like on a Gantt chart or something like a dashboard online that, you know, this is what we're trying to do and this is what's getting done. So just kind of we can follow the progress as it's so important.

Yes. We can absolutely make a high and highlight on our website, a web page that has these ongoing actions, the progress that we're making, the things that we can the community can do to participate or become involved in that, those kinds of things. Yeah.

Great. Thank you. Great. Councilmember McTurney, see you've made a motion.

Yes. I think my motion is based on what Eric has conveyed is to continue with this process to first accept the report and then leave it to all of you to prioritize what we can afford, what we can pay for. And I know that you've broken everything down in our list between the safety the policy safety measures, enforcement, education, engineering. So just to continue down that path. One thing I'd like to add, I don't know if this is the appropriate venue or if it needs to be as a standalone, but to incorporate the local travel network in part of this evaluation and whether we can just leverage their dollars, those dollars to help make our street safer for cyclists as well.

I'm seconding your motion. I want to make sure that we include the further advocacy on the priority safety quarter because that opens up many more options. Yes. That we accepted. I think there were other issues with the slow, not the name of it, the little turtle.

I think the community wasn't supportive of all the signage and wasn't sure that it would be effective because there are other electronic ways to find roads that lead to where they're going. It was generally that.

I believe Councilmember Tarne, you're just simply asking if that funding might be available for some of these items that we're exploring. Is that correct?

If we can leverage the funding from those efforts and I do know that it sounds like it was a while ago and now with e bikes being so prolific, think it might be an opportunity to re examine what we can do to make Okay, it very

good. I second it. Any further comments on the motion? I see Council Member Schroeder.

No, no, already spoke.

For my comments and why I'm very much supportive of this effort is, we have a problem on the major Boulevard, California Route 1, which transects our community. We've had too many fatalities. We have gotten Caltrans attention. We are grateful for their partnership with our traffic engineer to be exploring practical measures that we can take in partnership with them. But as was mentioned by one of our speakers, there's going to be funding required.

So as a result, that's one of the reasons why we have been advocating to be able to get this qualification, this criteria for the boulevard, which opens up funding, opens up additional citation fees, opens up the ability to use this sort of the cameras that would supplement our deterrent capabilities. There have been studies shown on how effective these cameras are to deter certain behavior. We want to explore that. And this designation would be helpful to do so, and it has been extremely frustrating that we haven't gotten support so far. So I think it's all the more reason to have brought this to council now and get the full support of the council in favor of that.

So I will be supportive of the motions. Is there any other council member comments at this time?

Let's do it.

Not, let's call for the question.

I just want to make sure I have a note here and qualify for the safety corridor. Is that

what that's I'm trying say? Yes.

Call for the question.

Thank you.

Motion passes five-zero.

Thank you. And I want to particularly thank our traffic engineer. He has been meeting regularly with Caltrans and continue to come up with these ideas and really work hard on this. Thank you. Okay. All set to move on with a light item, our fiscal year twenty twenty seven proposed operating budget. Shall we go forward? Let's do it. Item number nine is presentation of the fiscal year twenty twenty seven proposed operating budget in consideration of the CERT funding request.

Good evening. Thank you for your patience as we made our way down. My name is Libby Bradauer, your finance director, and I'm glad to have the opportunity to present an overview of the fiscal year twenty seven proposed budget tonight. I would also like to thank few of our staff members who've worked very hard on putting this proposal together, including Emmy Rose Hanna, our financial services manager, and Alexis Motenaga, our new budget and financial analyst, who are both joining me here tonight. The document is about 428 pages this year, and we'll do our best to break it down and highlight key points.

We've already received several comments via email and here tonight, and we hope that residents and community members continue to engage with us over the next few weeks as we work our way towards adopting the budget in June. So tonight's presentation will include results from our recent budget survey, an update on our current fiscal outlook, including some challenges we have on the horizon, plus an overview of general fund revenue and expenditure trends. Tonight, we'll mostly focus on the general fund. The budget study session on May 12, next Tuesday, drill down into each department's operations and staffing and changes that were built into next year's budget. At the end of tonight's presentation, we will be happy to take your questions, comments, and feedback for additional information that you might want to learn about next week or hear more about.

