City Council - Regular Meeting

recording in progress all right we're

We're close to an important photo opportunity. So we're going to get going. Welcome to Tuesday, June 16th, 2026 at our regular Marina City Council meeting. We have some special guests. We have Claire and we have James and their mommy and daddy are with us. We're so happy to see you here. And so we're going to have a roll call, please, Anita. Anita?

Council member McAdams here. Council member McCarthy here. Council member Biala here. Mayor Pro Tem Fisher here. Mayor Delgado here.

All right. Do we have any changes to our closed session schedule?

Thank you, Mayor. No, there are no changes.

Okay. So we're going to step down. Well, any comments from the public on closed session items? Anybody online? No. Okay. So we're going to step down and go into closed session. And before we step out of this building, we're going to take a picture with our special guests. And I'll turn it over to Councilmember Biala to tell us exactly how to do this. And then we'll come back here at 630 for our open session.

Well, actually, we could adjourn and then we can go up to the front of the dais to take a picture. Is that okay? Do we need to adjourn? or i mean just go to closed session that would close the meeting for the night yeah all right so kathy would like you like us to step down now for the photos all right

thank you everybody for being here it's going to be a very long night i believe uh we just came back from closed session we've been there since 5 p.m and our city attorney renee ortega will summarize that for you yes thank you mayor so council provided direction in closed session but took no reportable action We have some wonderful presentations tonight, but before we get to those, I'd like to ask you to stand for a moment of silence. And after that moment of silence, Gwen Atherton is going to lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance. Thank you, Gwen, for being a good sport. Okay, our first presentation is the Village Project and Manana Warriors. And who will be leading this for us? And we have a couple of, we have a few folks.

Good evening, Mayor, Council Members. My name is Reyna Vasquez and I am here today on behalf of the Village Project and our Emanata Warriors. First, I would like to thank you for your continued support of our work in the community. For many years, our Emanata program has been dedicated to empowering children and youth of African descent through cultural education, leadership development, mentorship, and identity building. One of the most meaningful aspects of our program is helping our youth understand who they are and where they come from. The educational trips we organize are learning experiences that bring history, culture, and leadership development to life. The impact of last year's trip to Ghana continues to be felt today through the growth and development we've seen in our youth. It has been inspiring to see our Jagna warriors share what they've learned and experienced with our younger warriors. Some have written songs and poems reflecting on their experiences and their connection to their heritage. This year, we are planning an educational and cultural immersion trip to Panama, where they will further explore the African diaspora, visit important historical sites, engage with local communities, and deepen their understanding of global Black history and culture. We are extremely grateful for the city's support in helping make these opportunities possible. And we respectfully ask for your consideration of this year's $10,000 contribution request for not only our Jagna Warriors educational trip to Panama, but also to support the Marina families we serve, which Ms. Regina will talk about briefly.

thank you so much for your time and for your continued investment in our youth good evening mayor city council city manager i'm regina mason and i'm the co-founder of the village project and i just want to uplift what reyna has already said but i also want to say that for 18 years the village project has invested in the city of marina in fact we have clinical therapists that are deployed to several schools working with children in the community we also have many families that are receiving untold numbers of services that are from the city of marina and they come to get re-entry services and a myriad of other services one of our students from marina just graduated from york and has been accepted to the university of nevada we have eight other students that are all they've known them since they were knee-high to a duck so to speak and they all graduated this year and they're all going to four-year institutions and they're coming from underserved backgrounds and so this is the type of work that we do And I just want to say that we really appreciate the partnership that we've had historically with the City of Marina. I will now let the Emanata Warriors talk to you a bit. Thank you.

Good evening, Marina City Council. On behalf of our group, I would like to sincerely thank you for your generous support of our educational trip to Africa last year. Your contribution helped make that experience possible, and it provided us with memories, knowledge, and cultural understanding that will stay with us for a lifetime. This year, we have the opportunity to participate in an educational trip to Panama. We will be grateful for your consideration of a donation to help support this experience. As with our previous journey, this trip will allow us to learn and grow and open our perspectives through firsthand cultural and educational opportunities. Thank you for your continued support of youth educational programs and for considering our requests. Thank you.

What was your name, sir?

I'm Zachary Alexander.

Thank you.

I'm Quincy. I don't really have a script, but I do want to mention something. You know, I learned a lot in Ghana and I gained a lot of experiences. It was really great being able to go back to where my ancestors came from. And something I did get from Ghana is was the name Kojo, which I'm actually my dad recommended. I can use it as my artist name. for making music. And I think that's something very special that I got from Ghana. Thank you.

Thank you, Kojo.

Hello, my name is Antonio Parker. I didn't get the pleasure of going to Ghana last year, but I have been on many different field trips with the Village Project, and it's allowed me to learn things I never would have learned before about my history, my culture, where I come from. It's allowed me to see myself across many different places, see my culture presented throughout different places, throughout different professions, different places. it's it's really helped me and inspired me to grow as a young black man myself and to really dive deep into my history and learn who i truly am and it's given me confidence as a person as well and allowed me to try things i never would have tried before and learn things i never have learned before so yeah thank you antonio

Hello, my name is RJ Parker and I would have to agree with everything my brother here Antonio said. This program has given me a lot of opportunities to grow as a black young man and learn more about my culture where I come from and kind of how I fit, how people of my race, including myself, fit into the community and just in society. This program just has. It's hard to explain, put into words, but in short, it's just helps me grow and given me confidence and has taught me so much. So any I would like to thank you for your consideration and anything you can provide for the village project. We'd be very grateful.

Thanks, RJ.

And I think that that is it. Both RJ and his brother are twins, as you can see, and they live in the city of Marina. So thank you very much for allowing us to speak on this evening. Thank you, Regina.

I wanted to give a special shout out to Kojo Quincy, because I saw him recently be a lead in the play Hairspray at York School, and his character was Seaweed. And Seaweed is a character that performs some amazing songs, like a show-stopping number called Run and Tell That. Anyway, he was an amazing actor in that play, and it's great to see you here, Quincy Kojo. and uh thanks to village project you know there's not too many non-profits that take youth to countries around the world like ghana and panama and we all know what an impact that has for all of us but especially when we're young able to do that it's wonderful thank you uh councilmember mccarthy

Thank you, Mayor. I just want to shout out to Mel and Regina and all the mentors. When I look at these young men, I really see the mentors. And that, to me, is what is so special. You know, I certainly had my fair share of mentorship growing up. And there are people that I think about every day when I go to bed at night. And I hope these young men think about the mentorship that they've received, too. And so thank you to you for what you do for our community.

Adams?

Thank you, Mayor. We have a sister city in Japan, Uzukuni. And, you know, I really, I sort of connect that work to this work, right? I mean, I look at the impact that the Marina High students have had. I mean, and really thank you to Council Member Biala for her leadership and work in that. And so for me personally, you know with the village project and and our um investment and support of this work it really brings it all together and connects it nicely so um and also um you know i i think the timing is is for two fortuitous with with friday being um juneteenth And so I know there was some great celebrations this last weekend. And I just, again, thank you to the Masons for their ongoing work and leadership and mentorship. Thank you.

Council Member Biala?

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And of course, Mel and Regina and Reina, thank you very much. But I want to say for all of you young people who have come today to speak here, I know it's probably a little nerve wracking to come out to the dais, but it really is special when you come and thank us for things. That just really, really does it for me. So thank you really for taking the time out tonight to do this. Thank you.

All right. Our city manager has some input.

One of the things that I heard from their presentation is a request for $10,000. We're in a new budget year. We haven't budgeted for that. And so if council is interested in that, we can put on the agenda for a future council meeting and bring that back to the council.

All right. I think that'd be a good idea. I see nods. And let's go to Mayor Pro Tem Fisher.

Thank you, City Manager. That would be a good idea to put that on a future agenda. And just like Council Member Biala, I wanted to commend you for speaking so well. Because I know it can be scary to do, but you didn't show that. So thank you all for being here and wishing you good travels. Travelling is so good. It opens our eyes. Being exposed to other cultures, other countries, it's wonderful. So thank you for being here.

And you're welcome to stay. You're welcome to leave when you wish. You're not captive here. Thank you very much all for coming here. All right. Our next presentation is to a special individual, Dean Zujane Atherton. And I mean, this is going to blow you all away when you hear about this proclamation. So I'm going to come on down and read it. And I'll ask Dean to come up and join me just in front here. so dean i don't know that we've ever had an individual living in the city of marina that's accomplished what you've accomplished but it sure is special and in recognition of your outstanding athleticism in the field of gymnastics we want to read a few words about you dean zhu zhing atherton Sue Jean. Sue Jean Atherton, thank you, Dean, won first place as an 11-year-old in the 2024 All-Around National Gymnastics Association's Championship in the Level 6 category. This includes achieving a final score that combines results of six routines and crowns the most versatile gymnast. What are the six routines?

Like what you mean? Like vault. Oh, vault, mushroom, highball, peaball, rings, and floor.

As a 12 year old in 2025, Dean placed second in the all around national championship in the level seven category. So he's moving up. As a 13 year old in June, 2026, Dean won first place in the all around NGA national championship in the level seven category, as well as first place in the high bar, the rings and the pommel horse. His team, Rising Star Gymnastics, is a Monterey-based training facility. His team placed first in this year's National Gymnastics Competition. Dean has always received strong support from his parents, his grandparents, and his coach, Sage Barka-Hall. Now, therefore, be resolved that we as a city council standing behind you of the city of Marina, along with the entire Marina community where we all live, do hereby proclaim and extend our collective pride and congratulations to you, Dean, for your achievements as a national gymnastics champion. We wish to thank you publicly for demonstrating such exemplary dedication, years of hard work, and success on this 16th day of June, 2026. Thank you, Dean. now special people like you always have to give a long speech so what would you like to say um thank you for supporting me and it will help me and get me confident and yeah thank you So we'll take a picture, just Dean and I, and then we'll ask the council to come down and then we'll ask the family to come up. Yes. And while the council is coming up, Dean, why don't you tell us who's in your family today that came with you? At National. In your family.

Who has supported you over the years? My mom, my brother, my sister, and my dad.

Right. And who's not here who supported you a whole bunch, besides your dad?

My pop.

Your grandfather?

Mm-hmm.

All right. Thank you, Dean. Okay. Well, have family come join all of us. And the last picture will be just Dean and his family.

It's all safe place.

Let's let the mom and I some places. Take away. Can you can you see very ugly? Now we'll leave a family for the final one. all right thank you dean thank you family congratulations that's a family success okay um Tough act to follow, but we think we've got it. We're going to introduce our new fire chief, Kristen Maurer.

I don't know if I can follow either one of those, but I'll try. Thank you, Mr. Mayor and council and city manager Long for having me and letting me introduce myself. My name is Kristen Maurer. That's the fire department right there. Was that timed? That was timing. But thank you for having me. I started as a firefighter in 1999 as a firefighter medic, and I served at a department named Clark County Fire District 6 in Vancouver, Washington. I served there 26 years, worked my way up to the ranks, finishing there as fire chief for the last five years. I could have retired. I was kind of enjoying that time off, but something in me was calling to come back and serve. And so I started looking at opportunities and places to go, and I had never heard of Marina, California. But the recruiter called me and she said, Kristen, I think this is going to be a great fit for you and you should check it out. So I listened and I did. And from the moment I first interviewed here, I knew it was a special place and you have a special city. I felt really welcomed. The professionalism was high in all aspects of the testing process. And then I was lucky enough that city manager Long called me back and said he wanted to talk to me some more. I interviewed with him from 9 in the morning till 3 p.m. in the afternoon. That's the longest interview I've ever had on record. And it was the most enjoyable time. And what he first said to me is, I'm going to sell you on why you should come to Marina. And he did. It worked. So even after that, the fire department, every interaction I've had with them has been completely professional. And I know they had to go on a call, but I didn't ask them to be here tonight. And the fact that they were all standing in the back and supporting me speaks to their professionalism and the support that I hope I'm going to have over years to come. So I just want to thank you for giving me the opportunity. I'm really looking forward to serving this community and serving this fire department, helping it grow and enhance its services to take something that's already great and make it better. So thank you.

Welcome.

I also wanted to, not to take the thunder away from Kristen, and she's going to do great here, but I also want to just recognize Mark Sweeney, who's been serving as our acting fire chief for the last five, six months now. Mark has done a great job and he's going to be really important in Kristen's transition of coming here. So thank you, Mark, so much for the last six months.

And we don't have Lane too much longer, about another month. But Lane not only saw to the hiring of Kristen, but also our Police Chief Randy, our Recreation Director Elizabeth, Police Chief Ishmael, Public Works Director Ishmael, Assistant City Manager Courtney, HR Director Belinda. Not sure else. But I wanted to point out that before we had our police chief, Randy, we had an acting police chief named Steve Russo. Much like Mark Sweeney was acting fire chief, Steve Russo did an excellent job before we had Randy. And then Steve Russo handed the baton to Randy, and I'm sure they had a lot of transition passing the baton there. My point is that thanks to our city manager, Lane Long, who's been here for 12 years, we've had an excellent lineup of directors and management staff. And it, it has to, you know, it starts at the top. It's got to, it speaks to Lane's ability to pick and to, um, to inspire good people to uh to take the position like you heard a six-hour interview so i want to thank lane for for bringing on good people and i want to thank the good people for coming to the city marina and doing such an incredible job i just can't remember you know any of you that have done a bad job and it just speaks to the the quality the caliber of our little community of marina thanks everybody for for that for your contributions and thanks to lane for seeing in you what we've all seen since he hired you very much appreciated okay so now we're going to move on to council and staff announcements if there are any staff announcements let's take those first

good evening mayor o'tem and council members um i just wanted to give a little reminder about our fourth of july block party uh that is scheduled for saturday july 4th out at the marina airport it'll be starting about 3 30 in the afternoon and it will go till nine o'clock and we will have a number of different bands food trucks vendors touch a truck display and just lots of kids activities so it'll be great fun for the whole family and then we'll also have a a special launch pad for safe and sane fireworks if anybody wants to bring their own and that'll start at dark and so we just want to encourage everybody to come out we hope to see you there and um yeah We're excited about it, so I can answer any questions if you have any.

Thank you very much, Elizabeth. Elizabeth is our Recreation and Cultural Services Department Director. She's been here for a couple of months, and she's been fantastic. Any other staff announcements?

on next tuesday june 23rd the state lands commission uh at the regular meeting is having a um there's an item on the agenda that is critical to the city of marina um this meeting it starts at 12 o'clock and the item that they're going to consider is a lease to cal-am uh water company to operate their slant wells in a property that state lands commission owns that is in the city of rita and that will absolutely impact our our fresh groundwater that we have here in our community and so we're going to be publishing information on our website of how you can join the state lands commission it's up in san francisco is the meeting you can go there in person if you want you can uh join it by Zoom from your home. We're gonna set up a big TV here at our city council chambers, and you can come here and join it on Zoom here at our council chambers. On our website, we're gonna put together some talking points of the key issues that this Cal-Am Water Project is critically impacting our community. And so we'll have that on our website. Also, Councilmember Biala is actively involved with this. If you have questions, please contact her directly. And also Councilmember Vischer or Mayor Pro Tem Vischer, they'll be your conduit for additional information as well as our website. But we encourage all of our community to get involved, let them hear of how important our groundwater is and how these wells from Cal-Am are really going to impact our future groundwater. Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you very much, Lane. So yeah, we hope to see a lot of people in this room lining up to speak on Zoom. It's nice to be amongst each other, with each other during these hearings. And this is one of many hearings that we've had, and we'll have maybe some others coming up on the same issue. Really important issue. Our future water is almost nothing more important than that. All right. So now let's go to Council Member Biala.

Thank you. And I just wanted to add that we had confirmation today from the State Lands Commission that we can have people come to the Zoom podium, so to speak, in a group. And so that we could have one speaker with up to four people behind them standing there, but also getting credit for being a part of the testimony as well. So you can come and speak or you can support one of the other people by standing with them so please don't be you know bashful that you don't you you can't you know public speak and whatnot okay so please contact us and we'll help that organization okay thank you thank you Kathy Mayor Pro Tem Fisher

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Council Member Biala, city manager, and our mayor will be in San Francisco. I will be here in the council chambers. So if you come, come around noon or shortly after noon, and we will help you with scripts, or if you just want to stand there to support one of the speakers. Just please come on over next Tuesday, the 23rd, shortly after noon in these council chambers. Thank you.

Thank you, Elisabeth. Let's go to Council Member McAdams.

Thank you, Mayor. In honor and recognition of Juneteenth that takes place this Friday, we celebrate the emancipation of enslaved African-Americans, as well as the ongoing pursuit of freedom, equality, and opportunity for all. Juneteenth serves as an important reminder of our nation's history and the work that remains to build a more just and inclusive community. The city offices will be closed this Friday on Juneteenth. I think that's the first time that that has taken place. Is that correct? last year was okay so the second year and then so we will reopen regular business hours on monday and then also i wanted to thank and congratulate staff on the gloria jean tate park opening oh my goodness what a park I've been there several times. It's packed. Pickleball courts are packed. There's adults exercising, kids playing. My dogs love the dog park. And it's really a special time for our city to see that tangible work. and community investment so I just I really wanted to thank staff everyone involved I know they're working through the kinks and working through the hiccups that'll just take a little time but overall just what a fantastic asset for for our community so I've heard that we're like the place to be now so thank you

Thank you, Jenny. Councilmember McAdam? I'm so sorry. Councilmember McCarthy?

Thank you, Mayor. As the Recreation Director mentioned, fireworks season is upon us. You are welcome and encouraged to report if you believe fireworks may be illegal to law enforcement. You can do that by calling non-emergency, which I think is 831... 384. 384-7575. I find the telephone prompt to be unbearable, so I always go to Monterey Spark. Just Google Monterey Spark, and it's an online reporting form. I find that police response tends to be just as quick, if not quicker, by using that online form. There were some complaints in Preston Park about fireworks just today. So again, you're encouraged to always report. Our professional law enforcement officers will know how to handle any situation. Second item I wanted to mention was this council had approved funding for spay and neuter services. My understanding is that is in the works. I don't know if a formal date has been set.

I don't believe a formal date, but it is close, and so we'll let you know.

What I would encourage anybody in need of spay and neuter services to do is contact SNPUS directly and ask them when their marina clinic is scheduled to be held. They will be in Marina before the end of the year offering low cost or I believe free. I don't remember the detail of the spay and neuter services. I cannot tell you the number of city council meetings that I've sat through in this room with likely unneutered cats below our feet. And it's just not only frustrating because of the noise, but because the lack of care that the community shows towards these animals. So thank you, Mayor.

Thank you, Brian. Mayor Bertrand Visser.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Marina Coast Water District starts offering financial assistance with water bills. If you're on the PG&E Care Program, please visit marinamcwd.org. There's a limited time window to apply. And after that, I think it's well supplies less. So anybody on the PG&E Care Program, please check out mcwd.org. Thank you.

all right thank you there's a couple other firsts that have happened recently our public works department took the initiative to find a designer and plant over a thousand uh different well over a thousand local uh native wildflowers in front of vince dimaggio park by the parking lot where before that it was a tired looking landscape and now it's a beautiful flowering well-maintained loved uh location so check out this new native plant garden in front of instamaggio where you park your car to walk in really amazing thank you to ishmael the public works director that kind of took the lead to make all that happen uh last saturday the other first is that uh our recreation staff joined up with our hr staff and uh held the first ever Marina Volunteer Appreciation event at the community center. There was an incredible spread of food for all different kinds of diets. I'm talking vegan, vegetarian, meat eaters, etc., was just a wonderful spread and all the volunteers that came to be appreciated. I think they left feeling appreciated. I have a feeling this event will be one that grows in size, but this was the first and I think it was really wonderfully successful. So thanks, especially to the recreation staff and Elizabeth, their leader, but also to all the other staff that were involved. It was a great event. I learned that day that on june 30th Coming up at 6 30 p.m at the rocky hahn community center There will be an art in the park planning meeting to plan and and and share the plans Uh and get feedback on the art that's going to go into The all-inclusive playground that's going to be built next year by the hands of about a thousand community volunteers so, uh I hope that some of us can join the June 30th, 6.30 p.m. across the parking lot, Rocky Han, to hear and give feedback more about the art that can go in that wonderful park. All right. So now we're going to move on to public comment. And this includes anything on our consent agenda that you'd like to speak to or other things that are not on our agenda later tonight. We'll start with the folks in the room. Come on up. You have up to three minutes.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor and council members. My name is Fred Watson, one of the co-founders of 4TAG, the Fort Ord Regional Trail and Greenway Project. Please pull item 10G4 from the consent agenda. My comments tonight follow a letter that myself and Scott Waltz sent to the council yesterday. Hilltop Park is a real gem. You can use a great internal trail system to reach the top and watch the sun set over the ocean while standing in a natural environment and to be able to do that forever. Imjin Parkway is a great road and it has on it on the north side of it a really great 12-foot multi-purpose trail that connects Preston and Abrams parks to areas to the west. As part of the Fortag project, Tampsey is just about to build a connection from that Imjin trail in the Preston-Seahaven area across to where 8th Street comes down to 5th Avenue. We've designed that trail to connect directly into the 0.45 mile trail segment along 8th Street that is mapped in the packet tonight. Everything is set, for example, for young families in Preston and Abrams parks to be able to safely bike toward the coast and up onto Hilltop Park to see the sunset over the ocean. Many thanks to everyone who's made this possible, the developer, staff, consultants, past and present councils, TAMC and CSUMB. There's just one small but very important glitch As drawn in the map in the packet, the Eighth Street Trail doesn't actually connect to Hilltop Park. It's blocked by an eight foot nature strip and then there's a narrow five foot sidewalk and two very tight 90 degree turns. There's not, as you might hope, an eight foot wide connection to the existing system of eight foot paved trails at the park. We need to make sure that the particulars of the easement agreement tonight do not constrain us from being able to fix this. And we need to fix that glitch to make a family friendly eight foot connection between Eighth Street Trail and the summit area of Hilltop Park, and to make a loop out of the dead end segments that are there now. To look at this another way, You wouldn't build Highway 101 in the Bay Area right past SFO Airport without actually having off ramps to allow you to get to the airport. It's the same thing. If you build a segment of a 30 mile regional trail system past one of the best parks in one of the best cities, there's an expectation from the community that you'll incorporate a safe, accessible, intentional connection from the trail to the park. Please pass a motion tonight that makes certain that we will get that connection. Thanks.

Thank you very much, Fred. And there's been much discussion about it tonight, and we'll get to that in a moment.