So the budget development process on the timeline you see here typically begins in December and January and concludes in June. In between these months, several steps are taken to bring forward the proposed budget. This slide provides a quick overview of our budget process timeline including kicking off the process internally with staff and then preparing at the midyear budget update that was presented to the city council on February. We also kicked off the community budget survey, and I'll be sharing results on that in just a moment. Staff and all departments work together to develop the proposed budget that is before you tonight.

It's important to note that this presentation provides a high level overview of the fiscal year twenty seven proposed budget, and we probably, you know, we won't be going into full details for each department's operations and budget allocations. Due to the various funding constraints this year, I do wanna highlight that departments have already made some really tough decisions that resulted in $1,100,000 in controllable cost reductions, and we thank them for their diligent efforts and collaboration. Details on these items will be provided more next week during the budget study session. And then the plan is to return to city council with our, then mayor Joe Franklin on June 2 to adopt the budget before the new fiscal year begins on July 1. Okay.

So diving into the budget survey results. This year, we had 476 responses, so a little less than the height we received last year of over 600, but still a very strong showing, comparing to past history. The key takeaways from the results are that respondents deeply value our community's character and values and safety with strong preferences for public safety, infrastructure, and development that is both community centered and preserves our small town feel. When asked about spending priorities for city operations, the light blue bars or, I guess, maybe they're little more teal indicate that most respondents agree that the amount of money currently dedicated to each category seems appropriate. The yellow bars indicate a desire to spend more money with parks and recreation and city maintenance getting the most responses there.

Public safety received the most votes for maintaining the same amount. Per usual, the city administration leads in the desire to reduce funding. However, there's only so much that can be reduced from our supporting departments of IT, finance, and HR. That said, we're always looking for efficiencies in our operations and staffing. So when asked about the their top five priorities, number one, far exceeding anything else is keeping our city safe.

Our second and third priorities are fixing roads in orange and making our parks better. Interesting. The survey also asked about the top places to fix in Manhattan Beach. So starting on the left, you see the the number one, priority was parking facilities followed by big pool and then parks and recreation facilities as the top priority. I wanted to note that if you add together the first, second, and third votes, the parks and recreation facilities actually far exceeded the other top two by receiving 379 votes versus the parking facilities in Big Pool receiving about 260 each.

So moving on to our current fiscal outlook, our city our city budget is a sending spending plan, and the goal is always to first and foremost foremost reflect community priorities. So results of our survey confirm our budget aligns our our top priorities of public safety and emergency services, which totals 52% of our general fund spending. The fiscal year twenty seven budget also includes funding to maintain essential services at our current service levels. As a service organization, how do we provide our services? It's our people, our staffing.

It's critical that we have the right people in the right roles with the proper training and technology and the leadership to steer everyone forward. This is how we maintain our outstanding service levels here in Manhattan Beach, and this year's budget continues to support our service oriented employees with the MOU salary adjustments that were approved last year. The proposed budget also prioritizes infrastructure in line with survey results. So I I did wanna mention one thing that's not really highlighted in the slides, but I wanted to point it out, in advance of Gil doing the CIP presentation after this item. So we have seen flattening of some of our streets and roads funding through the gas tax, measure m, measure r, prop c funding, and so that's really been limiting our ability to fund street infrastructure projects.

So you will see in Gil's presentation that we've had to reallocate some of those projects into our CIP fund, which is funded by general fund dollars. So that those street projects are now competing with other general facility projects, and we've been hearing a lot about the Scout House tonight. So that will likely be a topic that we'll need to dig into, and we can bring back more information if you'd like. So, overall, our general fund revenues are stable in many key areas including property taxes, our largest general fund revenue source. We are also fortunate that voters approved Measure MMB in 2024 to generate an additional, $6,600,000 in transaction transactions and use tax.

And lastly, I just wanted to highlight that the city's triple a credit rating was rating was reaffirmed by SMP last year in 2025. And overall, our financial position allows us to maintain our outstanding service levels and make strategic investments in infrastructure. And yet, we still have our challenges. I in my notes from last year, I said this was the most challenging budget year since the pandemic. And here I am a year later saying, this has been the most challenging budget year since the pandemic because we have so many competing interests and limited resources.