Mayor, City Council, wonderful staff. I wear a lot of hats. Oh, Mike Moeller, resident of Marina. I wear a lot of hats in Marina, but tonight I'm wearing the hat of Repair Cafe Marina founder. And I'm excited to announce the long-awaited return to the Repair Cafe in Marina on July 15th. from 4 p.m to 6 p.m at vince dimaggio park thanks to um the generous support of the city of marina and their recreation and cultural department um i am writing the shirt tells of another event that was happening there anyway um I HAD PLANNED TO HOLD MORE REPAIR CAFE EVENTS SOONER. THE FIRST ONE WAS MAY OF 2025. AND IT WAS PRETTY POPULAR. LIFE GOT IN THE WAY. BUT RESIDENTS KEPT ASKING ME TO ORGANIZE ANOTHER ONE. WE COULDN'T WAIT ANY LONGER. AND YOU HAVE TO GIVE PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT, RIGHT? SO WHAT IS THE REPAIR CAFE? it was founded in the netherlands actually in 2009 by a environmentally conscious woman who decided that we throw too many things away and if she can get skilled people and community members who have broken items need to be fixed they can get together and keep things out of the landfill save money and i think now is a a better time than any with um you know rising prices inflation uh tariffs um that we try to keep things uh try to fix broken things and try to keep things out of the landfill which is always good um the repair cafe actually has an exciting future um it's i plan to grow it um in the In the process of reaching out and finding more volunteers, I was approached by some other organizations here in the region. We have some partnerships developing that will be really great for Marina and the community as a whole when it comes to sustainability and the repair cafe. Um, so I invite everybody to attend. Um, you don't need to bring in a broken item and you don't need to be able to fix anything. You can come and have a cup of coffee, have a snack, um, talk with people and just enjoy your community. Um, I think that's pretty much it. I hope I didn't forget anything. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Mike. Anyone else in the building wish to speak?

Hello, Mayor, council members. My name is Nolan Aragon. I'm a resident of Marina and a local business owner. I am concerned about the approval of flocks drone as first responder technology through the consent calendar without a more detailed public discussion of its long term implications. Unlike fixed cameras or license plate readers drone technology introduces an entirely different level of government surveillance capability. drones can observe neighborhoods from above monitor activities over large geographic areas and collect video footage of residents who are not suspected of any crime. While the stated purpose may be emergency response and public safety, the city should carefully consider how this technology could be used in the future and what safeguards will be in place. Recent concerns surrounding flock safety in California have centered on data sharing, oversight, and public trust. Several California jurisdictions have terminated or suspended flock contracts after discovering issues involving access to collected data and concerns about transparency. These experiences demonstrate the importance of establishing clear policies before expanding surveillance capabilities. Respectfully request answers to the following questions. What specific public safety problem is this drone program intended to solve that cannot be addressed through existing police resources? What is the total cost of the program, including equipment, software, maintenance, training, insurance, and future replacement costs? How frequently will drones be deployed and under what circumstances? Will drones be used only for emergency response or can they be used for general patrol and surveillance purposes? What restrictions will exist regarding surveillance of private property, backyards, parks, public gatherings, and community events? How long will collected video footage be retained? Who will have access to the footage and data? Can drone footage be shared with outside agencies, including federal agencies? What auditing procedures will be used to detect misuse? Has the city evaluated alternative public safety investments and compared their effectiveness against this technology? Public safety and civil liberties are not mutually exclusive. Residents deserve both. For approving expanded aerial surveillance capabilities, I believe the community should have a full discussion regarding cost, benefit, privacy protections, and accountability measures. I have also printed off a couple reports that have detailed flocks security issues with their hardware and various problems with user access by unauthorized users. So I have copies for all of you up here.

You can pass them out, Nolan, if you like. he's doing that let me ask our our city manager um nolan has asked several questions how might we answer those lane wait is it normal for us to answer them on the diets tonight on a consent item no so it'd have to be pulled and put at the end of our agenda all right thank you nolan anyone else

Good evening. I'm Jan Schreiner, and I sit on the board of the Marine Coast Water District, as well as the Monterey County Democrat Central Committee. But tonight I'm here as a former Public Works Commissioner, as a cyclist. And I want to speak a little bit about 2009, 2010, when as a chair of the Public Works Commission, I worked on the Pedestrian Bicycle Master Plan. And in those times, we were looking specifically at connectivity. And it was an early time in GIS. Our city staff were unable to create maps from Google Maps or GIS layers. And so out of sort of a limitation of what we can do here in Marina, I turned to CSUMB. and was just so in awe of the maps that Dr. Watson was creating and the idea of 4Tag. And so a lot had gone on leading up to that time in regards to University Villages and Sea Haven, but even more has gone on since those days. So I would just ask that you reflect on the disconnect and the imbalance. And Marina needs a unification and a connectivity that we have not yet seen. So I embrace the new growth, but we need to connect to everyone who is here already. And a lot of our folks, even one of our board members last night rode his bicycle to our meeting. A lot of us are turning to the bicycle as gas prices are hitting $7.00. gallon and maybe who knows it goes up from there right so please pull that item give it a really hard reconnecting kind of a thought and follow the four take maps if you can thank you jan okay let's go online welcome denise turley

Hello. Good evening. So some of this will be a slight repeat since we are bringing Kristin on, brand new tonight as Fire Chief. I'm going to do a little bit of the history of 4th of July fireworks here. And then proceed forward with the conversation. Brian, I only wish that the resources you mentioned actually worked. But sorry, they don't. So... Least not on my phone. And I have never successfully left a message or gotten a call back without having to go through the police chief himself. Not good in an emergency. So Christian, so fireworks in the city are prohibited. And basically we have started the hell that is going to be the next couple of weeks where we have behavior that you would expect in a riot regarding fireworks. And the only way to call in and make a complaint to you is through the county non-emergency and emergency services who switch themselves to voicemail if they're overwhelmed. So in a real emergency, forget getting through. So to start briefly to frame this last week, we had two incidents at the park at Preston Park. where at the pony league baseball games fireworks were let off not once but twice and i just want to say to the persons who participated i think it was awful tone deaf to go into a neighborhood who lost three homes less than six months ago to an unexpected fire to light off incendiary devices no matter what they were so close to that home hello those people still have ptsd and shame on you i will yield back a whole 10 seconds thank you thank you denise grace silva santella welcome

Hi, Mayor and City Council. I want to express my pure joy at having dedicated pickleball courts in Marina. I've been waiting a number of years. I know I have spoken to you. I've spoken to the Recreation and Cultural Services Commission supporting Pickleball and Marina. And on June 6, I was there from about 10, 15 until 3 o'clock in the afternoon. And it was one of... I felt I was in my pure, happy place. I had been donated to me 15 gently used pickleball paddles from friends that we were giving away. I gave... some to two young families and they were so excited about getting these free paddles. We gave free pickleball balls to some of these people who were showing a genuine interest in playing. The courts are really popular and people are really excited about the courts that will be coming to Seahaven. The players that are playing there are Marina residents. They're coming from Salinas. They're used to going to other places. I can walk down to these courts, which is really exciting. I want to express my gratitude and a big thank you to Drea in the Recreation Department. who met with myself, Joel Johnson, who's a marina resident and a recreation commission member, and another pickleball player from Monterey, Mike Kennedy. And we worked on the signage that you'll see there on the courts. And also they took care of a problem we saw on the courts and had it fixed by June 6th. So just want to express real gratitude to you all, to city staff, to city manager who, unlike other cities, has supported pickleball in the city of Marina. And tomorrow morning, I'll be there at nine o'clock if anybody wants to watch me play pickleball. So thank you very much.

Thank you, Grace. Let's go to Linda. Welcome, Linda.

Yeah, thank you, Mayor and Council. I live directly next to the city-zoned ballpark in Preston, which is fully surrounded by residential homes. Although the facility is zoned for municipal use, the surrounding neighborhood is entirely residential. Ample flight music, megaphones, and fireworks from city-permitted events carry directly into nearby homes. exceeding reasonable residential noise levels and creating avoidable safety and fire risks. Regulatory provisions that still apply, the municipal noise ordinance, noise limits are based on where the noise is heard. When amplified sound from a city zone facility impacts homes, residential noise standards apply. The California Noise Control Act requires local governments to protect residents from excessive noise and authorizes restrictions on amplified sound affecting residential living. Public nuisance law. Any activity that interferes with the comfortable enjoyment of property is a nuisance, regardless of zoning. Loud amplified sound and fireworks in a dense residential area meet this definition. Fire code and fireworks restrictions. Fireworks, consumer or improvised, are prohibited without proper licensing. Fireworks set off by attendees at a city zone ballpark still violate fire safety rules when they endanger surrounding homes. land use compatibility requirements. Even city zone facilities must operate in a manner compatible with adjacent residential uses. The city is responsible for mitigating impacts from its own permitted events. As a resident, I'm asking the city to revise its permitting conditions for this ballpark to prohibit amplified music, megaphones, and any fireworks at events held at this location. Strengthen security and enforcement to ensure compliance with noise safety and fire prevention rules. Every resident has the right to safe and quiet living conditions. Zoning does not exempt the facility from protecting the surrounding community. I respectfully request that the city enforce existing regulatory protections and update permit conditions to safeguard the neighborhood. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Linda. Let's go to Carrie Hansen. Welcome, Carrie.

Hi, sorry about that. Can you hear me now?

Yes. Loud and clear.

Thanks so much. I just wanted to introduce myself. My name is Carrie Hansen and I'm here attending this meeting on behalf of flock safety. So I will be happy to answer questions. I won't do them now, but if there is time at the end of the session and there continues to be questions and we'd like to go over that with the community, I'm happy to do so. And I can yield back my time.

Okay. Carrie, before you go, I didn't hear your topic. Can you repeat what your topic was?

Oh, sorry.

I am Carrie Hansen here on behalf of flock safety regarding the drone program that is up for proposal.

All right. Thank you, Carrie. Thank you. Let's go next to Paula. Hello. Welcome, Paula.

Good evening. I'm following up on some of the comments made by other people who live out here in Preston and Abrams Park. I sent in what I thought was a robust email to all of your attention, so I know you have the details of this. And it's not just a complaint about fireworks. It's a complaint about the lack of policies and procedures and oversight and enforcement of activities conducted at the sports park here in preston park and perhaps even at others specifically there is a need for clearer guidelines governing acceptable conduct at permitted events and meaningful real consequences for violation of those guidelines. When I reviewed the sports field application, I found that it doesn't explicitly prohibit fireworks. And of course in the city of Marina, um, you know, safe and sound are allowed. However, in this housing area, the residents who live here are prohibited and that's because we have a lot of dry vegetation and we have vulnerable property, personal and public property, both. So, um, You know, such a restriction should exist at least for this sports park up here. And the lack of real-time monitoring at these events further complicates enforcement efforts. You know, and it was referenced earlier by Councilwoman McCarthy to call the police department. Well, the problem is oftentimes by the time the police can get out here, the violators, the people who are the perpetrators of this, are gone and cannot be located. So And given these recent incidents, one occurred at 8.41 a.m. in the morning. And when it happened, it sounded like an assault weapon. It did not sound like fireworks. We're not in a night sky. We couldn't see that they were fireworks. Later in the day, it was evident And it was also evident that they were illegal, because they were going way up in the sky. But this is a problem, because later in the day, it was 1241, I believe, and the police had gone out, as well as the Pony baseball president, and had asked it to stop. So clearly, self-regulation and reliance on it by the event organizers or the participants is insufficient. So additional mitigation measures should be implemented by the City of Marina to ensure accountability, protect residents, and safeguard both public and private property. And I have enumerated those in my email. Some of them have to do with the revision of the application itself. some of it has to do with specific consequences should there be a violation and some of it is the encouragement to the city to do some type of surveillance whether it's cameras that are turned on and also i believe that the city of marina should have graystar publish to the residents here when these events are happening so that they can better distinguish that could be, in fact, fireworks or something happening up there rather than assault weapons. Some people were absolutely terrified and texted me thinking they needed to take shelter. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Paula. OK, we'll go ahead and close public comment. And I think that regarding 8th street 10 g4 that fred watson and some others commented i think it's best to pull that to let them know uh what some of us found out today which is good news about the easement agreement that we're going to consider tonight that's on our consent and i think that uh nolan did a lot of work and answered asked a lot of uh well thought out questions. And so at some point tonight, I'd like to ask the police chief to briefly answer those questions and give Nolan an opportunity later to meet with Chief Hopkins for more detailed discussion. But that includes pulling those two items. And counsel, would you rather put those two at the end of agenda tonight, which is our normal practice? And that's probably not gonna be satisfactory to Nolan or Fred. They'll have to wait till the very end of this meeting and it's gonna go late. But at the same time, we wanna get to those main issues that we have that are very important to our city. So let's do that. We'll pull those two items and we'll bring them up after our action items, or perhaps after 10A and 10B. and maybe at that point we could take them a little sooner. Why don't we do that look real quick so Fred and Nolan and other commenters know if they choose to stay or not. I'd like to ask our city manager if C and D, 13 C and D, are important for tonight, or if we could do these two consent items before 13 C and D. Councilmember McAdams, do you have comments? I'm seeing about the agenda order.

Yes. Okay. Yeah. I mean, I think we need to stick with how we usually do business. And unfortunately that's part of it. We have people that wait in the audience till 10 o'clock at night, regardless, regardless. So, or we can move it till the next meeting and then it can be on the top of the agenda. But I noticed that the council like the agenda or the, what mr ortega like where did his item go that keeps getting pushed and pushed about the council the meeting efficiencies, like our meetings are so inefficient that we can't even talk about efficiencies.

Right. So let's table the question about the other thing. Let's stick to what.

Yeah. So, so my suggestion is that it goes on the next meeting agenda. Cause we're not going to get to the two items.

Okay.

That's what I'm assuming. And, um, You know, and there's other people here that are here to talk about the ballot measure and all that stuff. So I would say if you don't want them to wait till 10 o'clock at night, then we can assure them that we'll hear it at the next meeting.

All right. Thank you, Jenny. Mayor Pro Tem Fisher.

Thank you, Samir. While I agree with council member McAdams that we usually need to stick to our routine, I think 10G4 doesn't, well, it probably already has been pulled now, but I thought we could just give a quick comment because we know that all the feedback that we received, all the questions are not about the agenda item, but about design, which will be brought back to the council at a later time. So when people are aware of that, they might just not want to wait tonight. And I don't want to hold up this agreement because this road needs to be constructed.

Thank you. Uh, city manager lane long. What do you think about C and D 13 C and D? on on 13 d um the issue here is that uh it's just an easement um the actual design of 13 d or third sorry yes 13 d i'm looking at 13 c and d uh which we to ask how important they are that we hear them tonight those are critical those are critical okay so i think that council mcadams is correct um is it is it okay lane is it not critical if we um Don't even pull the street 8th Street, but we do pull for a further meeting the flock item, or is that flock item critical for tonight?

I don't think the flock item is critical for tonight.

It is critical. Okay. All right. So I think I would suggest that we go to Council Member Bialik.

That was a new piece of news that the flock thing is critical, so I was going to suggest something else, but now I...

Wow. Okay, Kathy, I think I'll suggest that the flock item be approved tonight at the end of the meeting, even though it's going to make some folks wait and that we see if any council wants to pull the 8th Street item after we hear a very brief reference to that. So I don't think we need a motion as long as we have consensus. So the flock item will be at the end of tonight's action agenda. which will be rather late if we get to it and we will because the chief says it's critical and then these 8th Street is part of our agenda let's go there now uh City Manager can you give a brief uh summary like 30 seconds or less on the 8th Street easement agreement

The item for Council is just a small portion that we need to get an easement from CSU and B and timing is really critical because we need it before Vanya is gone. The actual design that there were some of the issues that were raised by Doctor Watson. Those are going to be discussed with staff and that we brought back to counseling. Certainly reach out and talk with Doctor Watson and others that are interested in that design part of that.

My brief comment on that is it's my understanding from Edry de la Rosa, I'm sorry, Edry de la Rosa of our, I'm sorry? de los santos thank you um that the design is completely up in the air um as far as all the things that the public tonight expressed concern about how it's going to be connected to four tag how it's going to be a gateway to hilltop park that whole area The design that's in the packet is outdated. There's a new design already, but it's not final. That this may or may not go to a commission before it comes to council, but it will come back to council for design review. And so all the things that Elizabeth and I see in agreement with the public's comments, because we've been talking about this for a couple of days, we we we feel we feel very confident that the design is still to come so tonight's placeholder design is just to get the easement agreement with the university it's not to approve the design and so i just want to ask the city attorney if the if we pass the easement agreement tonight the way that it's written does it allow us to basically design um the four tag connection to hilltop park as we wish

so so yes thank you mayor so um i'm not gonna i don't know that i can comment on the design issue i haven't looked at where that sort of stems from in terms of that it's going to come back to council what i will say is the item before us tonight doesn't limit whatever else is out there in terms of the design in the sense that um this agreement is is just that is for a small piece that is needed to complete the roadway as i understand it maybe the city uh i'm sorry consulting engineer edry can can advise better because i don't understand the full scope of what other agreements may govern and require this design to come back to council okay so

So we've given a lot of time to this, given that we're not pulling it, but still, if any council member wants to pull it, we'll take it up at the end of this meeting. Otherwise, we're likely to approve it as part of the consent agenda tonight, trusting that the design is still down the road. Soon, it has to be done very soon, because we want to build the 8th Street. It's ready to be built, but we don't have a design.

yet for this important hilltop connection customer i think um uh edry had his hand up yeah i'm just i'm just worried about spending too much time on it because okay well then i'll make a motion to accept the agenda pulling uh only the flock safety um 10g2 and have that put at the end of the agenda second okay uh seconded by mayor pro tem um all right any other let's go to councilman mccarthy

So if there's no final questions or comments, we'll go to a vote.

All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Opposed, please say no. Okay, that motion passes unanimously with us. Thank you, everybody. We'll move on to the public hearings. The first one regarding Seabreeze Landscape Maintenance District.

Yes, please. Hello, Council, City, City Council, residents, Mayor Bruce Delgado. Thank you for having us here today. I want to bring the public hearing for the LMD District of Seabreeze, the Seabreeze Landscape Maintenance District. So Just want to do this presentation just so the public knows and the city council also knows. The Alaska Maintenance District for Seabreeze was established in 1996 and includes 36 lots that is on the northern end of the city of Marina. The proposed fiscal year 2526 had a assessment of 182 and 42 cents a year per parcel, or $15.20 per month for each parcel that has residents. And the outgoing plan maintenance for this district will be 3,500 per parcel. Next slide please. Exhibit C by the engineer report shows the fiscal year 24, 25, 25, 26, and 26, 27 reports just showing what the dollar amount is for each district. Next slide, please. Here we go with the comments and questions. I did receive a... message from William M. Hinova. He's a retired Army Corps engineer and he shared his thoughts on the maintenance that was going on. We will review the specific location that he identified and make a coordination with the maintenance contractor if appropriate. The purpose of tonight's hearing is to consider the annual asset levy. However, staff will continue to work with residents regarding the maintenance concerns and severe several expectations within the district.

Next slide, please.

The next on the agenda will be the open public hearing for the Monterey Bay Estates Lighting and Landscape Maintenance District. Next slide, please.

Let's open the public hearing on the Seabreeze Landscape Maintenance Assessment District. If there's anyone in the room that would like to speak to this, please come on up to the microphone. Not seeing anyone, anyone online that would like to speak to Seabreeze, please raise your hand and we'll call on you. okay we'll close the public hearing and i would motion that we adopt the resolution before us confirming the diagram the assessment and ordering levy of 182 dollars and 42 cents for f fiscal year 26 27 as an assessment for the sea breeze landscape maintenance assessment district and authorized city clerk to file a certified copy of the diagram and the assessment with the monterey county auditor controller prior to august 1st 2026.

SECOND.

ALL RIGHT. THANK YOU FOR THE GOOD REPORT. ANYTHING MORE THAT YOU WANT TO PROVIDE INPUT REGARDING SEA BREEZE?

WELL, I JUST WANT TO THANK MR. WILLIAM, JUST BECAUSE HE WAS THE ONE RESIDENT THAT EMAILED ME REGARDING THIS AND HE COULDN'T MAKE IT BECAUSE OF A MEDICAL PROCEDURE. BUT JUST WANT TO SAY THANK YOU. AND WE ARE WORKING TO SEE HOW HEALTHY THIS DISTRICT IS IN TERMS OF THE piggy bank as you would say just because it is um it's not in the best shape it's getting lighter yes sir all right thank you lissandra couple cast member mccarthy thank you mayor um as always i always have questions about these landscape and lighting districts um

guess i'll start with that retaining wall so does that belong on somebody's property so this district were to be dissolved that retaining wall would be responsible of each lot owner or or is that on city property so the retaining wall would be for the property owner they would be responsible just like if a tree was in their property it would be their responsibility as well okay um I appreciate your comment on we're trying to find out the financial condition of these landscape districts spoiler alert spoiler alert they're in terrible condition right and um I was shocked that this council voted to dissolve the other one that was in bad condition, but the writing's on the wall. It's coming for these two. So I think as a city, we have played some role in engaging with these entities to try to help them understand the risk of when these dissolve, if they dissolve and I mean, $16 a month or what, what's the current monthly assessment.

Indeed. It is a,

yep 182 and 42 cents per year per parcel 16 bucks a month isn't enough to cover expenses for um so I mean again the writing's on the wall either the assessments need to go up and I believe the voters or the residents have to approve that or there's trouble down the line you know and it's it just feels very awkward voting to approve this knowing that it's not sustainable but those are my comments thank you mayor

Thank you, Brian. Let's go to Mayor Bertin Visscher.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And thank you, Lisandro. And I agree, the outreach to the residents needs to be very clear. It needs to be made very clear what will happen if it gets dissolved, if people don't vote to increase their contributions. It's unsustainable. You cannot do maintenance based on fees from 1996 with costs in 2026. So, yeah, when the outreach to the residents happens, please make it very clear what the options are and what it will mean for them. Thank you.

Thank you.

Lissandro, is Cypress Cove the name of the district that was dissolved? Yes, sir. And I think it was the second district that was dissolved because there was a tiny one on Bayer Drive that was dissolved about eight or ten years ago. Do you remember that, Lee? Yeah. So I think we've had two dissolved. And the issue is that every time we go through the process of asking the residents to increase their assessment, they decline. And that's their right under Prop 218. So we have no way to require an increase uh from the residents of the district so the district landscaping etc gets worse over time because there's less money there's less value in the in the assessment as inflation goes up it does less labor and less supplies it pays for less labor supply so option one assessments go up as council member uh mccarthy said Our staff has been highly involved in some of these districts, and it's not resulting in a majority vote, not even close to a majority vote. It's a landslide no every time that the 218 vote has been put to the residents of any of our districts in the last couple of decades. So the second option that Councilmember McCarthy mentioned is trouble. So the trouble is that the degradation of the landscape district. It's an interesting ethical question that where I live, the city takes care of my lights and any public, any landscaping that's not related to my house. And that's true over most of the city, except for these landscape and lighting districts and the dunes and Marina Station, which is under construction now. But the majority of our city, all residents pay for streetlights, landscaping that's in public area. So it's a little unfair to make these residents of landscape districts pay for something the rest of us don't pay for. It was in the contract that the paperwork they signed when those developments were built. So it's according to agreements that are in writing, but it doesn't feel fair to the people that live there. So I just want to point that out and ask a question that gets asked when we do these on a pretty regular basis to staff. Staff, what do we do when the quality of these districts becomes an eyesore and maybe unsafe, et cetera? What are the city's options? And Lissandra or city manager or city attorney, whoever is appropriate.

I think we do very similar to what we do to the Cypress Cove when it gets to where there becomes safety issues and the district is not willing to increase the funds to address that, then we bring it to the council and recommend dissolving it at that point.

After dissolution, how are the safety and aesthetic issues addressed?

Since these improvements on private property, it's the private property owner's responsibility. And so in the picture he had there, it had a wall. Typically, we don't build walls on backgrounds. In Cypress Cove, they plant all these huge trees, retaining walls, again, that we don't typically do. And those are improvements put in by the developer for that development to move forward. And so in this case, you see that wall behind there is decaying at some point. We would come to the council and say, you know, a recommendation to terminate the district because the safety issues are continuing to grow and the district isn't willing to address them. They're really kind of

forces our hand so in this case after we were to dissolve this district and the wall continues to degrade and it's the responsibility of the landowners to fix it what happens if they don't fix it and the wall falls or becomes a safety hazard it's the landlord's responsibility okay so do we send code enforcement to the landowners whose lots are occupied by the wall I see Ishmael. Ishmael, can you come on up? Because this is the toughest question. We see a downward trend and we're asking what happens at the end.

Yeah, what you recommended is what most cities would be left with. If there's a safety issue and it's not the city's property, then code enforcement would be sent out to deal with the property owner.

Okay.

unless Lane knows of some other way to that he's handled in the past and it's not it's not an easy situation for sure okay maybe stick around Ishmael and like I have a question for you but we're going to go to councilmember Viola

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I remember the last discussion with Cypress Cove and some of the residents there were very disturbed that the other majority of the residents were not willing to increase the rates when it's so evident, you know, the degradation that's happening. So in those situations, I I feel for the ones who were trying to increase, but at the same time, that group has to have the responsibility to finding the majority in order to comply with the increases. So we're kind of stuck there. But in the recent conversation saying that it converts, if you dissolve them, the district, then it reverts back to individual ownership. So it sounds like, and I just need to reaffirm this with our city attorney, there is no remedy available to say that once it converts, once it's dissolved, and once it converts to the responsibility of the individual property owners, that there is no other legal remedy that can have the city subsume those responsibilities because we do it for other people.

So, I mean, I think two things. If you're talking about the improvements that are on private property, those will become improvements that the property owners are responsible for. Anything on city property, on the other hand, would be the responsibility of the city.

Okay. So I'm just saying, for example, that brings to mind the whole issue of sidewalk repair. That has always been... individual homeowners because that's what i did i ended up you know having to repair it because it was kind of in no one's i didn't own it and yet i had the responsibility to maintain it and yet the city has made a decision to go ahead and um and to repair the sidewalks we as a city for property owners and yes it's not It's not our property per se, but it didn't seem reasonable that the property owner should be fixing and maintaining sidewalks in front of their houses so i'm i'm just saying that is there no way to kind of look at this situation and a little differently because quite frankly you know we keep seeing the same items come up and and really it it it just feels kind of you know senseless to me

I mean, the sidewalks have a specific statutory scheme, so that's sort of kind of a different paradigm altogether than what these are, landscape and lighting districts.

Okay. So you're saying zero, zero chance other than saying that it goes down and then we enforce and...

yeah yeah i mean not not that i can think of you're saying if if for some reason some of the property owners say oh city you've been taking care of the this retaining wall so now you you still have to do that is that what you're asking yeah or that we do it we assume that that that's a separate that's a sort of policy decision and we'd have to look at that if that were to come back to council if you wanted to undertake that obligation okay thank you thank you kathy paper temperature

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. City Attorney, I remember we were told we cannot use public funds for repairs on private properties. And I agree that sidewalks are different because they're used by the public.

Yes. So again, we'd have to look at that. If that were something that the City Council wanted to consider, we'd have to look at it from that lens.

because other people will come back to us because they had to take care of their own trees now. So when you start that cycle, where do you stop? So I think the main message is to communicate very clearly with the residents to really explain what will happen. Because I spoke with a resident from the district that recently was dissolved and she stated that she didn't understand. If she had understood, she would have voted yes. So because she didn't want to do this to her neighbors. So please be as clear as possible. Yeah. So thank you.

Thank you, Lisbeth. Chancellor McCarthy.

Thank you, Mayor. I didn't mean to get us too off track here, but I guess to reiterate, the recommendation for me is create like a one-page flyer to these residents that says, hey, these are the risks. If your district is clearly in financial trouble, doesn't seem to meet its obligations, it's heading down the wrong path. If it dissolves, these are the things that it means. Code enforcement will come after the homeowner for a crumbling wall or a tree that normally the the landscaping lighting district would maintain right and um that can be very expensive and you know without the help of the collective the individuals are going to be responsible there and there's a lot of risk there and you know ultimately it's the property owners that get to make that decision so um with that i move that we approve um this item a second oh is there already motion okay Okay.

All right. My last comment is, what can we do different, Lisandro, regarding outreach that we haven't done in the past?

What we've done so far is reach out to the residents via mail and via the paper. We could do flyers or not flyers, but door hangers for the residents because we understand that some residents rent and the addresses that we find on our backend aren't the residents addresses, it's the homeowner. And the homeowner doesn't always communicate to the renters if there is something like that going to city council. Maybe door hangers would be the best option just to communicate more to them, but that would be my only suggestion.

Okay. Ishmael, do you have more input? No. All right. I think we could probably agree that a robust outreach... would include flyers and some other components. There's not that many people that live in this district that there couldn't be some other kind of direct communication. And I don't know if the renters are part of the loop unless they're going to pressure the landowners. But I think as Lissandra mentioned, it's the landowners that need to be contacted and a flyer on the door of a rental households might not get to the landlord. So it seems that staff should come back to us with a plan of outreach that we feel comfortable is the most reasonable approach to get through to the residents, the pros and cons of what their choices are. Does that sound reasonable? Let's go to Council Member Biala.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So since this is a small neighborhood, you know, it seems like we should have sort of community kind of informal, maybe at somebody's house. You find the resident that really wants to promote this increase in fees and stuff. And then you ask them, can you go to your neighbors? Can we have an informal discussion at somebody's house? And we invite the city staff to come articulate the consequences of that. of whether you choose to do this or not. Because I think that helps more of a one-to-one contact. Flyers and that kind of stuff is great, but this can easily be by a community meeting.

I agree. This was like the resident William did. He did send an email out to me, was the only resident that did that. We could attempt to do something like a community meeting and have it orchestrated a little bit by the residents just because they are the people impacted by this. So we'll look into that.

All right, so we know this issue, as Councilmember McCarthy said, is going to come up every single year with every single such district. And so I'd like to suggest a friendly amendment to the motion that city staff engage with to Preppy Smith to work with staff to come up with an outreach plan for these districts. And we have a year before we need to go to these districts again with that outreach. But anyway, that would be my friendly amendment.

Did I make the motion? No.

Who made the motion?

OK.

So I'd like to make a friendly amendment to my motion. I accept the friendly amendment. Does the second hold? The second holds. All right.

mayor i'm happy to support that but you know we live in a city of 50 renters so getting a community meeting probably isn't going to work um if that applies in that neighborhood because the renters aren't the ones that make the decision they're not the voters um and in terms of engaging trippy smith i mean i use ai to create a flyer in 30 seconds i don't know that i want to spend thousands of dollars but if that's what it takes i mean i'm supportive of it too i just think it's a fairly easy task to create some quick flyer that helps explain to the owners like, look, your landscape lighting district is in trouble and these are the risks.

Yeah, I think that flyer, a community meeting, Checking the addresses of the landowners, sending them mail, trying to contact them by phone. I think Tripeppy Smith is probably the best entity to put something together and bring back to us and say, here's what we want to do. We think this will cover it. And then we can decide if it's too much or too little. Kathy, your face tells me you're not happy.

I kind of agree with Council Member McCarthy. I just can't see us spending a lot of high consultant money for doing this. I mean, I think we know, they know.

what to do um mayor and council we have um i think most of you know we we stole donna from rec and cultural services so we have somebody that can help us with flyers and um social media uh posts and and we will work with code enforcement who has access to um property owner contact information uh so we can bring a plan back to you let you know what we're doing to reach out to that neighborhood um if necessary we can plan a saturday and and our staff can go knock on doors if necessary to we'll do everything we can to get as much involvement but i i i will say this um the last time we went through this was uh uh yeah cypress cove um we had community meetings and had five people show up so uh and i don't think um That particular situation was hard because there was more residents that were not ever going to have expenses than would with those trees. So it was always going to be a majority saying, I don't want to pay extra. And hopefully we don't have the same situation here, but we can bring a plan back to you. We can do it internally and we'll bring something robust to you.

Okay, so I'll modify my motion that staff come back to us with an outreach plan for all the districts, which are maybe three left, and connect with Tripepe Smith as appropriate so they can provide some input on the plan that staff comes up with. Second hold. To peppy Smith, if necessary, I first would like to see the internal communication so modify the motion for staff to come back to us with an outreach plan, and then we can decide if we want to engage with true peppy Smith on that plan. Second, all to that yes okay Anita are you clear on the motion okay the Sandra anything more.

No, sir. Okay.

Council, we're ready to go. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. All opposed, please say no. Okay. That passed unanimously. And we'll do the same similar deliberation for the next item, Monterey Bay Estates. Do you want to run through the assessment amount? Yes, sir.

All right, so Monterey Bay Estates, this district consists of 162 single-family homes. Next slide, please. For this one, we have the proposed budget for the 26-27, sorry about that, is the 77.14 cents a year, or $6.43 per month for each of the residential lots. Some of the work that is covered on this one is the beautification of the landscapes and the tree trimming.

Next slide, please.

Some of the info from the engineering report shows some of the dollar value that is left in the parcel, which is going down. Contrary. It is coming down just because of the increased costs. Next slide, please. For this landscape district, we did do the same reach out for that we did for the Seabreeze, but we were not met with any outreach from the residents. That is what I have for this hearing or public hearing, if any but he wants to follow up.

All right. Thank you, Lissandra. Let's open a public hearing. Anyone in person want to speak to this issue? Please come forward. Especially if you're an electrician.

There we go. I would, how were the notices sent out? Because I live in this district.

No, Nolan, you need to talk to us.

Okay. Well, I was asking how the notices were sent out because I don't recall receiving any notice about it. And then the other question I had is what, it says this is for lighting and landscaping. for the lighting anyways, does the city actually maintain the streetlights in this area? Because I was actually just walking the dog this morning and I saw PG&E actually changing the streetlights in this neighborhood. So I was just curious if the city is contracted with PG&E or if PG&E is contracted with the city to change these light bulbs or if they are PG&E's property to maintain themselves.

great thank you nolan and once we'll ask your questions as soon as public comments over anyone else in person then we'll go online anyone online want to speak to this issue please raise your hand not seeing anyone we'll close public comment and lesandro how were notices sent out notices were sent out via mail for the uh back end that we have for all the addresses If a new resident moves in, they buy the house, how does it change to their name so that we know not to send it to another name and gets lost in the mail somehow?

I wouldn't have the best answer for that one.

So we have access to... the same system that escrow companies have. Anytime a new property deed is recorded into a new owner's name, when we look it up, we have that new owner's information that same day. So the addresses, phone numbers that we have is the same thing that an escrow company would look up. I couldn't answer why sometimes people don't receive it. I will say this. If people are like me, they don't check their mail two, three weeks at a time. And when they finally do, they throw away 90% of it without reading it. So it's possible that that happened. And we also get a lot of phone numbers that are in the escrow records, but off when we call.

All right. So how good are we at the city of getting updated homeowner names when they turn over?

We don't get it until we pull the report again. So if we pull it right now, whatever is on people's records at that time, title reports, that's what we'll get. If something changes tomorrow, we won't know until the next time we pull that information.

Got it. Yeah, I think Nolan has lived there for a couple of years at least, so it wouldn't be that issue. Six, seven years. Six years. Thank you. And he checks his mail every day because sometimes there's bills in there.

okay and then another question is that the lighting is it maintained by the city or pg e or how does that work so uh even lights that are owned and maintained by pg e we still have a contract we still pay the um uh monthly fee for those you mean the the energy the power the electricity energy power electricity yeah there's a per light fee that the city pays for those okay all right thank you

so council i just want to ask you the question just like the last sea breeze district what's your sense what's your gut sense about the outreach that we're doing to reach these folks councilmember mccarthy

First, I should note this one appears to be in slightly better condition than the other one. I think outreach to the owner on record is what you have to do. It's a public record. I can go to the county courthouse and see who lives at a certain address or who's on title. Not who legally has the right to vote, so that's who you should reach out to. I don't know if that answers your question.

I'm just thinking in the case of the public member that spoke, Pretty sure his household didn't get mail. So it makes me wonder, you know, is there more we could do to ensure homeowners get at least getting the notice?

So I'd probably go to the county and figure out where that disconnect is or maybe work with staff. And maybe there is something that we're not seeing, but... I get all kinds of notices from the city. Some nice, some not so nice.

Mayor Bertin?

You could also deliver door-to-door on top of mailing. And of course, you will reach the tenants then as well. So maybe in the door-to-door letter, you can say, if you're a tenant, please pass this on to your landlord, to the homeowner. Just to try to do more than one.

So it goes back to what we talked about earlier. Council Member Bial, you have the last word.

to say this, but we do have one resident in that district of 162 homes. So start with that person who's in the audience and work with them to think about some ideas and outreach to their neighbors.

We'll do. And it's up to staff to come back with an outreach plan that may include connecting with known people who have expressed interest, like Bill Genova. okay um i'll motion that we adopt a resolution before us ordering the levy of 77.14 for fiscal year 26-27 for the assessment of the monterey bay state's lighting and landscape assessment district and the city clerk would file that certified copy of the diagram and assessment with the monterey county auditor controller prior to august 1st 2026. a second All right. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Okay. That passes unanimously. Thank you for all your work, Lissandro. And I'm sure that Edry is glad to be off the hook. He's normally the one that does this work. So thank you for standing in for him. Okay. We go to 13A. Am I on track here? All right, so we go to the user utility tax item, and who will be introducing this for us?

I will, Mayor. So first, we're going to have a presentation by FM3. They're the survey group who recently conducted a statistically valid survey, and Adam Sorensen will be making their presentation. And then following that, our city attorney, Renee, has a presentation on the actual utility user part. And then after that, we'll be ready for public comment and council comment.

Okay, Adam, we've promoted you to panelists. Welcome.

Hi, everyone. Adam Sonnenschein with FM3. I'm glad to be with you and thank you for the opportunity. The nice thing compared to the prior times that I've been uh here to speak with you is we actually have the a good opportunity for a successful ballot measure for the city so looking forward to taking you through those results and then we'll take any questions that you have at the end so i'm going to go ahead and share my screen with the powerpoint hopefully that's coming up on screen for you all as well and uh we see it we're ready to go thank you thank you mayor so um to start let's talk about the methodology of how we did the survey this was conducted recently from may 6 to the 21st we interviewed people who would be considered likely november 2026 voters in your city meaning that they are folks with a past voting history that goes beyond you know showing up once every four years to vote for president they're a little more frequent voters than that and would be expected to vote in a midterm election We did 312 survey interviews, which means we have a margin of error of plus or minus, let's call it five and a half for easy math for questions that are asked of everybody. We get into some of the details you'll see there. Sometimes we've asked questions and slightly variations of wording where half the group is getting one question, half is getting a different question. In those cases, the margin of error will be larger. uh we reached people a few different ways we did um email we did live telephone interviews on both cell phones and landlines as well as sending emails and text message invitations for people to take the survey online the online survey is protected it's not like one of the ones that kind of shows up on facebook or next door and you could take it 50 times or send it to all your friends each person has one opportunity to take the survey uh we'll share some uh results and how they compare to surveys done in 2016 2022 and 2024. uh we offered the survey in english and spanish and you might see someone that doesn't quite add up to a hundred percent and that's because we've rounded decimal points So starting with just the big picture views of how things are going in Marina, we still have about half of voters who would say things are going in the right direction. 50% compared to about 29% who would say wrong track and 20% who find themselves in a don't know, some things are good, some things are bad. You know, I'm not quite sure how to answer that question. We are seeing this trend in many, many communities these days of people being concerned about the way things are going with more negative numbers than we've seen in the past for a variety of reasons. And we find anyone who is at half of voters thinking things are in the right direction, we consider that to be a pretty positive result given the general mood And the fact that if you were to ask people, for example, how they think the state is going, you'd find over 60% who think it's headed off on the wrong track. We also see quite good favorability numbers for the city's public safety and parks and recreation department, as well as your local small business owners. So we gave people this range of very favorable in the dark blue, somewhat favorable in the light blue, somewhat unfavorable in the pinkish color, very unfavorable in the dark red. And then the gray bars are some combination of they haven't heard of that group, but they don't have an opinion. We lead off with the fire department at 87% favorable, only 2% unfavorable, a few people that don't have an opinion. So kudos to the work that's been done there with over 60% having a very favorable opinion. nearly as favorable as your fire department is your local small business owners. 84% have a favorable view, 3% an unfavorable view, with about more than 4 in 10 who have a very favorable opinion. So this is something that we're also seeing as a trend around the state, an increasing perception of favorability towards local small business owners. in your community you have some we tested some other departments your parks and rec department and your police department both scoring very well in the 70 range it's extremely common for fire departments to pull better than police departments so uh we not we're not seeing a surprise in in those numbers but a 73 to 17 ratio for a police department is very very positive and one of the better that that we've seen recently uh public works is a little bit further down 54 to 16 but largely a group of people that are not really clear on how to rate that department about 30 percent who fall in the category of haven't heard of them or not really sure what they do enough to give an opinion city government and city council both get favorability ratios of about two to one compared to the favorable to unfavorable so good numbers there as well you'll see both of those numbers are pretty close to that right direction wrong track ratio right of about half who would say things are going in the right direction we've got about half who rate city government and city council as favorable and then in the range of the mid-20s who would say either things are going in the wrong track or they are unfavorable about those groups We also really importantly, actually even more importantly than what I just shared with you, find that over seven in 10 voters now think that the city has at least some need for additional funding, which is an increase from 2024. We're at 71%, only 8% who would say there's a little need and 13% who would say there's no real need. And we almost always find a very strong correlation between this question and opinions on any kind of revenue measure for a city. And so to see an increasing sense there is really beneficial and if we're thinking about the viability of a measure. So that's all context just to set you up and get to the mood of how your voters are feeling as we come in and look at this ballot measure. We find the best way to assess the viability of a ballot measure is to give people a 75-word ballot question to react to. So not trying to get ahead of you and say this is a thousand percent what the measure has to be, but they need something to respond to so that it's more than just a conceptual question. So we gave it a title, the Marina 911 Emergency Public Safety Community Services Measure, and we referenced some of the illustrative examples of how funding could be used. This is positioned as a general purpose measure, so you don't have the ability to lock in these uses, but they are examples meant to replicate where we think the city has been headed here. Ensure firefighters, paramedics, police officers' response to emergencies and natural disasters by funding police and fire stations. prevent disruptions to city services, provide safe play places for children, and provide general municipal services. Then we have a bunch of legally required language. So shall the City of Marinas measure establishing a 7% utility users tax generating approximately $3.6 million annually until ended by voters, be adopted, requiring low income rates, And then some fiscal accountability provisions, which are inherent in the measure, but a lot of people are not aware of that, and it's helpful to remind them right in the 75-word question, and that's public spending disclosure, audits, and all funds spent locally. Now, on the initial reaction to this measure, we're just about at that 50% threshold that is needed for this measure to be successful. And that says to us that there is the importance of ongoing informational outreach, just to preview the rest of the presentation. When we provide information with people about what this measure is, what it does, how it benefits the community, we see a pretty strong increase in support, well above the 50% number. But we see at this initial level, we're within the survey's five and a half point margin of error there at 49%, 42% saying no, and about 8% who are unsure. We also see a little bit of softness in terms of that 49% with only 21% who feeling like they definitely would support this compared to 28% who are in the probably or leaning yes category. That's another thing that gets addressed with additional informational outreach. uh just real fast to give you a sense that there is plurality support uh for this measure uh in each council district um with uh not a lot of statistical difference here right from 46 yes to 53 yes in a survey of this size is not that different especially when we're breaking it down into these four council districts with relatively small sample sizes So then the next thing we want to look at is some of your voters' priorities for this measure, as we talked about before. And as you know, with a general purpose measure, we're not promising certain funding uses, but we are talking about what voters' top priorities are and how that aligns with the city's priorities. You'll also see within here, some of the questions that we've asked are more about the outcomes from the measure, the accountability provisions that are in the measure. It's not just about how the money is going to be spent. So in this question, you're seeing the choice of extremely important in the dark blue, very important in the next color blue, somewhat important in the light blue, not too important in red, don't know in gray. First thing to take away before we get into any of the individual spending priorities is how low the red bars are and the gray bars are, the not too important and the don't know. You have a whole series of attributes of this measure that nearly all of your voters are saying is at least somewhat important to them. So we have things, even though only about half are saying, yeah, I'm willing right away to support this measure and the funding mechanism, they like all the things that come into the measure. So just to give you a little bit of a sense here, Some of those extremely high priorities are related to maintaining safe and clean drinking water, emergency or natural disaster response phrased in a few different ways here, public safety described in a bunch of different ways and different elements of that, accessibility for disabled residents as it relates to your public buildings, um and then some of the fiscal accountability and uh and sort of outcome language so there for example you're seeing maintaining the city's long-term financial stability with the 86 percent of people saying that's important to them extremely or very important requiring spending disclosures 85 percent extremely or very important requiring all funds spent locally 82 percent But the other elements are more in terms of the way the funding would be used, as I mentioned, public safety, response to emergencies, natural disasters, the drinking water, etc. If we look at the next slide, we see a couple items that are statistically very close to what had been mentioned on the prior slide. That's repairing streets and potholes at 81%. preventing disruptions to city services at 78%. And then you can see some of the others requiring audits, recruiting and retaining police officers, funding local fire stations, supporting ADA access at public buildings. Again, this is where I was mentioning, you know, different variations of similar questions with accessibility for disabled residents compared to ADA access. These are all still high priorities, right? You're still in the three range of three quarters or above for all of these elements of a ballot measure and ways that funding could be used. They're just not at the top, top of the list like you saw in the prior slide. If we get down to the next range here, this is where we're starting to see, you know, the mid 60s, the high 60s for extremely are very important. The reds not too important are now creeping up to about 10%. So they're still pretty low, but they're part of the conversation at least. Here's where we get some of the other items you saw in the ballot question draft, providing safe children's play areas, for example. You also have lower rates for low-income residents. That gets 71%, but only 27%, extremely important. um and the uh disruptions to city services um scored very well it's a little bit softer when we tie that more directly to city hall itself that's the idea of the phrase providing preventing disruptions to city services but it comes in at 66 when we reference city hall The next thing we wanted to do in this survey is something I mentioned earlier, which is simulate the kinds of information that the city could be providing to people if this measure is moving forward. And I know some of this outreach has already been done, but this is an opportunity to bring it forward within the survey context and simulate if everybody in the city got the same kind of information. And there's a lot of text on these slides. I'm not going to read it all. But you can look at kind of the themes in the parentheses here. These are statements we provided to people, and they told us that they were convincing as reasons to support the measure. These are very or somewhat convincing in the 70s and 80s for a measure that just about 50% of people were initially supporting, right? 30 points higher in terms of them saying these statements are convincing. Again, not going to read them all, but you get the sense of streets and the need to repair streets, your medical response times and the locations of existing fire stations and what that means. Your ability to have community space serving seniors and children and the need to repair that upgrade, go beyond what you have now. City Hall, which is not in and of itself a huge priority, but when we tell the story, it does resonate with people. We just have to be more descriptive than saying we need to build a new City Hall, referencing that the city has been growing and public buildings haven't kept up. um that's also a compelling theme for voters um some that are okay but not quite as strong still important to reference uh fire uh their aging fire and police stations uh in in the not keeping up with earthquake safety standards and they need to do that the fiscal accountability i talked about earlier Little bit softer when we talk about the fact that doing these making these changes later will cost more than doing it now or talking about the amount of crime that's been happening in the city and needing to maintain response times and patrols. Here's maybe the most optimistic point in this survey, and that is after we provided that information to your local voters, support for this measure went from 49% up to 65%, yes, for a majority vote measure. So you need 50% plus one. We are 15 points over that number, well outside that five and a half point margin of error. We've nearly doubled the definitely yes vote from 21 to 41. While the definitely no stays about the same, right? There's going to be a core group of people who are just not going to budge on a measure like this, that they're concerned about the cost for themselves or for others. And pretty much no amount of communication is going to change that. But you can see that many, many voters are open to more information and maintain their level of support or excuse me, increase their level of support when they hear why you would do this measure and what it would mean. Now, we wanted to make sure we're providing both sides of the story. We also gave people the kinds of statements that might come up if this measure is put forward from potential opponents of the measure, if there are those who are organized. And they're going to talk about cost of living and all the other sources of funding that you should have and the way you spend money in general. And then we re-asked the ballot question. and what we see on the right hand side now of this slide is while that opposition takes a little bit of a bite out of the support it's still maintained at nearly six to one right and that's simulating a pretty robust opposition effort similar to how we simulated a robust informational effort where everybody heard uh that that kind of information from the city's perspective um after that opposition we're still again above a majority vote threshold and outside of a five and a half point margin of error on the survey and we feel pretty good about the potential for this measure given this outcome and particularly assuming that the city can do the outreach and information sharing that we've simulated in this survey Another piece of good news here compared to your prior surveys in 2022 and 2024, which were testing bond measures, we see that after information and even after opposition, support for this measure is substantially higher than we found in either of those surveys. And again, in those cases, you were looking at a two-thirds measure. In this case, it's 50% plus one. So a much higher a softer bar to clear and a measure that more voters are open to. We wanted to explore some of the other considerations that you have to think about as it relates to this measure. There's different options for how this could be constructed, different ways that you could look at it. uh one was to ask um if there was a measure on the ballot at the same time as measure a that was an advisory measure um would that make you more likely to support the measure less likely or no difference what we see is about four and ten um who say it would make them more likely only 20 who would make them much more likely. And for the majority of people, it would have no difference, or they're not sure how they would react, plus another 7%, 8% who say it would make them actually less likely. We then followed that up or looked into the details of that, and really the people who said they're more likely to favor your UT measure, if there's an advisory measure on it, are the people that were already saying they were going to vote yes on the UT measure to begin with. When you look at the people who are no voters on the UUT measure, it's a relatively small gain, almost offset by that less likely vote. It also doesn't necessarily mean just because they're more likely that they're going to cross over the line from no to yes. I could be a no voter who's a little more likely to support the measure, but I'm still voting no. um so to us it feels like an advisory measure um is not worth the the the direction of doing that and uh we always worry about potential voter confusion if there's more than one measure on the ballot at the same time so our advice is is not to do that just stick with the the revenue measure that you've been discussing uh we also asked how voters would feel if it was a seven percent ut with reduced rates for uh lower income residents or a five percent ut uh with the same rate for all residents and they could tell us they'd support both of them equally they would vote yes they'd vote no on both of them or they just picked one or the other And it does look like the 7% overall rate with a reduced rate for low-income residents has more support than a 5% across the board. uh then lastly we uh wanted to give them some background on the potential for a new city hall building and the fact that the city is considering several locations and if voters approve the measure the city's planning a process of public engagement to pick the final site and does knowing that make you more likely or less likely to vote yes on measure a we see that about a third of voters say that's making them more likely just seven percent less likely But for the vast majority of people, it's not making a very big difference one way or another. About 23 percent are in this somewhat more likely category, three percent somewhat less likely, and about six and 10 are in this no difference, not really sure number, which leads us to believe, That's probably just a fine process to go forward with. It's not going to build a lot of support. It's not going to cost a lot of support. There may be some people who care a lot about that, but for the average voter, it's not probably a central part of their decision making. so that leads us to a couple conclusions we see that a uut measure for your city is viable for the november 2026 ballot as long as there's a commitment to ongoing outreach and communication about the measure and its impacts we know there are rules that change once the city council decides to put that measure on the ballot you still have the opportunity to do some objective information which we think is important On the initial vote, support for the measure is very close to the majority vote threshold needed. In some ways, that support is similar to the results you've had on past bond measures, but in this case, you need a 50% plus one threshold, not two-thirds. Additional information that the city can provide leads to a jump in support all the way up to 65%. And the measure stays well above the majority vote that's needed when you simulate robust opposition messaging. Further, after information and opposition in the survey supports higher than in past surveys. And that's in part bolstered by the fact that more voters now perceive that the city needs additional funding than we've seen in at least the most recent survey. A lot of really high priorities for this measure from your voters. Again, as you recall back to that slide with lots of different items on it into the 80s, 90 percentile range for extremely or very important to be part of the measure. It's really the services and the outcomes that come from investments in infrastructure, not just the infrastructure itself. maintaining safe and clean drinking water, emergency and natural disaster response, public safety, accessibility for disabled residents, repairing streets and potholes, as well as preventing disruptions to city services. Really important for voters that there's fiscal accountability, public spending disclosure, audits, all the money staying local. An advisory measure, as we said, doesn't really seem to be particularly helpful or necessary for this measure. And more support for a 7% rate with low income rates than a flat 5%. So I know I just threw a lot of data at you, but I'm happy to stop there and take any questions that you may have.