This current era of economic uncertainty, slow revenue growth, and high cost is painful from everyone, families, businesses, and the city. We absolutely acknowledge and agree with members of the public who have recently sent an emails about the fact that our expenditure growth is trending to outpace revenues, and that's something we need to be talking about. The five year forecast section of the budget document is an important tool for seeing these trends and allowing us the ability to take preemptive action, and we'll talk more about this in a few minutes. Other challenges we are facing include rising CalPERS UAL payments or unfunded accrued liability, which now, those payments now total about 2,700,000 in the general fund for next year. These payments are currently projected to reach 3,600,000 in fiscal year twenty nine in two years, which is almost another $1,000,000 increase over the next two years that we will have to fund.

Insurance costs are also rising related to premiums, claims, and litigation. These costs have increased pretty significantly in the in the last few years. One note is that internal service funds are funded by charges to other funds. Now I will admit our methodology over the last few years for the insurance fund has been inadequate. We've been doing, using a methodology to look at historical trends, a five year average, which worked for many years as cost and liability claims would go up and down and up and down, over time, it averages out, and we were able to keep pace with the cost.

The last few years since 2022, we've just seen cost increase increase increase, and so we've now kind of fallen behind in funding those charges. Another important to note about the insurance fund is that, the city does have a self insured retention for liability and workers' comp claims. Now once cases close, the city will recover funds over that self insured retention. However, we have to wait for the cases to close and some litigation cases can take multiple years, which is what we've been seeing over the last few years. So again, we do expect to recover funds and the insurance fund in the future, but we just don't know when or how much due to, the length of cases these days.

And finally, we've seen, significant increases in equipment and fleet replacement costs, and, this is due to inflation, tariffs, and increases in technology. The fleet replacement funding methodology we've been using, also has not kept kept pace with cost increases. As an example, an ambulance the city purchased in 2017 cost $176,000. Our methodology was to take that 176,000, apply a CPI increase, amortize it out five years, and then we would have those funds in the fleet fund to buy a new one. Well, it's due for replacement next year, and it costs $550,000 Wow.

Due to increase in cost, technology, other changes. So, I mean, that's just something that we couldn't predict, and but we have to, address it somehow. The staff has also been deferring and stretching out vehicle replacements as must as much as possible since I've been here over eleven years. However, that catches up to us sometimes with higher maintenance costs and equipment failures. I was scheduled to meet with someone just last week, and I got an early text.

My car won't start. There's a battery issue or something. So we do have, maintenance costs there too that we have to address. So in light of this, departments are working on long term equipment replacement schedules that will then help us prioritize our needs and better understand our long term funding needs. So this is an important slide with big dollar impacts that a moderate growth rate in revenues just cannot easily absorb along with other operational cost increases.

And speaking of operations, the fiscal year twenty seven proposed budget does include increases for employee MOUs, again approved last year, and CPI increases for known contract increases, materials, supplies, etcetera. The budget also includes department requests if funding was found to be available. So, again, we proactively reprioritized $1,100,000 in general fund expenditures to accommodate higher community priorities, and departments will be discussing those next week. The budget also includes equipment and fleet replacements that we could fund totaling $3,200,000 And finally, year one of the proposed five year capital improvement plan that will be presented next is, included in next year's budget. So this slide, everyone is always, very, interested in knowing about the positions included in the budget.

And this year, we are proposing three new full time positions that were determined to critical needs. The first one being a human resources assistant position. The cost of this position was fully offset by reductions in part time salaries and contract services. So a net new position but cost neutral. One new sewer maintenance worker funded in the sewer fund, was also partially offset by a reduction in part time hours, and the management analyst in public works, the cost of which is actually, spread out across the funds and divisions it would support.

We also included changes to three existing positions, including a recreation coordinate coordinator in parks and recreation that was actually offset by a vacant transportation services operator, an upgrade to an administrative analyst in the fire department, which was being upgraded from a current executive assistant, And lastly, an upgrade in the IT department from an office assistant to administrative assistant. And departments will be presenting the justification for these proposed changes next week during the budget study session. So also next week, each department will provide some context to their operations by presenting their performance measures and highlighting notable workload indicators and activities that has been have been accomplished in the prior year. Each department looks forward to sharing their story and answering questions next week. And if you have any specific questions or requests for information, we'd be glad to take that tonight, or you can also send us an email at budget@manhattanbeach.gov.