Thank you very much, Adam. Let's go to the public, starting with the people in the room. If you'd like to speak, please come on up. You have up to three minutes.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor and council members. I was concerned about low income. It would be based on their rates. In an apartment building, water, sewage and garbage are paid for by the landlord. And how can you determine who is low income? Say 50% of the people are low income, the rest aren't. How are those people? How is that rate paid for them? That's one thing. And the other thing is whoever did the survey for FM3, they reached me, they talked to me for 15 minutes. So he did his outreach. Thank you. Thank you, Eileen.

And we'll get to your question as soon as comment is over.

Thanks for the presentation and I apologize if I missed it. It was 300 and some odd folks that they surveyed. Do you know what the survey recipient's income level was, whether they were renter or not? And I had another question, but it left my mind. Sorry. Thanks.

Thank you, Mike. Anyone else wishing to speak?

council and mayor i think it's full of children um definitely a communication plan behind this um you know there's a couple things in my mind that are unclear i hear a lot online whether it's restricted unrestricted funds i hear a lot online whether or not it's going to be allocated to capital projects so a definite communication plan Now, hopefully everybody's able to hear me, but hopefully a communication plan would come out behind that because I think that's really needed. Because on the face of it, it looks like you're trying to backdoor a capital expenditures project. And that essentially, in my mind, flies in the face of Proposition 218, if that's what you're actually trying to do, if that's what's actually trying to be done. So I just think a good communication plan behind it and be above board, accountable, transparent, I think that would help go a long ways in this endeavor. That's really all I had to say. Thank you, Phillip. Thanks.

Okay, let's go online. Kim Cohen. Welcome, Kim.

Hello, everyone. Is my zoom working? Can you hear me?

Yes, we can hear you loud and clear.

I would just I'm a resident of Marina. I've lived here since 1998. And I have seen you know, we have I have seen the state of public buildings. and as a resident i feel like if we're going to continue to attract the best possible talent of employees and others to work for the city to create the city environment that we want we need to have adequate facilities including making sure that we have fire stations that are built to modern code earthquake resiliency to keep our city safe in an emergency and it's unfortunate that the bond issues didn't pass but the if it takes a utility tax like this i'm in favor of it thank you thank you kim let's go to denise turley welcome back denise

Thank you. So I just wanted to correct or add more info to an earlier speaker. Just because you're in a multifamily unit does not mean you don't pay utilities. It means that the landlord gets a super bill and prorates you. What, me? I'm going to wait for a second until that's cleared up.

Okay.

yeah thank you so um so so multi-family unit does not mean that um they they do not pay services most do mobile home parks do uh if you rent from graystar or several other landlords you do in a thing called com c-o-m-m services so um there is a way to determine um the income especially if the person is an apartment renter because you had to declare your income to rent there in the first place so they know what your income is thank you thank you denise anyone else online please raise your hand if you'd like to speak

Okay. Well, let's get Moto G Stylus 5G. Welcome. Trying to unmute you. You might have to push a button on your end.

There we go.

I guess this is Tommy Bollea. I don't know. My name got disconnected. I was out of town and I'm driving, but as I get to Marina, my cell phone goes in and out, so I miss quite a bit. But I don't know. I'm kind of against taxes, bonds, and all that kind of stuff. I mean, I think if we find a way to cut corners and trim, I don't understand. I guess the first question is, why couldn't we just take some of the existing buildings that we do have to save on this tax initiative or whatever it's going to be called, a measure or whatever. I mean, I just think that a lot of people are in fixed incomes. You have a lot of renters. I mean, it's going to create rent increases. It's going to create more homelessness, I think. I think Yeah, definitely you need some infrastructure updated. There's no doubt about it. But it seems like if you do go ahead with this, I mean, anything new that you guys build, fire station, city hall building, you're not going to build it in the center of Marina. You're going to build it over there in the south. You're going to improve their community and kind of leave central Marina abandoned. I mean, if we knew all the plans, which we don't, And then you want to pass this thing in 2026 in November. I mean, I don't know. I'm leery about, I want to see, you know, I want to see more before I vote yes on any, any tax measure. I mean, everybody I talked to on fixed income, I mean, this is just going to lead to higher costs for everybody, more rent, the least increases, you know, yeah, we need, support our police and fire. I'm not against that. But you could take the existing police and fire and turn that into a police station, 100% police station. And the fire station, I would level that old post office and that vacant building that has a lease sign in there, that could be your fire station right there. I mean, Del Monte is starting to look, you know, looking at the library back When Del Monte was bustling, it looked really well. It doesn't look too good now. It's because everybody's leaving and going to the south. Why couldn't we just take some of those land and existing buildings and go and develop that right in the center of town? Why? That's my question. Why can't we do that and save money in the long run?

That's all I have to say.

Thank you, Tommy. Anyone else online like to speak? All right. We'll close public comment. And Eileen had the first question. She asked, how is low income determined if we go with some kind of an exemption for low income?

One of the things that we're going to rely on is the PG&E care program. And I don't have the list with me, but if you're on the WIC program, if you're on SNAP, if you're on these different assistant programs, you automatically qualify for PG&E. And so anyone that would qualify for PG&E, they would automatically qualify for our low income rates. And we'll be putting together that longer comprehensive list.

Tommy asked, why not use existing buildings somewhere in town, such as the old post office, which is right here on the corner of Palm Avenue and Del Monte Boulevard, or bulldoze those locations and build new?

Those are answers you can get on our website. Those are discussions we've talked long ago that the most cost effective and efficient way is the program that the council has before voters right now. These existing facilities. To repair them, to fix them is not the cost-effective way. They're way beyond their useful life. They're not even remotely large enough to fit our growing needs of our city today. So we've already looked at that. And those answers are on the website. That information's on our website.

All right. Mike asks, were demographics recorded such as those for the income level, the renter or homeowner status for those 312 surveyees? And Adam can answer that.

Yeah, happy to do that. We did ask people to self-identify if they own or rent their home in Marina, and 67% said that they owned, 29%. so that they rented 4% were people who chose not to answer that question. And I just want to flag for everyone that that's not meant to be representative of the total population of Marina, which I'm sure has more renters than that. But it is the population that's expected to be voting in a November 2026 election. And that's the group of people that were tasked with surveying since that's ultimately is making the decision on this measure. We did not ask personal income because we found that so many people prefer not to answer that question in a survey, even though it would have been a relevant category to know when we look at things like low income rates. And other demographics are meant to reflect the likely voters. So geography, where they live in the city, age, political party, gender, etc.

Did anyone note questions that I didn't just address? Okay. We have a second presentation from, I believe, from?

Rene is going to.

Rene, our city attorney? So it's going to be a combination of Lane's going to, on the first eight slides, and then Will jumped in, my partner who's online, Pearl, Pearl Munger, who you met before, will finish off the presentation.

Next slide. So at our last council meeting, the council asked us to come back with three things. Number one was the rate that we would want, excuse me, and what utilities should be covered and the exemptions that we'd put forward. And so we'll be providing the information for that. And that's the specific information and direction that we need from council tonight. Next. This is what we've talked about. The need for facilities is we have completely outgrown our use today. They don't meet our safety standards, particularly our public safety building. We have accessibility issues. We have storage issues. We have ADA issues. These buildings are deteriorating. We operate off of a balanced budget. As you see, many of the communities around us are, as they've been adopting their budgets, they have been having major shortfalls and reductions and layoffs. And we have a balanced budget and we have a very good future. Our ongoing revenues support our ongoing expenditures. But one of the things in budgets is they typically don't, you aren't able to save up monies for these large capital expenditures. And there are several reasons for that. Number one, they're just large and you generally don't have, you just barely have the funds to meet your operational costs. The other reasons are if you try to save up for it, generally you're saving up for a long period of time, 10, 15, 20 years. And the cost of inflation and the construction cost outpace your ability to save. And so you're always getting behind. And the other part is there is just a generational inequity issue. so that a taxpayer today if they're if you're setting aside money to build new facilities or improvements that they want so they're putting aside money but they're not seeing the improvements for 10 15 20 years and down the road then some new person in the community they they receive that benefit benefit so there's intergenerational equities um but um we don't have have the revenue for capital projects is the bottom line like that. Next slide. So we've had a lot of meetings. Adam talked about we had the measure two years ago in 2024, and we got 60% voter approval. And so clearly, even back then, the voters understood the problem and supported the problem. We just weren't able to hit the 66 and 2 thirds requirement for general obligation bond. um we've had a lot of meetings one of the important things that the council uh directed staff last um fall was to put together a citizens advisory committee and so we put out uh invitations and we got 13 responses and so we just invited all those members to be part of the committee uh this committee it was led by um tripepi smith by ryder smith and he's on the meeting today And they had three in-person meetings and one final Zoom meeting. And they prepared a report that they've submitted to the city council. And that committee unanimously recommended that we build all new city facilities, city hall, police and fire station. One of the things that was very impactful and helpful for that committee was at the very start, we took them on a tour of the city facilities. And when they walked back, they said they had no idea how bad things were. And that was one of the recommendations from the committee. And so we've been doing community tours. We've done four separate ones. Now we're going to continue to do them every third Thursday of the month at six o'clock. and 98 of the people that walk through the the buildings they all come back and they're just appalled and they just say you absolutely have got to get these facilities replaced they walk through a police and fire facilities um then you'll look and you'll understand um how behind and how bad those facilities are and so that's been very useful and helpful and um and The bottom line is that report from the Citizens Advisory Committee said it was unanimous. They recommended the council consider replacing all the facilities, police and fire, and city hall. And they also recommended a utility user tax at 7%. Up to 7%. What they said is we need to do it once. Let's do it right. Make sure that we have sufficient money. to get them built so that we don't kick it down down the road then we've had other meetings in March and our most recent was April and we gave some rough estimates of what a utility user tax would be in our presentation today we'll have more refined numbers on that next slide um what are our architects that have been involved with this for a couple years rnt they've estimated that the cost um and these are last year to build uh new facilities is 69. 25 million total that would be for a new city hall council chambers police station and fire station we have through impact fees and other fees we have about 19 million and so the cost forces um for really the city hall police and fire station is about 50 million dollars We put this slide up on here just early on the process and the Citizens Advisory Committee was the same thing and the council was the same thing as we had a lot of questions about our recreation in this campus. And we said, let's just put that on hold. We're going to discuss that in this ballot measure. This is what we're going to focus on. But this just let you know that that was the direction from councils. We aren't going to focus on these recreation facilities. So we're just putting this out there so people can understand why we're not doing that. Next slide. One of the things about the utility user tax is in Monterey County, most of your cities have a utility user tax. In the state of California, they give local governments three primary tools to operate their cities. One is the sales tax. One is property tax. One is transient occupancy tax or hotels tax, and the other is utility user tax. Our city here in Marina actually had a utility user tax, and then in like 2005, 2008, something like that, the voters did not, voted to not continue the utility user tax. This just shows the cities in our area kind of what their levels they tax at. Almost all cities that do it, they'll tax gas, electric, water, mobile phone, and most do cable. Next slide. What we are proposing is to put a utility user tax on those typical utilities that they cover, water, gas, electric, and telecommunications and cable TV. Internet is not taxed and that's by federal law that you can't tax internet. We're recommending a 7% utility user tax. We think that that will cover building the facilities. We know that even though right now we say we need 50 million, by the time we get through this ballot measure and then get through the designing the facilities and put it out to bid, we're going to be a couple of years down the road and we know that construction inflation is going to continue to increase. And so I would estimate that we're going to see another 10 million that we're going to need down the road and and so uh we agree with what the citizens advisory committee recommend it's to a seven percent utility user tax to be sure that we have sufficient funds to do uh what we need uh the council directed us um to look at exemption options and we have um some of those and i think renee will uh that'll be next slide um there we go So these are some ideas that council could look at. We could do just low income for PG&E and CARES if you qualify for that. And I mentioned earlier, you have all these other programs that if you are into those programs, then you automatically qualify for CARES. So it's not just income only based programs. And that would streamline the administration process very easy on our end. They just have to show proof of service for PG&E or then the care program. Council talked about seniors. And so another option is to do seniors over age 65. But if we did that, we would want to do or proposing to do it under PG&E. 75,000 a year income so that those have higher income would not be getting an exemption or a lower rate for utility user tax. Then the next one is just put that level up from 75 to 100,000. And the next would be care program and all seniors would qualify for the low exemption. And these numbers here kind of show you how much the 7% would generate. So if we did just the 7% utility user tax, we would be at actually $66.8 million. which is above the 50 000 that we need probably closer to the that are the the 50 million that we need probably closer to the 60 by the time we get under construction then you see the other scenarios here um low income if we did a fully um A full exemption for all the utilities that is at 53 million. If you did a half rate of three and a half percent instead of the seven percent, it'd be 60 million. And if you just exempted only say gas and electric and you'd see 62 million. And so you can just see the other options there. We do have, I apologize, copies of this for the council. We'll get that printed really quick and get that up here on the council dais. Yeah, for that, but we also have Adam Sorensen's presentation. Yeah, so we'll get that to council. Next slide. And then... Pearl can take it from here. Okay.

Welcome.

welcome pearl thanks for joining us tonight sure and i can't quite see myself up yet but i'm hoping you can see me and um good to see council members again again it's pearl uh pearl mutter from chupahoe and weinberger renee's partner on um election masters so i just want to walk you through the next steps if the council wants to proceed with placing this on the ballot and talk um very briefly about a couple of uh overarching legal issues and then come back to um um to the decisions you need to make tonight to give staff direction. So the path from here, Lane went over sort of all the meetings you've had, but the path from here to getting a measure on the ballot is we would recommend that if the council wants to proceed with this, you direct staff to come back at your July 7th meeting with a draft resolution to place the measure on the ballot. And the measure would consist of The ballot question would be based on the ballot question that was presented to the voters with some slight modifications that we'd be working on over the next month, as well as the ordinance that actually adopts the tax measure. Utility user tax is a relatively complex because there are a lot of details about how you actually impose the tax on different utilities, but the key issues in terms of policy issues are the one that Lane's already gone over, which is the amount of tax the tax rate, which utilities you wanted to apply to, and then what exemptions, if any, you'd like. So I'll come back at the end of my presentation to seek council direction on those, but I just want to give an overview of the path. We intend, our plan is, if so, directed to come back on July 7th, and we believe we'll be ready to do that. We're working with a consultant who's working on the technical details of the ordinance. If for any reason we're not able to come back July 7th, and that is our intent, we actually have until August 7th. That's the last date for this council to put any sort of measure, ballot, tax measure, or other measure on the November election. So you've got another meeting on August 3rd, which is the latest regular meeting at which you could place this in the ballot. But August 7th is the final date, and so you could, in theory, hold a special election we are not recommending i mean the special council meeting we're not recommending that i just wanted to make sure you had all the um um that information in front of you and then if you um if you adopted a resolution placing this on the ballot on a before august 7th that would then appear on the november ballot um and if the measure is um uh um adopted it would become um by a 50 vote uh it would become uh the tax would become binding and go into effect the following year uh so the next slide I did want to just briefly go over what it means that this is a general tax as opposed to a special tax. The council has previously given the direction that it wants this to be the special tax, but there are a couple of critical things here I wanted to underscore. One is that the voter threshold for special tax is a simple majority. So if 50% of the voters voting on it plus one is what's required to pass. That's not the two-thirds majority that applies to bond measures or to special taxes. One, the major import of that is a general tax by definition, the funds raised by that tax cannot be legally restricted to any specific purpose. While we've been talking about and clearly your public based on the poll response has a lot of concern about these public facilities, as a legal matter, the funding has to be available for general municipal services. The council has the option of what that would be, what the money is used for in your annual budgeting. And if you were to use bond financing, so use this tax stream for bond financing for capital facilities, at that point, the money would be locked in. The bonds would be for that purpose. But legally, the tax revenue would be available for any general purposes. municipal purposes. Next slide, please. And so, you know, that's basically the overview of my presentation. The three key issues we're looking for for direction from tonight are, again, what utilities should be taxed at what rates and what specific exemptions should be included. and i just want to end with the next slide which is the recommendation um that wayne covered with um so if you've got the covered utilities here you've got the rate in terms of the exemption staff recommendation was to go with um the low income care exemptions and uh an exemption for uh seniors plus 65 with an income um capital below um 75 000 per year

that concludes my presentation all right thank you very much pearl okay let's go to council comments questions councilman mccarthy thank you mayor a couple hopefully um quick questions first of all um so

For those that aren't aware, our water services is a special district. It's not a private company. And I'm reading online that that is often in some cities that kind of the designator of what utilities get taxed, whether it's municipal service or a private entity. My question is sewer and trash, why those weren't recommended for inclusion and sewer in particular, if staff has any downsides to including sewer.

We looked at that, and for some reason, when you look at cities across California that charge utility user tax, sewer just is one of those utilities that they typically don't. Some do. I think it's probably around 20% of the cities that charge utility user tax do sewers, but the far majority don't. Now, it's not that you can't.

From a mechanics perspective, if the council wanted to do that, there would be no, it wouldn't be more difficult to collect the tax on that than any other utility. yeah i think it'd be it's one entity marina coast water district so i think it'd be very straightforward with them okay thank you um another question i had was um regarding the exemptions and the the income limit if council wanted to change something between 75 000 and 100 000 let's say 85 000 because that's 80 ami roughly for monterey county and then index that for inflation is that a challenge or is that doable I'll let Renee and Pearl answer that.

I mean, I don't see any issue with that. I just don't think we have any figures for it. Pearl, I don't know if you have any thoughts.

Yeah, no, in terms of, I mean, it's certainly legal to do that. Whether that's easy to implement would be a question we're going to be meeting with the consultants who actually implement these tasks, because it actually takes some technical expertise to implement that, whether or not the CPI uh increase would be you know at a significant cost to implement but that's something you could do legally as renee said we just don't have the projected numbers of of what that would do to the revenue you would generate thank you yeah obviously the challenge there is 75 000 today is going to be very different in 10 15 years so i i struggle with that

um i'll end right now by saying that you know and i i've said this all throughout the process i mean i'm very challenged by this regressive tax that disproportionately impacts lower income people um however having said that i mean i i think that it's absolutely right to take it to the voters and and let them decide and i think that

historically this council has expressed support for that um and if that is still the support of the council i'll be supporting that as well thank you mayor thank you brian councilmember mick adams thank you mayor um i think for me with the exemptions um what i'm struggling with is how i mean the pgme the care program that's straightforward right when you get into like know household income etc i think it just gets complicated as far as how is staff going to figure that out and then what if your income changes one year and then one year doesn't um and then i don't know how the city would um continue to sort of annually have that you know qualification survey or whatever so for me that's just um complicated and the you know pg e the care It's tied to, you know, like recently in San Francisco and even here, the income guidelines were increased. So, you know, they're really the... I think have that expertise and have the experience and they're stringent on their recertification, which is annually. We're not good with that at all. So I want to like stick with the care qualifications and not tying to any sort of household income. Because for me, you know, $75,000, whether you're a senior or a single mom, is still $75,000. And that's really challenging to live on in this area. So if we are going to go down the path of coming up with whatever number, then I want it to be all inclusive, and not just seniors, because a dollar is a dollar and you're struggling or you're not. Um, I am also interested. I mean, it sounds like other cities, um, know how do they track and um and sort of stay on the exemptions um you know again we don't really have a good record of leases and keeping track of things so if if an outside agency is doing that and doing the collection and all of that great i don't want staff to think that we can possibly take this on um And then I agree with council member McCarthy. Like this is not for the five of us to, you know, to decide our task is, do we let it go to the voters? Absolutely. You know, absolutely. We do. We were so close with, with the prior ballot measure that was tied to property taxes and the homeowners were upset and wanted, you know, everyone to have a little buy-in. Well, here is that. opportunity and we're hearing from the same group now they're even upset about this so here's that you know we're going to have that 25 that are just going to be hard nose we can like do cartwheels and light ourselves on fire and they're not going to ever support any taxes so i think that um you know it is up to the voters and um you know usually the the loud voices are are the voices who are retired and have means and have the time to come and participate so um at the end of the day this is absolutely up to the voters and if you can't stand taxes great You vote no. And if you are excited about the new park and you want to invest in our city a little bit every month and have more new facilities, then you would support this and vote yes. And that's just really easy and basic for me. Thank you.

Thank you, Jenny. Let's go to Council Member Biala.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So first, what was so impressive to me is the survey that said essentially that people would even vote for a higher percentage if there was exemptions for low income. but for and even putting it lower at 5% with no exemptions, they didn't like that. I just think that that's such a statement about our community that we are carrying very thoughtful community and it just showed through. I was very proud of the people who answered the survey in that way. Let's see, on the PG&E care, I think that that probably already includes a lot of seniors. And the reason why we chose to say seniors under 75,000 is was because seniors as a group i remember that we were saying well not all seniors um are low income and so we shouldn't do a blanket so i don't think that we need to go back and include other people who are under 75 000 because they would fall also under the um the the pg e care program so i think i think i'm fine with the pg e care program and it's a system that we don't have to replicate and we don't have to then agonize over all the details. It's a tried and true system and I think we should expeditiously use that already established system. And then I think because we're the only ones that it seems that don't include the cable, I think for just consistency sake, I think we should just add that. And therefore, you know, we sort of adopted the regional standards as well. And I don't know that that makes a huge amount of difference anyway, but it just seems odd that we've got all the little Xs on every box except for us on cable. So anyway, that's my three thoughts on things so far. Thank you.

Thank you, Kathy. Mayor Pro Tem Fisher.

you mr mayor uh city manager will it be handled by a third party if we would go to route to include yes we've been in discussions with mcwd and they use the third party for their verifications and yeah that's probably what we'll do oh yeah because they just are they just started their program so we can learn from them and um And I agree with council member McCarthy, if there would be an income limit, it should be indexed annually. Will that happen?

figure out, that's what I'm asking Pearl, logistics of doing that. How do we do that?

So I understand that if it's the CARE program, then we would just, would automatically be indexed.

So the CARE program, like Council Member McAdams said, that's easy. But if we would like, if we would choose to go the route to also include a income limit, that should be indexed because otherwise 30 years from now, it will be

laughable i'd say right and renee if if i if i can interject on that i you know i i you know it's legally doable to index i imagine that the third all of the third party entities that administer these kind of types of exemptions have a way to do that but we can confirm that as we're preparing the origin so when we come you know if that's the direction of the council uh assuming that's doable and easily to administer easy to administer we could include that if for some reason

it turns out it's exceptionally difficult to do that we would let the council know that but i you know i suspect it's it's doable thank you and um social media lots of people of course are asking what exactly is included like marina coast will it include the base charts and um of course water consumption but also wastewater collection charts and then there's a fire service fee which is three dollars but will it include all those four items or You don't know yet?

Yeah, I'm not positive. We'd have to look at all the individual items. I'm not comfortable saying yes, it would cover all. We'd have to look at that.

So detailed information will be available?

Yes.

Okay, thank you. And I know many people online, of course, you compare your own usage, your own expenses. I was lower... Probably because we do have solar panels, we have a well-insulated home, but we were higher for water because I live at one of the former Fort Ord, in the former Fort Ord developments, and Marina Coast has a different fee structure for those. So just, we need to be as transparent as we can, and I think we should have different information for that. I don't mind that we are higher there, but it also includes apartment complexes. So those are my, oh, and I do have, for the public, because of this, I dove back into the PG&E.com website. It has so much information. Many, many years ago in my previous life, previous neighborhood, I communicated a lot with them. They even came to a meeting for our neighborhood. and um you can look up on pgd.com you can have your usage and rates your energy uses details you can compare with similar homes it's it's actually really cool and you can um look up your energy use and then you can download your data into a spreadsheet i mean it's the options are unlimited but i think it's very important to or for people who are interested it can be very um important to look at how is your usage do i use a lot more than similar homes and how can i conserve this was a good thing that could come out of this so thank you all right thank you

I wanted to ask a couple of questions. I asked them earlier today and the answer wasn't ready to be given. So the first question is on exhibit A where it shows how much would be collected depending on which option we choose on the exemption half. And then it shows how much bond capacity would be the result of making that choice. And my question is, does the bond capacity half of this exhibit A include the revenues coming in from commercial, or is this just the residential?

Yeah, I wasn't able to get back from our consultant. He wasn't available. So we'll have to answer that next time.

Okay, another question is related to that one. If you go to table 2A, it's residential, it's a bunch of numbers, but it shows, for example, in the bottom right, $260,600 to be collected every month if we do a 7% UUT with the PG&E exemption. So that's a monthly revenue, 260,000. Let's call it 261,000. If you multiply that by 12 months, you get an annual revenue of 3.1 million. But when you go back to exhibit A, it says in the appropriate, the corollary box, it says 3.5 million, not 3.1 million. So there's a $400 difference between multiplying 261,000 by 12 to get an annual revenue from the PG&E exemption and the 3.5 million that's here. And so that's why I ask if the commercial is included in this table. And even if it is, it doesn't really add up because the commercial, if you look on page table four, is $970,000 a year would be collected from commercial customers. So if you add the $900,000 a year to this right half where it talks about bond capacity on exhibit A, it doesn't add up to the numbers that are here, but it gets a little bit closer. So I just think that we need to have a connection between these tables of figures and our choices and our bond capacity that results from the choice we make. I had a question of how hard it is to track income because council member McAdams was one of those people that said, you know, it's very complicated. And I've heard since she asked that, that a third party would be likely to be hired to do that. And then I heard that it might be difficult to index it to inflation, but it's probably done. So how do we get an answer tonight about how hard it is to track any variants that we choose beyond the PG&E care by itself? And have we already got that answer that it's doable? Don't worry about the complexity. It's doable.

No, we think any tracking outside PG&E would be very complicated. Even MCWD, their third party just verifies people are on the care program or on other programs that meet the care qualifications. So anything income qualified, you would have to be looking at tax statements, income statements, and that becomes very complicated.

point all right that's enough for me we'll do a little bit more later councilmember mccarthy thank you mayor i just want to make sure we're all talking about the same thing when it comes to exemptions um so first i'm reading online at union city ut exemption tied to hud income limits 80 ami delhi city ut exemption tied to income thresholds that reference hud or state defined limits city of san bruno uh income qualified exemptions tied to hud limits uh public assistance programs So that speaks a little bit to the possibility of it, but more importantly, let's talk about the care program. You're 70 years old. You make $46,000 a year. You don't qualify for care. So we're not offering exemptions to those folks. You expect folks to live off of $46,000 a year and not get an exemption. I'm just a little bit confused because they wouldn't qualify for care.

If you go on the website, it lists all of the pros. So if you qualify for, there's like multiple programs, you're automatically in care or.

can qualify by your income if you're not in the programs okay so you don't qualify for medicaid or social security security all of those things right excuse me brian and jenny let's have one person at time oh sure sorry thank you mary so um yeah i guess i'm just i want to speak a little bit to that piece about income qualifications and i think council member mcadams is absolutely correct yes there are other ways to qualify for care but i really worry that we are putting seniors in a position to not qualify for these social programs, but also not qualify for the exemption. And I know at previous meetings, Council Member Beshear mentioned that some seniors absolutely have the ability to pay. And I do think we should be very intentional and careful about that. but I wonder often myself what it's like to be on a fixed income at, you know, later in life and wondering if, you know, I'm going to be able to pay the cable bill, people that, you know, the phone bill, whatever it is. So I'm a little worried about going to the care only model, but I'd love to hear, I mean, if somebody has a compelling argument as to why that actually works, I'd love to hear it. Thank you, Mayor.

All right. Thank you. Council Member McAdams.

Thank you, Mayor. I mean, for me, it, We don't have the staff to manage annual what I mean, we don't even do that at Preston Park or I mean, so that's like where I struggle with. And that's why I like the care is really easy. You either show that you are a participant in one of the programs. And for me, I like that because a lot of. A lot of college students are on CalFresh. A lot of seniors are on CalFresh. A lot of families are on the reduced or free lunch program. So there's tons of different programs that... if you participate in, you automatically will, um, will get into care. And if you don't participate for whatever reason, um, then you can, you know, show your income that way. So, I mean, that I, that's what I struggle with. I don't want to go down this path of like trying to administer an exemption program. Cause then we'd have to basically hire, you know, somebody to monitor that. Um, and that's where, um, I think it just, it gets complicated. And again, like $85,000 for a senior. Well, the other side of that is $85,000 for a single mom with three kids. Like, how do you pick who gets the exemption? It's the same amount of money. So I would really advocate that if we are going to pick a number and tie it to whatever, that it be inclusive of everyone and not just seniors. Because I... I mean, I don't know why what's so compelling. I mean, of course I want to support seniors and I also want to support working households or students or people on disability and on and on and on. There's tons of different groups that have their own unique I DON'T LIKE TO SAY SUFFERING, BUT THEY HAVE THEIR OWN BARRIERS, RIGHT? AND SO WHO AM I TO SAY THAT, WELL, ONLY SENIORS ARE GOING TO BE ABLE TO BE EXEMPTED. IT SHOULD JUST BE THIS IS THE NUMBER, AND ANYONE IN THAT NUMBER CAN QUALIFY. I'M NOT ABLE TO PICK.

NEW SPEAKER, ANYTHING MORE? Some comments I have are that the difference between a bond that we tried two years ago, Measure U, and a user utility tax that we're talking about tonight, is that the bond measure had an equity equalizer in it, and that if you lived in an apartment, you were probably going to spend less if Measure U passed. than if this measure passed. And I've always believed that property owners are in a better position in a lot of ways that relate to finances than the average property owner compared to the average renter. There's an inequity there, there's a gap there. And if we had a bond that had passed, there would have been some equity built into it because the renters would have paid less on average than the property owner. So there was a built-in equity. There were some property owners where that was their number one objection to the bond. So why aren't apartment or renters paying this, you know, and why is it all on the backs of the property owners? We want something different. And we also know that if you're in an apartment and your landlord pays more, that is there's probably going to be some pass through so that you're not skate free. You're going to be paying something, but it's probably going to end up being less than what a property owner would do. We did not. That's one thing that we did last year or two years ago. We went with the bond. We did not have a citizen's advisory committee. It was kind of a top down approach. The city council started it and the city council finished it. one of the objections it wasn't one of the biggest but it was there was that we should have a citizen advisory committee so this time around when we started fresh we said let's go ground up let's do the citizens advisory committee first and then we'll bring it to council the citizens advisory committee was comprised of opponents to the bond and supporters of the bond. There were probably more opponents than supporters in that 13 person committee, but we don't really know that because it wasn't something that we required them to tell us. But we know some of the people that were on that committee were definite no's on the Measure U. And that that committee looked at all the same stuff that we had looked at prior to the bond ballot measure. I was surprised, relieved, excited, happy that they came unanimously, the 13, to the same decision that we came to as far as we need to police a fire station and a city hall. They also understood that we need a new community center. but they were given full realm for full reign to make their recommendations. So they recommended a few things that were of their own initiative. They recommended that we go for the three facilities, excluding the community center. They could have said, go for all four, but they said, don't go for all four, go for these particular three fire police and city hall. They also said, for us to consider Vince DiMaggio Park as a second preferred site for City Hall. We didn't put that in their heads. They came up with it on their own initiative and they unanimously voted to City Hall going to MST site on Reservation Road as a first preferred option site and Vince DiMaggio a second. They also opted to go with a user utility tax and not a bond. They also opted to go to a 7% utility tax, not a 5% or a 1% or whatever. There are some other things that they did there that are probably more detailed, but we thought after we got that report, we make the final decision, but why would we go against the citizens report when it was just as logical as our perspective two years ago for the bond. Maybe I like the bond better. I mean, I do, but that didn't work. It almost worked, you know, but it didn't work. So now the citizen advisory group, which include some very respected members of our community and some that are new that we don't really know that much about, but they were unanimous. And they had all the same information that we had two years ago. They walked it. They talked about it. They kept us out of the room. They didn't want us in the room. They wanted to have their own process where we weren't boogering it up in any way. And they came to the same conclusion that we came to along with the public. We went to a lot of public meetings two years ago. That process two years ago came to the same almost exact decision as this year, except this year we started from the bottom up as far as public coming to, you know, weighing in. So I feel confident that for the second time in two years, we've gone through a process that ended up basically the same. We need fire, police, city hall. We also need a community center, but that advisory committee recommended against that. And anything we do that's different than that citizens advisory committee, we better have a really darn good reason because we're just poking the bear to some extent by not respecting the citizens advisory committee. But it's our decision. It's not their decision. It was their recommendation. But I see no reason to vary from their unanimous report because it was It was good report happens to be in line with what we talked about two years ago, except we would have liked a community center, but for us to add onto it, a community center, you know, that just kind of upsets the whole apple cart, but I would love to have a new community center instead of what we had there. Um, so I support the UT. I support the 7%. And, I'm not going to die on the sword for any of these options. I like the PG&E care only. I also like the $75,000 a year senior added to that. But I do respect the opinions that have been discussed that if I'm a poor senior, down on my finances, or I'm not a senior, down on my finances, You know, I think that we give seniors the nod because they're on a fixed income. And if you're a younger working person, a mom with three kids, you're out there working, you're bringing in money. You might get, you know, you have a chance to get to take a second job or whatever. Not if you have three kids necessarily. But I think that's why we always pick out seniors is because they're toward the end of their life. They have a fixed income. So we try to reach out to them. Before I started today, I wanted to pick that $75,000 a year senior plus the low-income care, but I'm happy to do the other. And then what was it? Was that the three that we needed? And the utilities, I don't understand the logic behind including... video streaming and not including waste. What's the logic? Is it just because more cities include streaming than waste? So we're doing the same thing? Is that?

Yeah, we're trying to follow the standard that is out there in cities and the industry. And the standard is they typically don't charge landfills. They don't typically charge sewer.

Okay. Let's go to Council Member Biala.

Thank you, Mr Mayor, so I just want to frame this as an amazing. Support by our public for this survey, because everywhere in California and probably the nation there's just this anti tax. sentiment across the country. And here we are, you know, our residents are saying they believe in the direction of our government, of our city council, of our departments, and they have a higher opinion when I think that if you ask most jurisdictions in California, they probably say they have no confidence in local government and the leaders. And so I think that, again, Marina is very special in that way. i think when we look at our exemptions you know whether we want to exempt all uh people under 75 000 versus just seniors i think i'm agreeing with um our mayor um about there are reasons why we singled out seniors because of the fixed income youth may have 49 000 as an income but they may it may be a temporary situation they have the ability for more job opportunities than seniors, et cetera. So I think they're not exactly apples to apples. And we think of the exemptions as have to be folded into our ultimate goal. We need $50 million for the objectives that we've stated. So if we're now going to exempt everyone who is under 75,000, I think we need to say, what does that do to our overall ability to have a result of 50 million? And I don't know that we have that calculation and I'm sure then we would have to figure out how to get to 50 million still. I'm sure that would reduce that amount considerably, but I don't know. I don't know if the analysis here has done that comparison.

Thank you, Kathy. Council Member McCarthy.

Thank you, Mayor. So I'm kind of looking at this a little bit as how do we sell this to the voters, right? How do we make it the most palatable? And is FM3 still on the line?

Yes. And also Tripeppe Smith, Ryder Smith is on the line too.

So a question for them, and I may have missed it, but is there any evidence that offering the senior income related discount or exemption rather gives a higher polling for the measure?

We didn't differentiate senior specifically, we just did low income. And 7% with low income rates fares better than 5% with a flat rate and no reduction for certain groups. But we didn't try to tease out how you would define that low income rate or seniors versus other groups.

So is it fair to say though that offering the income-based exemption for seniors generally would gather more support, especially for folks in that class?

Yeah, I mean, certainly if you were asking seniors if they think it's a good idea to have an exemption for low-income seniors, you're going to find some support there. I think, like I said, we asked about low-income rates in general, not low-income and being specific that it's low-income seniors or differentiating seniors from anybody else.

okay so i think you know and i don't want to go too much back and forth on the the low income piece but for me i think the reason why you do target low income is it is easier to manage than managing everybody it tends to be a class that is just generally more responsive more able to fill out the paperwork i think that that's why cities throughout california do target that that group um i'd like to start building a motion or OFFERING SUPPORT FOR OPTION THE LOW INCOME APPROACH TO REDUCTION OF UUT WOULD BE THE LOW INCOME QUALIFIED FOR CARE AND SENIORS 65 AND 65 PLUS AND UNDER an amount that is in the range of 85,000, but that staff will tie that to AMI. I think 80% of AMI in Monterey County right now is 83,000. So I think that's how other cities do it. If it's not feasible, then I would ask staff to come back and provide another solution that's in line with that. The only other thing that I'm struggling with are the utilities themselves. I'm kind of thinking that we should include sewer, but I wanted to get the rest of the council's feedback on that. I think that it would, again, talking about selling to the voters, I don't think that that would be something that somebody would say, oh, and include sewer, I'm not voting for it, right? But if we do include it and it passes, it ensures that we have the funds for what we need them for down the road. So I think that would be my motion. I can restate it.

Yeah.

Yep. We received a presentation from FM3 and the opinion survey. We provide direction to staff regarding the specific characteristics, including the rate, which would be the 7%, the covered utilities, which would be all of the staff recommendations and adding sewer, and that the exemptions be those that qualify for PG&E care and those 65 and older, but under 80% of Monterey County AMI.

Okay. I'll second for discussion. Do you have any more input? Let's go to Council Member Biala and then McAdams.

I don't think that I could support this sewage because if no one else around us is doing it, and you talked about how we market this, I can just see us being challenged and said, why did you include sewer? No one else is doing that. And then we're back to saying, why are we trying to get more money from people? i you know it doesn't make sense why why nobody's doing it but for us at this point i think it would be considered a little risky if we went out ahead of the crowd so i would not want to see that but i could accept the 80 of ami i'm happy to amend my motion to remove that if the second still holds

Okay, so you have 7%. You have the staff utilities, not including sewer staff recommended utilities, which means no sewer and a PG care 7065 years plus who are under the 80% Monterey County. Am I? Yeah. Okay. Okay, Kathy, any more input? Let's go to Councilman McAdams.