Okay. So finally getting into some the numbers you've been waiting for. So zooming out to the citywide level, expenditures are exceeding revenues when looking at the total city budget, which does occur from near near time to time when looking at the budget for all funds, especially with capital projects that are sometimes paid out of accumulated reserves. The citywide budget includes operating expenditures of 165,000,000 as well as capital projects and equipment of almost 22,000,000 or over 22,000,000 and debt service at $11,200,000. And this includes new obligations $624,000 for the purchase of 400 Manhattan Beach Boulevard debt service and 672,000 for the public safety radio equipment debt service that we purchased last year.

The last item on the list are interfund transfers totaling $11,000,000, and I'll speak more on that in a moment as well. So citywide revenues, the big blue slice of the pie is the general fund at almost 100 or over 119,000,000. The large orange slice comp is comprised of our enterprise funds, which includes water, sewer, storm drain, and parking funds. Special revenue funds include those governmental funds I mentioned earlier, like gas tax, measure m, measure r, prop c, measure w now, that are all restricted funds for infrastructure needs. Also included are proposition a funds, which are dedicated to funding transit initiatives.

The internal service funds category includes our insurance reserve fund, information technology fund, fleet management fund, and building maintenance and operations. And lastly, the CIP fund and trust and agency funds are there as well. Citywide expenditures by department are heavily weighted towards public works, given their oversight of significant capital projects. The next largest departments are public safety, police and fire, followed by human resources, which is due to the insurance fund being allocated to their department. And then parks and recreation, community development, and the administrative support departments.

The new non departmental section, that's new this year and is a result of the change in how we're presenting in our fund transfers that we discussed with our last midyear presentation in February. During that discussion, we discussed how this was a recommendation by the city's auditors being as a source of the recommendation, and staff thoroughly researched it and agreed that this is a best practice, and it also brings more transparency to transfers that are occurring between funds. And so starting from the top, looking at the general fund, general fund revenues are about 119,000,000 and the ongoing expenditures are about 117,000,000. Now again, this amount was originally greater, however, has already taken some proactive steps to reduce controllable costs within each department by removing any remaining contingency funds in program areas that did not support requested budgets. So based on this budget exercise, roughly 1,100,000 in controllable costs were reduced to adjust these program budgets to the minimum required amounts without impacting service levels.

And recognizing the transfers out as revenues and expenditures, Again,

it's

not only an accounting best practice, but it also further enhances our fiscal transparency by drawing attention to the impacts on fund balance. Previously, this was really only shown in the five year forecast section of the budget document. With this accounting methodology change, increases and decreases in fund balance will be presented more clearly now and into the future. Now transfers this year are unusually high with the recommended transfer to the insurance fund. Of course, the goal is to have the bottom number be positive so that we are adding to fund balance year over year.

So again, just speaking about the general fund, at the end of fiscal year twenty seven, general fund reserves are projected to total 24,900,000 in total. This includes what we call our financial policy designation of 20% of operating expenditures, which is projected at twenty three point four million. Now this since this number is a percentage of total operating expenditures, it does grow anytime our expenditures grow. So this year, it increased by $2,300,000 in line with the increase in expenditures. With the proposed transfer to the insurance fund of $6,000,000, the budget does show a temporary reduction in the economic uncertainty reserve that was $4,000,000 and we're now showing that as zero.

The unreserved fund balance is estimated at $1,500,000 So we understand that this is a concerning picture. There's not really any other way to paint it. These are the costs based on our current projections and revenues based on current projections. The general fund balance is impacted by transfers out to other funds and we've noted here the street lighting and landscape fund transfer of $270,000 that is an annual subsidy to that fund because the assessments have not increased since 1998, and a proposition two eighteen ballot measure would be required to increase those assessments. Until then, the general fund must support those operations.

The CIP fund transfer of $5,000,000 is also shown here. This was first directed by city council last year after the passage of measure MMB, and we understand that this is a continuing priority for the council and community. Now the insurance fund transfer of $6,000,000, that is the, new and unusual item presented in the budget this year. But, again, we do feel it is necessary to support ongoing claims and litigation activity, which have seen an unprecedented rise since 2022. If you recall at midyear, we did recommend transferring 1,700,000 to kind of catch up, but it was deferred to a future decision as we are working with an independent actuary to, receive some more information and put together potential options and, information for the city council to consider our funding policies or I should say, funding policies and reserve policies in the insurance fund, and that is still forthcoming.