Thank you, Mayor. And thank you, Council Member Piala, for saying that. I mean, I was thinking, you know, the last thing we want to do is provide any ammunition for, you know, people who are passionately opposed. And that's going to be it. Like, oh, the council's greedy and they want money from Sue. So I just would rather we not even go down that path. and then also with the citizen facility citizens advisory committee i mean i appreciated the mayor's comments and the mayor's praise because they did exceptional work and that really brought me along it's like you're absolutely right why would we steer away from from the work that that we that they did and the recommendations that they provided so um thank you for amending you know your your motion and um I do think it's important because when I was looking at the table, it's like Santa Cruz is the only city that this is tied to their sewer and they're at eight and a half percent. I think it would be helpful to know, and obviously not right now, but when this comes back, the years that the utility user tax rates were implemented in these cities. Because Pacific Grove, their senior exemption is based off of household income less than $12,000 per year. I mean, that's in, like you're living in your car, right? So I'm curious to just see sort of, you know, when the other cities like as you know we're comparing when um when they were adopted by the voters so um but i'm definitely in support of the the motion that's on the table

right i have a question and a comment the question is can staff track down those cities that are mentioned in this table seaside pg santa cruz and can they can staff confirm that they're currently charging those rates because it might be that they passed that number but they're not at that maximum because we have a future councils will have the just will have the ability to go below seven percent and the ability to go up to seven but not above these cities probably have the same so maybe santa cruz is eight and a half percent but maybe they're at five percent or or whatever there might have been some changes so it'd be nice to know the reason i asked that is because i had a meeting with a resident today and that resident asked that question you know how do you know that these other cities are actually charging and can you the city of marina reduce this seven percent if warranted in the future and the answer is yes we can if if uh if property taxes go up or we get enough money from other deals like mercedes that we don't need all this user utility tax i have a feeling that when we get serious about maintaining all of our city facilities we're going to need millions more to maintain those cities and we have a general fund for that But this utility tax is going to be going toward these three buildings that we're talking about tonight. darn i had something very important to say and i forgot so it must not be oh yes um we're we're not all the way there yet because even though we're we're moving toward the 75 000 limit we haven't talked about if if if those folks pay zero full exemption or if those folks pay 3.5 which is half or if they're only exempt from gas and electric. And it's important because which of those three we choose dictates how much revenue we're going to make. So if you look on the bond capacity side of Exhibit A, you see that if we give them a full exemption, we bring in about $51 million. And we need at least 50, and it's not taking into account the increase up to 10 million by the time we build these. So we probably should shoot for about 60 million. But that being said, if you cut it in half to 3.5%, then they're paying something. and we're getting about 59 million that seems to be kind of a sweet spot as far as being able to afford these facilities and then if you just exempted them for gas and electric which i haven't heard anyone say that it raises the revenue to 61 million which is maybe a little more than we need and not giving them a break on those other so i would suggest that we consider adding to the motion Which of these three numbers we want? They pay zero, they pay 3.5%, or they just get the discount based on gas and electric? And I would suggest the middle one, the 3.5%. Brian, your motion is being billed. What do you think?

You remind me what page, or can you tell me what page you're looking at?

Exhibit A, table one. It looks like this.

Okay. Or table nine on, or page nine on the handout. Yeah, I see it now.

So the 3%, cut the seven and a half to 3.5 on all utilities. So I'm a little confused on what you're proposing though, that for the exemption. So I, yeah, I see where that is, but.

So you mentioned 75,000, but you didn't say, do they pay zero? Do they pay half?

Yeah. Okay. Okay. i don't know that i have a strong opinion um i didn't know council member mcadam's question about twelve thousand dollars pacific groves ordinance apparently adopted in 1971 and today's dollars about a hundred thousand so it's right in line with what we're kind of looking at um the uh yeah does council have a preference on

exemption uh i'll motion we go to the end of the next item a second all in favor aye aye aye please proceed brian i would say brian i'd like to make a friendly amendment to your motion that we uh charge 3.5 percent to the exempted group or to the exemption to the reduction group that said their motion to attain the 58 or 59 million dollar level

Okay, yeah, that makes sense.

Mayor Patel, Fisher?

Since the motion includes them, it will be higher than 75. It will be more like 83,000, you said. So the numbers will be lower.

Right.

So we need to take that into consideration. Hopefully it will still be enough.

Good point. Thank you. So it's not going to be 59 million. It's going to be somewhere between 59 million and 58 million. Yeah. Not that big of a difference. 500 grand.

We don't know.

Well, you kind of do know because we got that 75,000 figure. We got the 100,000 figure.

Yeah, if it's linear, we don't know.

It's probably linear. Council Member Biala?

So I just need confirmation from our city manager because I was looking, you know, I have been in my head 50 million, 50 million, and now we've got 50.9 million. And if we did the 3.5%, is that, I know it's always nice to have a cushion, but is that really essential? I mean, are we going to be in trouble if we go for a 50.9 million?

and I can guarantee you that in three years by Tommy construct construction costs will have gone up significantly I can't tell you how much but I think targeting in that 15 to 16 million range um okay and if we follow our promise and we only use this UUT toward those three facilities

whatever level that cost is below whatever revenue seven percent brings in we can bring that seven percent down to meet our needs okay sounds okay for me okay any further comment before we go to a vote okay let's repeat the motion one more time brian sure so the motion is um

that we provide direction to staff regarding the specific characteristics of a utility tax, including the rate, 7%, the covered utilities, which are all of staff's recommendations, exemptions for low-income, care-qualified participants, and seniors 65 and over that have an income under Monterey County 80% AMI, and that the exemption be half the regular rate on all utilities, 3.5%.

Or the discount, right? The reduction.

Right.

Okay. And the second holds all of that. So are we ready to vote? Okay. And then staff's going to come back with some information, but it's not in the motion. Don't think it has to be. But I do you think, Lane, that staff wrote down the questions we wanted to get answered?

We have good notes. Yes.

Okay. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. All opposed, please say no. All right. Thank you. That motion passes five to zero. Thank you to Pearl and Adam, Renee, Lane, for all this information and any other staff that were involved. And thank you to the public for being involved. Now we're going to move to Del Monte intersection with Reservation Road and Del Monte Corridor with some reference to Del, I'm sorry, Reservation Road Corridor with some reference to the Del Monte Corridor, but not much.

There we got Alexis with Trepepe Smith, who's been leading our community outreach efforts on this. She conducted our community workshop and so we'll turn the time over to her.

GOOD EVENING, ALEXIS. GOOD EVENING, MR. MAYOR, MEMBERS OF THE COUNCIL. THANK YOU FOR THAT INTRODUCTION, CITY MANAGER LONG. SO, YES, MY NAME IS ALEXIS GILLUM. I AM WITH TRIPEPI SMITH. I'VE BEEN SUPPORTING YOUR COMMS TEAM THAT'S BEEN PROVIDING THE OUTREACH AND EDUCATION AROUND THE VISION TO ACTION SHAPING MARINA TOGETHER. AND I'M GOING TO BE SPLITTING MY TIME WITH MY COLLEAGUE OVER HERE WITH KIM LEE HORN, FREDERICK So I'll start us off to kind of go over the outreach that we just recently finished. But you're going to hear a little bit of repetitive from the last presentation. I know I was remote then and it's good to see some of you in person. So if I get next slide. so our purpose for the downtown um outreach and this was a focus on the reservation road and del monte boulevard corridors was to gather the input on the future of downtown marina and just to be clear this is how your residents want to experience this area of downtown and it's to support and inform the implementation of the existing marina downtown specific plan as it relates to this area We did conduct an in-person community workshop on March 24th. We had about 52 participants. I see some familiar faces in the audience here tonight as well. And then following that, with the feedback that we gained from the March 24th workshop, we did do an expanded community survey. We wanted to capture the broader community. that wasn't able to attend in person. And so that's what I'm gonna highlight a little bit tonight. And a lot of it did confirm the findings that we shared in our earlier presentation in April with the council. Next slide, please. So just again to recap, March 24th, 52 participants, we had an open house and facilitated breakout sessions that was supported by your city staff and a consultant team. And what we heard there in a nutshell was more walkable and welcoming active downtown place making at its finest, strong support for local dining, retail, community spaces and events. and a desire to maintain marina's character um so the the spirit and essence of marina as it is today um and was previously and then the um preference for horizontal uh lower scale development meaning what's there currently is your horizontal so you've got one ground floor use and was looking there at a one to two story residential, but not a focus on large density was the feedback specifically from that workshop. Next slide. So the online feedback form that ran for a two week period, May 26th through June 9th, it was voluntary and the report results are in your council packet. I can get into those in specificity, but for now we're gonna keep it high level overview. So this was shared across all city communication channels. We had a total of 231 responses. And I do want to make sure this is not as your previous agenda item had a formal and scientific survey. This was an informal community feedback. So I just want to distinguish those results. And just in full transparency, there was the early posting. that we did have some issues with two of the questions that was open for 24 hours, but we did get about 28 of those responses. Their feedback is reflected in the information that you have here. Since it was of two questions specifically, we still felt that the rest of their responses should be part of the overall report you have in front of you. Part of this, we asked the demographics, the current downtown experience, safety priorities, character and development, the streetscape implementation. It was about 20 questions total is what we asked the residents. Next slide, please. And so now we're going to get into the core priorities. Again, since this was an informal feedback, what you can look at this as is a way to have quantitative themes or really those pulse points of the community. So gathering and connection, we heard from the significant majority of the respondents, 69.7%, that it was very important to create a downtown where people could gather. They wanted those shared cultural experiences. The workshop participants echoed that as well. Again, using terms like plazas, spaces for community events, even farmers markets, things like that. Next slide, please. So the next priority was streetscapes and aesthetics, enhancing the streetscapes. And one of the parts that we heard, and it was echoed through the survey, was looking for the short-term investments. What could be done sooner rather than later obviously still going to the long-term priorities of the council that's already set the vision but what would be available there and so in the next one to five years specifically for investments in streetscapes and aesthetics just to make that more aesthetically pleasing instead of the area being dominated by the large parking lots and lack of that visual appeal to see more trees if they could more greenscapes landscaping and even facade and improvements if that was possible. Next slide. Pedestrian and bicycle safety. This was the most emphasized part of the survey response. Again, this is a confirmation rather of the participants of the in-person workshop. What I want to highlight here is it's not a complete move away from auto centric, but really wanting to carve out that space that is walkable and for bicyclists in this area. It was very important. And we had a lot of open comment boxes. So that allowed rather than just multiple choice answers, it did allow the residents to provide further sentiment around how they felt or their experiences and why they were choosing to select this. So it really helped kind of hone in on what they were looking for. Wanting that safer crosswalks, more dedicated bike lanes, requesting wider sidewalks. So again, not eliminating traffic, but wanting to slow traffic significantly so there could be shared spaces for the multimodal traffic in, again, this spot. So combined, there was the support for reducing traffic speeds. And again, the consensus for all of it was the increased pedestrian and bicycle safety. Next slide. So thoughtful development and economic growth, we touched on it a little bit, but the community was really looking for businesses that, again, maintain Marina's unique and approachable scale, the character, having those shared experiences, all of that coming together, wanting to have restaurants or cafes, arts, cultural, family-friendly spaces, somewhere to spend nightlife and have that entertainment. And again, just to reemphasize, the residents advised that they were not looking for an overly dense or urbanized vertical developments. They were open to mixed use, but again, wanting to maintain the city's character with that and visual openness. Next slide, please. So as when you ask the question, you get all the answers. So the mixed opinions when it comes to the perceptions around roundabouts, again, shared consensus that really focusing on safety. And I'm going to turn it over to Frederick here in just a minute. But so while there is the consensus in slowing the traffic down, doing so and and how the vehicle by which that happens is where it remains a debate for the residents um again because we asked open-ended questions we were able to gain some of the insights as to what was forming the responses uh driver confusion uh was one really wanting to make sure that traffic flow was allowed for, not wanting to redirect traffic to areas that traffic doesn't exist currently. So what we heard was a lot of opportunity for education around this. Next slide, please. So that gets into the implementation and next steps. When it comes to the education, we hear the strong desire to see action in the near term. We talked about that with streetscapes and aesthetics. The support for lower cost visible improvements and that large scale projects, obviously they be done together. nothing be done short term that isn't ultimately going to support the long term, but really around any sort of traffic improvements and traffic flow and infrastructure, really want to focus on building that trust and familiarity with roundabouts. We think that the City of Marina could really benefit from that, talking about the stats and statistics, because again, that shared consensus is the pedestrian and bicycle safety. So for the answer to the question, really sharing the data and information, and I believe there's even some statistics directly available for the roundabouts in Marina that we can talk about and that any sort of temporary quick build demonstrations when it comes to infrastructure would be a sound investment to help the community get used to something like that in different areas. So that in a nutshell is the community survey and feedback overall for the outreach. Happy to answer any questions. Also want to invite up Frederick to talk a little bit more around the education aspect.

Thank you, Alexis. Good evening, council members. So we have, I'm going to run through three sets of slides. One is just a refresher on the two corridors that we've brought to you previously with reservation road in Domani. Talk about the operational benefits and the superiority of the roundabouts compared to signals. And then I'm going to dig a little bit into some of the questions that were asked and some concerns that we've heard, and also bring some newer safety data for you as well. And first we're going to do reservation road, and I'm going to go as fast as I can. If I go too fast, just stop. You've seen all of us. Next slide, please. So the reservation corridor, basically focusing on downtown starts at California, goes all the way down to the one and the reservation road. Next slide, please. And we looked at signals versus roundabouts, right? This really shows the comparison between where the roundabouts would be located compared to the signals. Next slide, please. And then the cross sections in essence between the two are the same on the segments, right? So we keep the number of lanes, we have medians, provide bike lanes and nice sidewalk. Next slide, please. This shows the middle section for signal lane option for four lanes, and this is what existing looks like. Next slide, please. And this is the section north of Forest to California, mainly no race medium, but a two way lift and median to provide access to all the drivers.

Next slide.

So for the roundabout, the first section between Del Monte and Vista del Camino, sort of the same cross-section, four lanes of traffic, nice wide medians, and then the few roundabouts at both of these intersections. The roundabout at Del Monte is a larger roundabout because it's got more traffic to deal with. And then once we get the downtown sections, the roundabouts get slightly smaller. Next slide, please. the next section between vista del femino and crescent um so we're basically replacing the signals with roundabouts are we keeping most of the driveways or maybe a couple of them that we need to turn into right and right out there's one of them i think we need to close next slide please and this is the last stretch and then up to from forest to california but you can still see the cross section maintains capacity and we provide all the capacity at the intersections i think the last time i presented i said in an urban environment congestion happens at the intersections right that's where all the control is in between is where people travel really nice about this is the the the footprint the the the improvement with how the community and that local environment for slower speeds is really important, and bicycle and pedestrian movements as well, and then safety. Next slide. This is the roundabout at Talmonte and Reservation Road, where we have a heavy demand coming westbound in the morning, going southbound, and then that reverse commute in the afternoon. Next slide, please. And oh, yes, we do anticipate that we could put in RFPs at that intersection because of the heavy movement of vehicles. So those are the flashing lights that will give the pedestrians an option to feel safer when they cross.

What does RFP?

it's a rapid flashing beacon so it's these uh if you look at the photo on the right hand side it's ones that um they have a little flasher that comes on the other side of the road and pedestrian pushes the button and they flashing they're flashing rapidly so it comes with a yellow yellow light next slide So the levels of service comparison shows that the level of service for the roundabouts are better than what the level of service would be for the signals. Next slide. And then, of course, because the level of service is better, the travel time improves with the roundabouts, despite that there's a much lower speed. This is in the eastbound direction. Next slide. Westbound direction the same that the travel time with the roundabouts improve. We need to realize that this is just the aim and the peak hour. And the peak hour, there's tremendous benefits throughout the day. Remember about 70, 80% of the traffic happens outside of the peaks, right? So this is only looking at the peak hour. So there's still all those benefits for travel time and safety in the off-peak periods. Next slide, please. So let's look at Del Monte corridor, and this is the corridor that I think council approved to move forward with. This was a presentation that was made with the streetscape plan with Bianca. Next slide please. Again, we looked at roundabouts versus signals. Next slide. So that's a basic layout. We had two roundabouts, one at Palm and one at Rheindoller. And then there was a sort of a flashing beacon for pedestrians, the former block crossing between palm and reservation on on this option we or when we looked at del monte the option for um for a roundabout at the del monte and reservation was not on the table yet so that's why you don't see it on these graphics that came later next slide please This was just a sort of a look on what the existing road looks like. You know, not very inviting. We heard, you know, that today also that, you know, the whole corridor is not inviting for pedestrian and bicycle uses and it's in need of upgrading. Next slide, please. The cross-section would be, again, about the same between the signal and the roundabout corridors on the segments. The improvements really happen at the intersections themselves where we have more capacity for the roundabouts. Next slide, please. Same cross-section that you can see. Next slide, please, for the roundabouts. Here are some travel times again. So we can see that for the signals, the northbound direction is slightly more with the roundabouts compared to the signals. I think these are all the signal travel times, AM and PM. And the roundabouts are at the bottom. So an improvement on travel time. very small it's much smaller on this corridor because there's only two roundabouts okay next slide please in the southbound direction um the same uh slightly increase in the roundabout option but very close to each other in terms of travel time next slide please these just show sort of the comparison between the signalized layouts and this and the roundabout layouts and very important to note is that we do have the four lane facilities at the two roundabouts right um we do is again that's for that added capacity that we needed and there were concerns about that we're going to narrow the road and do the road out at the intersections we're not we're providing that capacity at the intersections that we need to get throughput for vehicles and also vehicles turning in and out of the intersections Next slide, please. We will have several bike and pedestrian crossing options on Del Monte, where the roundabouts are specifically, and then that mid-block hawk, it's a hybrid beacon. So it's one of these where the red lights come up and you push a button, red lights flash, pedestrian crosses, light goes dormant, and vehicles can travel. Next slide, please. We had several options for treatment and there will be striping options to enhance pedestrian and bicycle activity. Next slide, please. There's the picture of the actual hawk signal that will go up mid block. Next slide, please. And so this is just, I'm going to run through some of Bianca's images. So this would be the existing image. And then the next one shows, next slide please, show the rendering of how we would convert and provide additional pedestrian and bicycle and especially focusing on the landscaping elements of it. And the bicycle feature would be one seamless connection with the pedestrian facility and there would be a protected bike lane as well.

Are we northbound or southbound?

Looking northbound. So this would be approximately.

So one lane only northbound?

Past the intersection, yes, one lane, but at the intersection, two lanes.

Okay. What is that side strip next to the car?

We need a fire needs 20 feet with, so we have 12 feet for the lane and eight feet shoulder.

You don't drive in it. You don't park in it.

It's for emergency vehicles. Okay.

Thank you.

Next slide, please.

And that was an image with the Bianca's rendering for the median specifically. And there you can see that travel in the, in the lanes. Next slide, please. so now i'm going to share with you data and this is data and i i remember when when councillor mccarthy asked about the book field by traffic engineer by dr wes marshall And I think the lesson from that book was data, data, data. So I'm going to share with you data, and I want you to take the data and make some decisions based on that, because the data doesn't lie. It's real numbers. It's not something that is in the book that we figured out, and how are we going to use it? This is all real information that I'm going to share with you now. So the first one is public attitude towards roundabouts. This is the NEFHWA study that was done. You can see the dark green was before time. Before the implementation, people were very negative, and after implementation, you know, the opinions shifted to neutral, positive, and very positive. So that's just real information that we've got. Slide. And we did also a survey very similar to what Tripepe did when we did work with Bianca. And this is a slide actually from the presentation that she made. After that, or during that presentation, what I wanted you to look at the top right end is where there was actually a 62% favorite vote for the roundabouts. So we had good data in there for who's using it, what do the people want. The same message came through from what we saw with the survey.

What was the survey that resulted in those numbers?

It was also an online survey and it was at 62 responses and it was very much the same. So it was like a SurveyMonkey. We posted QR codes, the outreach meeting and the pop-up event that we had, people would scan that and respond to the survey. So it's an opinion survey.

2026?

2025. I think this is when we did the Del Monte corridor. Very interesting is the high percentage of people that said they bike and walk as well, right? It's not the most, but it shows that there's that need to provide multimodal facilities.

And can you speak to the 4159? Lower left or lower right. 41%, four lanes, 59% two lanes.

Oh, yeah, sorry. Yes. So when we were asked, the question was asked about preference for four lanes versus the two lanes. And the two lanes was justified because of the lowering of the speed, right? And people not passing each other and still maintaining capacity. So 41% of the people voted for four lanes and 59 voted for two lanes on the segments. Next slide, please. you you approved um probably a couple of weeks ago maybe a little longer a couple of months ago a vision zero plan and pamsea did a regional study that included marina and this is the vision zero safety plan for the city and that document is available i think on tampa's website as well i'm going to share with you a little bit of data out of that that tells a different story and i the one thing that popped out from this study because what it did it compared quite a few cities in monterey county to each other And Marina was at the top of the list for bad safety data. That stood out to me as an eyesore. But of course, the eyesore becomes an opportunity to get ranked. Next slide, please. It was data-driven analysis. You know, just wanted to share that with you. It was nothing here was sort of invented. It was all data that was collected, crash data specifically. But the focus was on injury and fatal accidents. We've got to keep remembering that a lot of crashes don't get reported to the police, so they don't show up in a database because if I'm in a fender bender, you know, we exchange information that doesn't get reported. So the crashes here are less than what's actually really happening in the field. Next slide, please. Something that stood out to me is what we call vulnerable road users. So those could be in older communities specifically, people that fight, people that walk, and how important the role or the role they play in moving about in the city and how we have an obligation to protect and design features that take into consideration the vulnerability on the roadway. Next slide, please. Some nice data here. I think, again, this sort of replicates back to the data also we had with Bianca. quite a bit of usage, bite usage, pedestrian usage. Can I go to the next slide, please? So what we did in that study was we took the safety data and approached it from a systemic measure. And through that systemic measure, we identify routes. And we call them high-injury routes. in the city of marina the orange roads that's shown in this map are your high injury routes so we see reservation road engine road and del monte and remember this is now data on engine before it was converted into the roundabouts what the data showed is that 80 of the crashes occurs on 12 of your miles right so these are corridors that need some measure to make them safer next slide please So now I'm going to dig into what the data from the FHWA says about roundabouts. So we do know that for signals, and we know the majority of intersections on these corridors are signals, that the reduction in fatal and injury crashes are 78% when you convert a signal into a roundabout. For stop control, it's actually higher, and that is just because people need to take apps, right? It's hard to take apps, especially for vulnerable road users. These things all become more difficult the more vulnerable you are on the roadway. Next slide, please. So I want you to look at this, and I think we've seen this graphic before. If the speed doubles from 20 to 40, the chance of surviving or the increase in a fatality goes up eight times. So speed is the primary source of killing pedestrians and cyclists on our road. Next slide, please. I think we're all familiar with conflict points, how many conflict points there are in intersections, you know, signalize or stop versus roundabouts, the fact that you're going at lower speed, the fact that if crashes do happen, they are far more severe in nature and the signal will stop, the low speed side swipe type accidents that happen in roundabouts. The data currently that we have on crashes in Marina, the ones that do get reported are primarily the UIs. I have been, I think, at a city council meeting or two where the chief of police said, it's the best UI catcher that you have in the city. Some of the recent, even the crashes on the new engine roundabouts too have been UIs, right? So under the influence and they couldn't negate the movement around the roundabouts. Next slide, please. There was concern about how do bikes use a roundabout and how do pedestrians cross? And this becomes extremely important. So bicycles have two options. If you're a spandex rider, you can take the lane. So that means you don't drive on the side of the road, you'll go in front of the cars because the reason is you're gonna drive the same speed as the bicycles going through the roundabout. So you take control in between the cars. If you don't feel okay and you cannot do that and you cannot manage 20 miles an hour, All the roundabouts have exit ramps and you can cross it with pedestrians on the side. So that sidewalk becomes wide, it becomes a fast trail facility across the intersection, and then you can come back and there will be an entry ramp again through the side street.

Next slide, please.

There's a whole bullet list here about why roundabouts are good for the drivers. The slower speed is rule number one. If there's a crash, it's very forgiving. Mistakes are not lethal. Longer decision-making time, so you have time to make a decision on what to do. No demands to accurately judge closing speeds of traffic. So sometimes if you're sitting at a stop street, somebody is approaching at 50 miles an hour, that is 35 miles an hour. Children especially and older adults have a very hard time judging the speed, right? And then the gap acceptance in finding a gap is not great. And then that's when we get crashes. We talk about low energy crashes. The visual scan that you have at a roundabout is basically this. When you're at an intersection and you've got to move for pedestrians, it's a 180 movements. And we've got a couple of those graphics coming up. And it's a very simple decision making. You will always have traffic or pedestrians like either just to your left or just to your right for pedestrians because they can cross both sides. But traffic will always approach you from your left. So you look to the left, look for the gap, go. Next slide, please. So this has a couple of, we've got a transition there maybe, and then we can go there. So for pedestrians, the challenge that we have is making, vehicles making right turns are looking, you know, or may not be looking for pedestrians that cross in the sidewalk. And you may think it's okay and pedestrians will know what to do. There were two parents that were killed in Gilroy a few months ago by a right turning vehicle at the intersection. All the striping was there. There were no side distance problems. So it is a fact that that right turn movement, when a vehicle makes that right turn movement, the pedestrian becomes vulnerable. um we do trust the lights too much we think if we get a green light that that's protection for us if we enter the roadway it's not right it just tells us you can walk now the fact is that vehicles may not see that green light or not look for you or maybe look for other cars um if we have unprotected left turns so it's a permissive left right i would always be looking for cars from the front and a gap and then i go and then if i go and there's a pedestrian in the crosswalk it becomes a problem um i can also share with you what many cities have at schools now because kids are the ones that are most vulnerable they have eliminated the permissive left turns and they put in protected left turns for safety for children um next slide please And this shows the visual angles that you need to have to be able to see and all the angles that you need to look for where you look for a pedestrian or a child or a pedestrian crossing. Next slide, please. We can push the slide again for the transition. And then go again. So those are the movements. And that shows you the only angles that you need to look for while you're traversing through the roundabout to look for that pedestrian that's crossing at that location. This is the four green spaces or the arrows that we had in the previous slide. Next slide, please. And maybe before I go into this one, I didn't put a slide in about crossing times, right? So currently, well, actually, this is going to be a slide later, so I apologize. There was a question on funding sources. So currently, all funding that becomes available is really related to safety and placemaking. We do not see projects that have signalized improvements getting funded at all. Even if it's pedestrian improvements, active transportation planning improvements, seldom do we see signalized projects getting funded. And also very few cities here actually build these types of improvements out of their pockets. They all get funded. You can go to Salinas, Seaside, even your Imgen. Those have all been built primarily with grant funds or traffic impact fee programs. So I've listed here the most recent sources of information, some federal, state, and local funds that is available to help build these facilities. Next slide, please. We're almost done. So La Jolla, Bird Rock, I think we spoke about that the last time. This is probably the oldest corridor that I'm aware of in California. And they have 22,000 cars a day. It's a single lane facility. I'm going to share that with you. We have about, we're forecasting about 20,000 cars a day on Del Monte and also on reservation. So about the same volumes on a daily basis. Next slide, please. The top left side is what it looked like. Well, the photo is what it looked like. 78 feet of crossing space, right, for a pedestrian. The bottom slide and the two right slides show you what it looks like now. So they've trimmed down, provided a nice median. and see how the urban space adjacent on that corridor has redeveloped into really nice outside space. So that's the downtown feeling that you're looking for, outside cafes. It was just a tremendous improvement for the corridor. Next slide, please. So five roundabouts in a row, and it's also a coastal town, a lot of visitors, plus all the locals. Next slide, please. This is an aerial image. So we took a couple of drone footage. So I wanted to show you, next slide, please. So on this next one, so this is a drone footage of operations, and you can see with those volumes, Let's look for a bicycle, let's look for a bus, and we're also going to find a pedestrian. You also see how the queues dissipate, right? They do get busy and they go through. See, there's somebody waiting for a pedestrian to cross. On the left side, the pedestrian crosses, the cars go, the other side wait. There were a lot of fears from people that it's not safe and people won't stop. And this has now been in place for 10 years and people do stop. And they stop in the right way. The space is there for them to stop and people behind them stop as well. Again, low speed. The bicycle is actually taking the lane. There was a bicycle going from the left to the right diagonal, right through the circle. So everything that we spoke about is happening at this intersection. Let's go to the next slide. So there's a pedestrian here and also, again, bicycles. So let's run that one. So there the cars stop. Pedestrian crosses one direction. Cars go. See on the right-hand side, pedestrian crosses over. The cars go. Look at that short distance that the pedestrian is crossing in. The car doesn't need to wait for the full crossing. It's only for that 14 feet that the crosswalk is there. Next slide, please. There's a bicycle. Oh, missed the bicycle. That's OK. Next slide, please. There's just more footage. So in that footage, you saw everything that you will see on Del Monte and on Reservation Road. There will be buses. There will be cars. There will be fire trucks. There will be pedestrians. There will be bicycles. And they all travel in the right way. Yes, is there education? Absolutely. everybody needs to learn how to use them you have a few roundabouts in the city you're probably a little bit ahead of a curve um we do see that all the people are having more challenges with the roundabouts because it does require some interaction and that's that's the education that alexis spoke about um this is a project in escondido and that roundabout was installed i think six months ago Also in the downtown, they did diagonal parking and parallel parking. They saw a 20% increase in businesses and business activity since the roundabout was installed. I think also, if you go talk to Jennifer Schumacher, if you want to call her, she won't stop talking about the success of this project. And I think on La Jolla, there was also a little less than 20% increase in economic activity. Next slide. that was just her testimony next slide i think that's about it so i think you know we wanted to bring back the concerns that we've heard at the community meeting and you know show you facts show your data um you know and then i guess we're up tonight for discussion on what to do with the corridors thank you thank you alexis thank you very much fred um let's go to public comment starting with those folks that are here in person

Hey, how you doing? I'll keep it brief. I sent a whole bunch of questions. Some of them were duplicate. Some of them were probably answered if I would have dug a little deeper. I've been digging through this roundabout stuff and this traffic stuff for the last four years, five years worth of meetings. I don't know what happened to the intersection plan that seemed to be a total go in 2022 and 2024. and then all of a sudden roundabouts appeared and i suspect i always suspect it was funding driven uh grant funding driven um i'm a little troubled by projects that are designed around grant funding We had all these meetings. I don't know how many people, people that live here, people that shop here, people that drive here, need to tell you that they don't want any of this. And all I hear is, well, it's sad that the public doesn't understand. It's sad that the public just hasn't had enough data crammed down their throat. And I can tell you something with all due respect, sir. can lie does lie it lies all the time it can be skewed it can be cherry-picked and i can likely pick apart every slide that was just shown tonight you're going to decide what you're going to decide i can see some members up there beaming during this presentation. And whatever you decide, good luck to you. It probably won't happen for years anyway. With any luck, it can be reversed before a shovel hits the ground. Thanks. Bye.

Thank you very much, Mike. Anyone else?

Ah, Mr. Mayor, members of the Council, my name is Kim Cohen. I was on Zoom at the fire, but thanks to the miracle of my own two feet, I walked down here because I wanted to make sure I was here to make public comment for this. I used to, I think I'm particularly qualified to comment about this because I actually used to live in the former Starbucks building that's about 150 feet from this intersection. And I've crossed that intersection on foot at the daytime and nighttime many, many times. And believe me, when you cross that intersection any time of day under any traffic conditions, I don't know how wide it is, but you feel like you are playing a game of Frogger with your life. and it is clear to me after seeing these presentations and that this kind of idea will increase the level of pedestrian safety vastly um so i would encourage this project to go forward thank you thank you kim anyone else like to comment on this

Hi. Thank you. My name is Laura Lerner, and I wasn't planning to comment until I heard something in the presentation when the engineer talked about permissive left turns. And I drive a lot. I have a long commute every day, and I just was thinking about making a permissive left turn at a place I do a lot. And I've had several close calls because I'm crossing. I'm trying to find that gap. the oncoming traffic and i'm like i got a gap and i go and there's and then there's a pedestrian that seems to just show up out of nowhere and i just feel like i have this you know fear like i can't imagine if i ever accidentally hit a pedestrian how horrendous that would be and so if there's and i'm not you know i'm more used to inter signal intersections than roundabouts of course i mean we all are right chain you know but if there's evidence showing that i'm most likely to accidentally hit a pedestrian and hurt someone, I would be in support of that. Thanks.

Thank you, Laura. All right. Let's go online. Erica Graham, welcome.

Thank you.

Hi, Mayor and City Council. I just really hope that we can see this project move forward. I'd love to see this plan actually move forward with the full one lane on each northbound and southbound direction from off of the highway, Rindler, all the way to reservation with a roundabout at reservation. I've lived in this city for a really long time. I walk, bike, I use uh reservation down um through that entire area and i have for many years and pedestrian safety is always it's super scary i watch people almost get hit the the intersection at del monte and reservation is always super dangerous to be able to cross i've done it with my kids biking walking multiple times it's very very scary um i would love to see this plan uh come into place um and really i feel like we have so much less traffic than we used to reservation and domani used to be more highly used before we had uh in jim parkway that was um the main route and i wasn't a huge fan of the roundabouts but after using them um to get back and forth um one into marina to salinas just using them they have actually kind of grown on me and although we are all starting to um use them a little more wisely and it's less of a challenge um that i've noticed They are more safe and they're easier to actually get through. There's no longer a long wait coming off of the side roads and getting onto the main roads. And I would really hope that the city council can vote on the safety part of this and bring this walkway bikeway and one one route uh one road sorry in each direction um as a part of the plan because i really feel like it is the safest and most efficient uh means of travel especially with the new housing coming into place it's going to be safer for our students that are traveling across the streets to get to schools from the high school down into the communities from the elementary school from the preschool just for our families using these routes the bikers the walkers it is just safer all the way around and with less traffic traveling this road i feel like this is the safest route so i hope this council can really consider this thank you thank you very much erica all right let's go to moto g stylist tommy valet i believe

Yeah, I'm a daily bike rider. Can you hear me? Yes. I'm a daily bike rider. I ride Imjin from reservation all the way, you know, almost as far as I can go. And then I cross over Imjin. But roundabouts and the crosswalk, I feel, are way too close to the roundabout. even though i don't have to look at a lot of things i only have to look at like the gentleman was saying but that car is in motion he doesn't have to stop when he's uh parallel with me going down um engine but i press the yellow light and i look and i don't see a car and then i blink my eyes blink and i open again and there's a car coming around making a right toward my crosswalk that crosswalk is too close to the roundabout it needs to be another 30 feet away it's too close for them to make a decision they're in motion and i'm crossing and and the other question i have is is it okay to cross that crosswalk on a bicycle i don't know if the police chief is there but am i breaking the law by riding my bike across that cross walk i guess that's the first question because ideally it's still dangerous they are in motion and they really don't see me a lot of times because if it's a tesla they're looking at their tv they're not looking i i have to make eye contact now every car has tinted windows so you know what i just wave cars through i don't press the yellow button i wait till all the cars go by i don't try to stop traffic i finally realized that i'm not going to cause any commotion or reduce the flow especially on commute commute times the crosswalks on engine are too close to the roundabout there's not enough time for me to even think about crossing or not crossing because the car is coming and making a right turn i'm thinking he's going to go through the roundabout and continue parallel with me it's the roundabout is safer but it ain't no it ain't no catwalk you still have to be very extremely observant because cars have blind spots they they tint their windows they're drinking their coffee people driving teslas are looking at their screen if you put all those roundabouts on reservation i mean i think you're going to end up i think it's cool and everything but you're going to ruin downtown people are going to want to continue to go because they don't they're not stopping so it's not going to be a stopping destination downtown Simple as that. Good night.

Thank you, Tommy. Let's go to Grace Silva-Santella.

Hello, Mayor and City Council. So I am especially anxious to hear how Councilmember McCarthy speaks about this item. Next to former Councilmember Frank O'Connell, Brian is the person who I see walking around the most in Central Marina's core downtown area. So I'm going to be curious to hear his take on this. I last night spent a couple of hours listening to your October 1st, 2024 city council meeting and the traffic consultant you have who just gave the whole presentation about roundabouts at that meeting gave you a very extensive presentation about traffic signal improvements to the intersection at Del Monte and reservation road. Myself and Jeff Markham were the only two residents who asked questions. I left that meeting feeling extremely confident that we were moving forward with some major improvements to pedestrian safety. You had $1.7 million of grant money in hand. And one year, eight months later, I'm confused and can't understand why we haven't, we did not move forward with the work that you were all talking about a year ago and eight months, one year and eight months ago. I'd like to know if you have arranged any meetings with the business owners in the core downtown area of Central Marina to hear what their feedback is about roundabouts and about reducing reservation road from two lanes in both directions to one lane in both directions. I'll remind you as one who walks this area often that the intersections are in fact five to six lanes wide when you factor in left and right hand turn lanes. And I'd like to know from start to finish, What will we be looking at for a roundabout at Del Monte and Reservation Road and replacing all of these signal lights with roundabouts along Reservation Road from start to finish? Two years, three years, five years? If we could be getting the answer on that, that would be greatly appreciated. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much, Grace. okay we'll close public comment and we'll start uh with with grace first and we'll go backward uh from start to finish all in del monte boulevard reservation road roundabouts uh how long will it take for implementation

So council has already approved Del Monte Boulevard, the medium project. They've approved it. You've approved the streetscape and the designs. We applied for funding for the roundabouts and only got... Did we get any funding for the Del Monte roundabouts?

That application went in three weeks ago. We'll know around September, October.

and so um as far as the median improvements um we are ready to move forward with that um here right away we've gotten to this point and then once you started getting feedback and looking at the del monte intersection again and the roundabout council put a pause on that and we heard back from the public and so we put a pause in on that project until we're at this point but we're ready to move forward but I think we're about 90 percent of the construction drawings finished so it's just a matter of um that last 10 percent ishmael can clarify we can go out to bed maybe be under construction maybe October for the for the medians for the medium part ishmael do you agree on that timeline yes And then as far as the roundabouts, what would you suggest?

So if you hear from the feds or the state today that you get money that will be allocated to you in the next year, then you're going to start your design process. So construction could happen anywhere from three and a half to four years out. You could be shovels in the ground. For what? For roundabouts. If we get money for the corridor on Del Monte.

Okay.

And remember, we have the money currently more than half of the money for Imgen or Del Monte reservation. So we have the 1.7 million already.

So that's Del Monte. The intersection of Del Monte and Reservation, we have the $1.7 million that is ready to go. If Council gives direction to move forward on the roundabouts, then we move forward with the design. We'll need about $3 million more. We have over $11 million in transportation impact fees that we can use to complete that project. And then as far as Reservation Road, Frederick can respond to that.

So Reservation Road is probably a little further out. There will be next cycles coming up for safety money. There was a bipartisan grants that just came out and the amounts of dollars that were being made available for projects like Reservation Road, there were plenty of them throughout California. In our area, I think Capitola got $5 million for their car. So I don't know if they're going to build it yet, and they had two fatal accidents on that car. So it's really safety data driven. And I think I told you that Marina has the worst data in Monterey County. So I'm thinking you are low hanging fruit for getting grant funding for these improvements.

So Frederick, can you repeat the out-year timeline for Reservation Road?

So let's say we go next year for Reservation Road as a grant application, right? That means that you will, and you, with the money, you will get it in the following year. So we're probably seven years out, I would say, for starting construction on Reservation, five to seven years.

okay uh have we had any meetings with business owners yet regarding roundabouts and reducing reservation road from two lanes to one lane in each direction

Meeting specifically with business owners, no. 92% of our respondents identified as residents of Marina. To do any sort of outreach with business owners specifically, we would recommend partnerships with stakeholder agencies within the community to be able to have sit-downs with your business owners to gather that input.

All right. Tommy asked if it's legal to bicycle across the crosswalks that are at the roundabouts on Imgen Parkway.

um so on Imgen Parkway no he's supposed to push his bike across um you know if it is a class one trail but once you get to a crosswalk you're supposed to cross to push your bike if there's striping that shows a bicycle facility so you can get a green stripe adjacent to a pedestrian white stripe then the bike can ride but currently there aren't the green stripes right so he's going to push your bike

okay uh i didn't get any other uh questions written down in my notes did anyone note any that i missed okay let's go i think mike had asked why the change from the traffic signals to the roundabouts when they're initially approved yeah and i think grace said something like uh she's confused why we didn't do those improvements so i'm sure she would like to hear that as well so fred back in 2024 you presented to us as a city council uh on the traffic signal improvements that you recommended and uh there was 1.7 million and we had a couple of public members tonight asking why we changed from that signal light improvement design signalized intersection design to roundabout preferred design

so i have to blame you council asked the decision or asked the question could we perhaps do a roundabout sub-preservation and we said yes um and then we would start and then this intersection would turn into a roundabout as well for del monte and reservation

and I think it kind of started once we really went through the Del Monte Road process looked at the roundabouts looked at the data and the information and and saw the huge safety improvements and the improvements the quarter then Council said can we also look at the intersection here and that's where you start to make that shift

And that was deja vu for me because the two roundabouts near the library on Reservation Road were originally designed to be new signalized intersections. And before Lane got here, we were told as a council, those two intersections wouldn't work as roundabouts. When Lane got here, I forgot why he took a second look. We asked him to, or he's just on his own initiative. But Lane took a second look and said, no, we can do roundabouts there. And so we did roundabouts there. And then we get to Reservation Del Monte, no roundabout. And then... It became doable. And so now we're considering it. Wayne, do you have any input on those two at reservation? Do you have a memory of when Christine DiOrio was here in that kind of timeframe?

Yeah, absolutely.

It was around 2013 timeframe.

So your first year here?

Correct, it was the first year. And really, it goes back to the general plan. Our general plan, one of the things is, when we have intersections, if roundabouts work, it gives direction to put in roundabouts. And that was a general plan that was developed by the community. And as the data comes forward, I mean, there's no question that roundabouts are safer pedestrians, for cars, for bicyclists, and we're seeing that. What will be really interesting is once Imgen Road is open for a year to really see the data on that.

Fred, I have a question. In our staff report, you talk about kind of doing an experiment, my words, not your words, on Reservation Road, trying out the one lane in each direction in segments and roundabouts with one lane, and if they interim condition, and if it works well, turning it into a two lane roundabouts and I guess two, can you, and two lanes each way. Full build out of the downtown. Can you explain that analysis summary that's in our stack report?

So the analysis that we did had a full build out of your downtown, which is substantial, right? I think, you know, and... it's very highly likely that you're not going to see that full development happen in by the next 10 20 years right so it um and i showed you la jolla right that has about the same volume that we were forecasting for your downtown operating fine as just single end roundabouts So you have the option of building the first two lanes with some roundabouts. There may be improvements at the roundabouts to accommodate turning movements in and out of the driveways, but that's an option and we can always reserve the right of way, plan the road, build some lanes, and as more development happens in the future, you have the ability to widen the road then.

On an experiment, it's a phased approach. Exactly.

It's a phased approach. That's exactly it.

Okay. And is there any reason to consider a phased approach to Del Monte Boulevard?

No, Del Monte. So we already, with some of the existing volumes and some of the future volumes, the two roundabouts towards Rhine-Dollar and Palm, they have heavy volumes already. A lot of people come down Rider-Dollar to get onto the freeway and coming back. So we needed that capacity. In the analysis, it was unambiguous needing the four lanes from Palm going towards the freeway.

Okay, my next question from Lane is in our staff report, there's a slide that refers to our downtown vitalization specific plan that was approved in 2024. And in our staff report, it says policy M-1.17. Support the implementation of roundabouts and lane reductions on Del Monte Boulevard. Similarly, continue to evaluate the feasibility of lane reductions on Reservation Road to calm the flow of traffic and further the city's goal of creating more inviting streetscapes. And goal M-1 that was associated with that policy was that we're shooting for, we're planning for a downtown with safe and efficient pedestrian and vehicular circulation that encourages people to gather, walk, cycle, or use public transportation. So I didn't know that those were in the downtown specific plan, but they are. And so can you speak to what we're doing tonight consistent with that downtown plan.

Yeah, I think it is absolutely consistent with that downtown plan. And there's a lot more in that plan that these improvements implement the downtown. One of the differences that Alexis pointed out was in the downtown vitalization plan, it talked about really high density residential, which would be, you know, five, six, seven stories high. And the feedback from the community, and Alexis can speak more of that, but the feedback was we're more interested in mixed use. Retail, maybe one or two stories above that. So that's the one thing different that going through this process that we've seen from our downtown revitalization plan. But everything else that we're proposing tonight is absolutely consistent with that plan.

Okay, thank you. Fred, you skipped a slide when you were going through your presentation, and it's also in our staff report. And it talks about 32 conflict points at a traditional signal intersection versus eight conflict points if you have a roundabout. And that's a one-lane roundabout. So can you speak to those conflict points, comparison to one-lane roundabout, and then mention two-way roundabout conflicts? Because this doesn't have two-way. Correct. Two-lane. And we're talking about two lanes. And some, like on reservation, but not on Del Monte, they'd be one lane.

No, money will be two lane. Okay.

So please speak to those three options.