The general fund also has transfers in from other funds, which includes a transfer of 146,000 from the county parking lots fund. In prior years, that number has been higher. The impact this year is because of the parking lot closure at Bruce's Beach due to the 28th Street infiltration project. So that has impacted revenues in the County Lots Fund, which then impacted the transfer to the general fund. And lastly, we'll talk about this a little bit more in a moment as well.

Since 2022, we started transferring general fund money to the Pension Trust Fund after the issuance of pension obligation bonds in 2021. And the pension policy adopted by the council at the time was that by issuing the pension obligation bonds, the city would experience savings in what we would have paid to CalPERS for our UAL payments, but we replaced that debt with CalPERS with level debt service payments by issuing the bonds. And so, as a prudent measure, then we decided to, have some the policy had some flexibility in how we could allocate the funds. For some years, we dedicated some of the funds towards the CIP fund. We've also been dedicating funds towards the section one fifteen trust fund every year since then.

However, in light of current needs this year for the insurance fund, we are proposing that we pause on the transfers to the section one fifteen trust, and as a temporary measure until we can hopefully receive some of those insurance fund recoveries and get a better handle on how those costs are trending. So and just to note too at the bottom there, this section one fifteen trust fund balance that is projected to be 6 and a half million at the end of this year and so those funds will just remain there and they can only be used for pension costs in the future. So drilling down into general fund revenues, these are estimated at 119,000,000. The largest source of funds are tax revenues of property taxes, sales tax, TOT, business license taxes, and service charges. So a few notes on each of these key revenue sources.

Property tax is our largest component of general fund revenues at 42%. We are projected to increase by 4.6% from the current year estimate. The city's housing market continues to be strong with high demand for residential properties and new construction projects contributing to our assessed valuation. Property tax is estimated based on historical data, local economic trends and expert analysis from our consultants at HDL. The top right has sales and use tax, which does include our 1% Bradley Burn sales tax and also the new transactions and use tax which is now expected to bring the city $6,600,000 The business categories that typically perform well include general consumer goods and restaurants and hotels.

However, these are very subject to changes in economic impacts from, travel and tourism and consumer spending. The next item is TOT in the bottom left, and this includes hotel, transient occupancy tax, as well as short term rentals. So the this revenue is expected to generate about $9,300,000 next year or about 200,000 over the current fiscal year estimate. This revenue is attributed to the short term rentals as we've seen the most fluctuations in that over the of the last few years. The budget assumes occupancy rates will remain steady over the coming months for both hotels and short term rentals and hopefully, we will even see a boost from the regional events like the World Cup coming this summer.

On the bottom right, the business license tax category, we do issue approximately 5,000 business licenses annually and revenue from this tax is based primarily on the type of business and gross receipts reported. This tax has been resilient in economic downturns and has remained consistent over the past few years. With our newer online portal implemented last year, businesses are able to apply and renew their business license online and receive their tax certificate via email. This implementation has resulted in significant efficiencies in the way we manage the program and to date, we've still really only heard positive feedback. We are also starting to implement a new audit and discovery program to ensure that all businesses within the city are licensed and paying the appropriate tax.

Business license tax is anticipated to come in slightly less than the current year estimate, and that's primarily due to the current year having a lot of discovery payments through that program where we are now licensing more businesses than we have before, but that was kind of a one time bump in the current year. So on this slide, have building permits and plans check fees that are currently at all time highs due to several large commercial and residential projects. Based on the new fee structure that was developed, through the user fee study last year, the fees from building permits and plan check services are expected to continue to increase by about $200,000. Again, these are cost recovery fees for these discretionary services that are offered by the city. The parks and recreation revenues on the right side of the screen, I do apologize.

We just realized there was a a typo on this slide. The fiscal year twenty seven budget number should be, $5,300,000, not 5.9. So it is expected to increase by about 300,000 or six and a half percent, and that's based on market rates and continued high demand for all of Parks and Recreation's offerings, including their classes, facility reservations, swimming, and tennis pickleball. So getting to general fund expenditures of about a $128,000 $28,000,000. Excuse me.

The general fund is largely supporting public safety, and that is about 53% of our general fund budget. These expenditures support critical police patrol investigations, traffic safety programs, etcetera. Fire department expenditures include fire operations, emergency medical services, community risk reduction and and support services, as well as emergency preparedness efforts in the EOC. Parks and recreation and community development departments are greatly supported by cost recovery fees and service charges. And, again, these program areas will be, you know, more presented more fully presented next week.