So we have an extra lane through the roundabout. So every dot that you see there is going to double. So there would be 16, but you also remember if I have a four lane roadway facility, I also double the dots.

so there's the same increase in the number of conflict points right if you compare a four lane intersection to a four lane facade sorry yeah four lane intersection to a two lane okay so in this slide it says four leg intersection 32 conflict points yep is that two lanes or one lane one lane so if we have two lanes in del monte boulevard we have 36 conflict points at palm and del monte and

we have 16 with a roundabout right but that and then we'll have if we keep the four lanes with the signals and it's it's going to double up on what you see on that graphic okay how about palm and del monte boulevard right now there's a signal light yep there's two lanes each direction right yeah two lanes yep so are there 64 conflict points at that intersection today can you give me a minute so i can just do my math here sure

I'm trying to understand the data or the math behind the safer roundabouts that everyone who studies this says that they're safer. I think that's an important point to illustrate why they're safer. And Fred, while you're looking that up, interrupt me when you're ready, but I got some information from TAMC today because in that vision action plan that's in the back of our staff report, it talks about three roads in Marina accounting for 80%. of our high severity crashes, and they only represent 12% of our roads. And those are no surprise, Del Monte Boulevard, Reservation Road, and Imjin Parkway. Those three roads are 12% of our road miles, but they have 80% of our high severity crashes. And so I asked Tamsie, well, between those three roads, How many did Del Monte Boulevard have? How many did Reservation Road have? How many did Imgen Parkway have? And the answer was that in the five-year period, 2019 to 2023, when the study was done, Del Monte Reservation Road intersection had one serious injury and six lower injury crashes at that intersection. and Del Monte Boulevard itself had seven serious injuries and 20 visible injuries that weren't serious. Reservation Road had three serious injuries and 60 visible injuries. Imgen Parkway had one fatality, five serious injuries, and 80 visible injuries. My point is that we have good data on the accidents and injuries that are occurring on our roads and it's helpful to keep that in mind when we're working on prioritizing where we spend our money on these roads and of course we're going to try to prioritize the most dangerous roads And Del Monte and Reservation Road are two of our three most dangerous roads. So making them safer is not just a cool thing, but it should be our high priority when those are our most dangerous roads and we're trying to make our town more walkable and safer for everybody. Okay, Fred, do you want to talk about conflict points?

So I'm going to add another 14, right? If to the signalized intersection, right? If one of the legs have four lanes, so two lanes on one leg, four lanes on the other one. So I'm adding another 14. So I get to 46.

Oh, I see. Because Palm Avenue only has one lane east-west. Got it. Okay. So how many conflict points at Palm Avenue today? You said you added 14?

40, 40, 46.

46. And with the two-lane roundabout you're proposing, how many conflict points will there be?

16. So 46 compared to 16.

And that's one way to explain why roundabouts are predicted to be safer.

there's an speed species, right?

There's 30 more ways to hit. Yeah. With Palm Avenue, Del Monte today compared to if it turns into a roundabout. And also the roundabout will reduce the speed. Okay. Let's go to Councilman McAdams.

Thank you, mayor. I'm curious. So I, when I was researching this a lot of cities are doing pilots for like 30 to 180 days and then collecting data before like making big investments and just sort of seeing how the public is you know, interacting, reacting to this. Is that something that we can do? And then For me, so I think I'm the only one up here who drives to the peninsula in the morning. And if you haven't done it, I would recommend that you do it. And especially during the surf bus line, that construction, it easily added 20 minutes to my commute. And I understand that, you know, you can get in the habit of going the other way or whatever. But that was, to me, a test of the road diet. and it was awful so um that was my like real life experience um and um i i do like roundabouts as well um but i do think that it would be important to have this pilot project we can have the data you know i mean we can sit up here for 45 minutes and talk about how safe it is but if um it's really impacting our residents quality of life commuting times, getting to school, et cetera. I think that, you know, that's when we would hear from, that's when people are gonna show up to the meetings, right? So can you elaborate on the pilot program?

I would want to say yes, but we have not looked at it. Obviously, a lot of the pilots that cities do are easier intersections. I wouldn't do them on a major corridor. They would try it on maybe a residential street, single lanes, and we have quick builds, the other words we're using right now. So those are options. But I would be, you know, we can look into that more. But to tell you, absolutely, we can do a pilot right now somewhere on this corridor. It's going to be, it's a maybe.

Or maybe on a part of Del Monte. I mean, I'm just curious. That's when people are going to wake up, right? That's when people are going to go, oh, my business is down 20% or, wow, I want to go here, but I have nowhere to park or no way to get off. So I think that it's important, even if it's a very small space. But if you're hesitant to do a pilot, Well, I mean, we're talking about months and months of construction. And so what is the difference with that?

So the pilot is not going to exactly replicate what the construction is going to be. So the roundabout is going to have specific geometry to it. And if I do the pilot, I can't exactly replicate that geometry. And so you're not going to get the safety benefits. You're not going to get the crossing distance. So that's why I say if it's a simple, cities that do these, do them where it's simple and it's easy to implement. The challenge, yeah, it's going to be hard on El Monte and the reservation to do pilots.

speak to your experience on Del Monte is that is exactly what the modeling said would happen because one of the options was if we narrowed it down to one lane with the signals what would happen and it it showed that it'd be a total failure and so so that is what the modeling predicted with that it said Del Monte narrow it down will only work with roundabouts

so without roundabouts you absolutely have to have two lanes and that's what it's showing and that's why palm sorry thanks thanks and palm and ryan dollar are two lane roundabouts because we need that capacity going down when the surf came they closed down you know the section where we're going to provide two lanes okay i'm still interested in in some sort of pilot um let me um i i i will work with staff and we'll get back to you okay great thank you so much

Thank you, Jenny. Mayor Pro Tem Visser?

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Yeah, and just thank you for your presentation, as always. And just what you said, when the SURF project happened, that's not how the road diet will be. And there were no roundabouts. So when people say this was a mess, that's not how the design is. So this is not the results that we will get. And for the rest, Everybody already knows I'm from the Netherlands. I just spent three weeks in the Netherlands again. I drove more roundabouts in three weeks than most Americans have driven in their life. Probably it works. It just works. And when I was young, we had a few roundabouts in the country. That was it. And now almost all the intersections where traffic has to go are roundabouts. And they didn't do it because they don't work. really and it is safer there are there is data and and people say data can lie just experience will show you so i wish that everybody could go there experience the roundabouts and by the way all the more and more of maybe all the downtowns that i visited now have a um speed limit of 30 kilometers per hour which is about 20 miles per hour it's all about safety uh especially for pedestrians and um what is it called bicyclists so even i get tired at some point so um so i and i believe the data i believe the designs i believe that the anything you show us it's there is a reason that yeah Yeah, but what we saw, everything we saw. So I don't know what more I can say to try to convince people. Oh, I do have one question for the city manager. MST, how will staff make sure that they get involved at the right moments and not when things are a done deal we'll absolutely get them involved in the design phase okay thank you and that'll be on ishmael's shoulders i'm writing that down okay thank you i don't have more thank you very much thank you councilmember raviola

you mr mayor um and i i have to say that i'm a big supporter of roundabouts too i just i'm glad you put in the la jolla um san diego uh picture here because it i just yeah and i don't know where it's coming from but we have on our uh reservation road one two three four five six seven roundabouts And La Jolla at least has five. So I, you know, cause I was wondering like, does any other place have that many roundabouts? So I'm glad we have one that says five.

can maybe share the city of carmel i think only has a few signals left in the city they have now and that's not not this carmel the other carmel indiana and they have now basically got rid of most of their signals so it's fully going forward for workouts and you know i was just in norway and there are cities that the size of marina that doesn't have a single

Everything is roundabout. And it's like this where there's one long street and there's... Because sometimes I wonder if there was a big stream of traffic and they're slowing down, but they're going through every roundabout. And if you're trying to get onto reservation, let's say, but there's a steady stream because there's nobody stopping. I mean, if people are doing this correctly, that's kind of just flowing. Is there any hybrid like you ever put like one signal someplace amongst all of these to have a stop so that at least when the traffic starts, there's a gap so somebody can get in?

So that's the next level of roundabout design is to have a signal control and that signal will come on when the side suite can't get in. But the signal is only on when it needs to stop and the signal goes off and the rest of the time in the off peak it operates like a normal signal.

Oh, okay. So that's something we can build in from the start. Oh, okay. So it's not really like just a signal, but it is there to help. Okay, that's great. So how many of those do you have then? Like in this situation here on Reservation Road, like how many would you have?

I need to check with our guys. We're planning those currently on Baronda Road in Salinas, but they have not been constructed.

Well, that's brilliant. Thank you. I didn't know that we could do something like that. Maybe you told it to us, but it never registered that we would have a way to put in breaks of continuous flow of traffic with roundabouts.

What I do know happens before that, and that's when we all pick it up, is if the roadway, the main line gets congested, right, then people can't find gap. What usually happens in the roundabout, people will get curtsy gaps. So somebody coming in, they will know somebody's waiting. It's just like an always stop, right? People will give you a two-way stop. People will give you the opportunity to enter the stream. That's what will happen as well.

Okay, I wasn't counting on people's goodwill. Okay, and then, you know, we just understand now that we cannot have a road going from Del Monte across to Second because of... because of habitat and threatens endangered species. So what we thought would be a connection between the old and new marina, so to speak, we're not having that anymore. We can't, it just sounds like that it's never gonna happen. And we can't even put a pedestrian and pedestrian bicycle road even. So when we have this Del Monte roundabout, you know, at, you know, at Del Monte and Rheindoller, I thought that that roundabout was explicitly for having the connections going across, you know, with this new road. But does that change anything if we don't have that possibility anymore?

Ryan Dollar will be its own roundabout. Depending on what happens further out on Batten Parkway coming down, there may be some additional measures. So Batten Parkway coming down... Will necessitate the...

Okay. So it won't be like a four-way thing.

It'll be three-way roundabout.

Exactly. Okay. Okay. I understand. Okay, that's about all I have. That's all I can think about at this time of night.

So Kathy, I encourage everybody to look at the webcams, especially during peak traffic on the roundabouts at Imgen Parkway, to look at how the side traffic enters the roundabout, even during the busiest times. it has zero problem just watch it it's like amazing it's just like the videos that we saw today you don't have people waiting to get in nearly as long as they used to wait for the right to turn green when it was an intersection at ord market for example abrams and imgen is the busiest intersection on imgen parkway where there's a roundabout

and it's 24 7 you can watch it pedestrians bicycles motorcycles trucks buses it's flowing like it's a sunday morning and it's peak traffic i will do that night and morning however reservation road seems to have so many more street intersections than imgen so it's a little different in my mind you know i can yeah i think you're right and so does some of the examples we saw

those downtown examples he showed us it was downtown it was just like very similar to that the other thing i want to say um we have we have a couple of pages in here you didn't go over these northbound travel times can we get this up on the screen the northbound travel times because it speaks to what councilman mcadams talked about um and that is that surf construction zone was congested and it seemed like it totally backed up traffic and took you a lot longer to get through it the flashing sign said you know expect 10 minute delays or whatever it said so that was a construction zone we all know that when you drive through a construction zone that's narrowed barely for your car to fit everyone's going to go slower you're waiting for traffic lights to turn red it's a mess And so we had a mess, and that's no surprise. But when you go to this northbound travel times, it compares the existing four-lane road to reducing the lanes but keeping the signals to reducing the lanes and having roundabouts.

And it shows you how fast you go from point A to point B.

And It's slower with existing. It's even more slow if you reduce the traffic and you keep the signals, which is what happened during surf. We reduced the traffic lanes, but we kept the signals. And then you move through point A to point B fastest if you have one lane with roundabouts. But that's a fully constructed project. surf construction zone was not a fully constructed project it was a construction zone with k rails on both sides and you felt very unsafe and so everyone went slow and they were backed up at the signal lights and it took 10 minutes sometimes to get through that this is not going to take 10 minutes like during surf construction it's going to take one minute 11 seconds in the am and one minute 14 seconds in the pm which is a little bit faster than other options but you're going slower and you're getting through faster, which means you can see what's around you. It's safer, but you're saving time. You're saving commute time a little bit. So if it's safer and you move through faster at a slower, safer speed, where is the problem? If it's safer for everybody and it's more efficient for traffic, aren't those the two most important things? Safety and efficiency of traffic flow. So I know if you look at this data, you have to come up with intuitive or gut feelings, opposition. And someone said earlier they could pick apart every one of these slides. Well, we need to do that. If you can pick apart these slides, let's have someone pick apart these slides. But they're based on national trends and international trends. And the Federal Highway Administration is showing us some of this data. And what Fred is finding is that the local data is agreeing with the national data, which says in simple terms, roundabouts and road diets make it safer. And that's why you can get grants. And it makes traffic more efficient. So it's not that we like roundabouts because we think they're cute. It's because they work. And Imgen Parkway is an example of how they work. And Holman Highway is an example. It turned congestion into a Sunday morning stroll. The difficulty I have with roundabouts downtown and on Imgen Parkway is with the bicycle safety. These are real people telling us real fear they have from their experience using these roundabouts.

And so Fred, what's your thought on the safety of bicycles? Mr. Mayor, just point of order. We have been talking about this, but there's a clear majority that wants to move forward. Can we, there's no question. One more question.

Can you, can you speak to the safety or unsafety of bicycles on Imgen Parkway and what you're proposing at reservation?

So I think on reservation, the speeds on the main line is going to be lower, right, than what it is on Imgen. But from a roundabout perspective, it will be exactly the same. If you don't feel safe taking the lane in the roundabout, you can get off and take the exit ramp and use the crosswalk. It's going to be exactly the same.

All right. Good enough. Okay. Who would like to make the motion?

Someone like to make a motion?

by the way i made a mistake earlier so it's going to be quick but we do need to do that gulf shell conversion item that was critical and the drone and the drone too oh not the gulf but the drone oh i got that wrong okay all right uh did someone want to make a motion So we've received the information. Do we have directions to provide, um,

so we're looking for a specific direction do you want to move forward with the roundabout on del monte and reservation road and then we want some direction on the reservation road corridor um do you want to move forward with that approval of that design concept or do you want to continue with more public outreach and discussion i think it's essentially i think what we're looking at

Okay, was there a staff recommendation? I don't have a staff report in front of me.

uh our separate recommendation is um Del Monte and reservation intersection move forward with the roundabout um uh and we would recommend um the approval of the reservation road corridor design with the caveat that if Council wants more public input and we can certainly do that

Okay, if we move ahead with the median construction, it is consistent with the roundabout at Reservation Road.

Correct. They could work together.

And if we move ahead with the median construction and then we change our mind, then we have to undo the construction in the median. So tonight is important to get the median, you know, measure twice, cut once, right? Do the median once, right? Don't refigure it and then bust it up because we're going to change our mind. Okay, so I'll make the motion that we progress with Reservation Road, Del Monte Boulevard, roundabout design, and the Reservation Road roundabout corridor design. And if that doesn't get a second, then it dies for another motion.

A second.

Okay.

Excuse me, I missed the part about the medians on Del Monte, so we cannot start construction.

We shouldn't start this construction on Del Monte until we make a decision at Reservation Road, Del Monte Boulevard intersection, because the median has to... Yes, but...

So if we approve now to or agree now to go ahead with the roundabout at that intersection. So that's what the motion is. Yes. So the medians could be constructed and will have to be adjusted a little bit. You know, when the when the roundabouts go in at the rain door and but the construction of the medians could happen now. Correct, they will. So I would like to have that added to the motion.

That's already in work. It's ready to go whether we do a roundabout.

Okay, then I misunderstood that, sorry.

Yeah, so it is ready to go. Its configuration depends on what we say we want at Del Monte Reservation. Okay, thank you. that's why it's held up the median has been held up for this decision now we can move forward thank you okay any other comments or questions before we vote okay let's go to vote please all in favor please say aye aye all opposed please say no on any abstentions okay thank you that motion passes four to zero and we have one more item uh at least all motion that we take care of that other critical item because our last motion was that we were going to adjourn at the end of this item. So I'll motion that we continue tonight until we get the 10G2 that was pulled. Second consent. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. All opposed, please say no. Okay, that motion passes unanimously. And who pulled this? Oh, it was pulled for Nolan, right? There he is. Okay.

He had a whole list of questions that Chief Hopkins can answer. Yes.

Thank you. And I definitely appreciate you staying over. I know everyone's tired. The reason that this was asked is to kind of stick with us is because if it's delayed one more time, we're coming into our summer months where we have national night out and we have our car week coming up and this technology We had hoped to have it up and running by then because it will be a game changer for us to help us with our events. Based on the late hour, I've tweaked this three times and I think I have it down to 10 minutes, so I'll try to get through it really quick and I'll go by each question. The first one is, what public safety program are we solving? All of this information can be answered and is answered in our policy 612, which is posted online, as well as my staff report. The drone program is meant to close time and information gap between when the officer receives the call and when they arrive with reliable information. So right now we depend on 911 calls, radio traffic, and whatever fixed camera happens to be nearby. The drone can be overheard quickly and give us a real-time scenario in terms of what's going on with situational awareness before officers even step out of their vehicles. So let's see here. I'm going to condense this a little bit. Policy 612 limits how our drones use the situations where it enhances the missions of our protecting lives and property and where the means are not available or less effective. And that's why we're asking for this new technology. The staff report spells out the goals, which is improving emergency response times, which is important for us, enhancing officer and public safety, and supporting critical incident management and increasing efficiency without adding staff. Question three, how often and under what circumstances will we fly? The system may be deployed when calls for service arrive or critical incidents or search operations, emergency management events, and traffic incidents, perimeter operations, and similar public safety situations. Under Policy 612, emergency mission must be approved by the chief, a commander, or a designee, and every flight must be logged with the mission type, the objective, the flight time, approving supervisor. In doing that, this ensures that the deployments are tied to defined call types and documented approval and just not a casual or continuous patrol. All right, question two, total cost, I'm sorry, yeah, wait a minute. Three, yeah, okay. Total costs including program components. The DFR agreement is structured as a three-year term at $50,000 per year for an anticipated three-year term costs for a total of $150,000 plus tax. The mobile security trailer is also part of this agreement. and it is a standalone one-year contract term for $25,000 plus tax. For planning purposes is both continued for three years in the combined estimate value to be about $225,000 excluding taxes. Those amounts are all inclusive under the agreement, the drone hardware, software, remote piloting program, air traffic tools or training, the mission reporting, the vendor support are all wrapped into the annual DFR cost. The trailer package includes the camera, the camera mask, the PTZ, and the 360-degree camera, blue light, and audio talk down. Funding comes from existing appropriations, projected salary, and operational savings. So we expect about $619,000, and we're using those funds that we're not going to be using to pay for this cost going forward. Alternative considerations. We continually evaluate other public safety investments such as staffing, training, and community-based strategies, lighting, environmental design, et cetera. The drone trailer are not substitutes for those efforts. They are tools that help the staff that we already have so that they can respond more safely and effectively. Because programs are funded from existing savings, evaluations will be done annually. and we can discontinue by providing timely non-renewal under the agreement. The city keeps the flexibility shift of resources if these tools do not provide sufficient value compared to our other investments. Next, let's see here. Emergency response versus general patrols and surveillance. Policy 612 again and staff report are very clear on this point. 612 allows drone use to enhance the mission when other tools are not available or less effective. And it identifies emergency training, pre-planning, and disaster deployments as appropriate use. Policy 612.6 expressly prohibits the use of USA drones, video system, or random surveillance for harassment or intimidation for discrimination or for personal business and prohibits weaponizing the drone. The staff report likewise states that these tactics or these technologies will be used only for legitimate law enforcement and public safety purposes and will not be used for generated or generalized or indiscriminate surveillance. So this is not a roaming patrol drone. We're trying it as we are flying it and using it as defined and mission specific uses. Restrictions around homes, backyards, parks, and gathering events. Policy 612.3 addresses this directly. Absent a warrant or stringent circumstances, operators and observers will not intentionally record or transmit images of any location where a person would have reasonable expectation of privacy or for example a residence yard or enclosed areas the policy requires reasonable precautions to avoid even inadvertently recording such areas including turning turning or deactivating the camera when when it's appropriate policy 612.5.3 also requires that the pilot pilot keep the camera focused only in the areas necessary for the mission So yes, we may use the drone at parks, events, public spaces when there is a defined public safety need, but we are not authorized to hover over backyards or record inside residents or curtilage without a warrant or emergency. And we will not use the drone to monitor lawful First Amendment protected activity or target people based on race, religion, or protected circumstances or characteristics. Next, retention and how long video will be kept. Policy 612.7 states our drone must be retained in accordance with our established records retention schedule. And for Marina, that drone policy is the 30-day purge policy for routine drone footage, unless the footage is being held as evidence in a criminal case and specific to a legal purpose. So in practice, that means that evidentiary video automatically is purged. Non-evidentiary video is purged after 30 days unless it's needed in a case. Who has access to the footage and data? Policy 612, again, requires that the program coordinator, which we have assigned and reports directly to me, implements protocols that the data intended for the use is evidence as, let me start over here. requires that a program coordinator to implement protocols so that the data intended for use as evidence is accessed, stored, and retrieved in ways that preserves integrity and chain of custody, including electronic trails and time stamping where appropriate. The staff report states, again, that you have that we submit it. that both programs are governed by the existing technology use, privacy access controls, auditing, evidence retention, and records management policies. That means only authorized law enforcement personnel with a legitimate public safety purpose can access the drone data and those actions are subject to audit under our policies. And I'll add that our policies are, we have a portal on our website that you can click on 24-7 and it will give you all of our information from our ALPRs and also will show how it's used. All right, sharing with outside agencies, including federal agencies. This is where SB 34 and SB 54 are mentioned. Our current configuration does not share flock data with federal agencies or out of state agencies and any sharing is subject to the California law. SB 34, which deals with ALPR requires agencies using the ALPR to adopt and use language and privacy policies to control access and use that when sharing and considering sharing of ALPR information. SB 54 also is the California Values Act limits who we can share that information with. which gets in again to making sure that our program and any data sharing practices must not just comply with our local policies, but also with state policies as it relates to sharing of information with immigration. Number nine, auditing and detecting misuse. Again, policy 612 requires that the drone program coordinator develop protocols to fully document the mission, maintain maintenance and inspection of records, ensure retention and purge those records per policy and monitor the program and provide periodic reports to the chief, which I received at least once a month is an audit trail. Policy 612.5.3 requires that each pilot document, the mission, the log, the included flight, the time, the mission type and the objective and the approving supervisor. In addition, we are also reviewing this activity daily through a public transparency portal. And also we conduct internal review at least every 30 days for an audit to confirm that these policies are followed and that no one else is accessing our system. And number 10, alternatives and flexibility. So finally, the alternative to long-term implications. This is one tool and a broader strategy. We're not proposing to replace officers or community programs with drones. We are proposing to add a tightly regulated policy-bound aerial capability that we can use for officers to assist them to make their job safer and to provide better resources for our community. These agreements are structured with clear annual costs funded from existing savings, evaluated every year for operational need and effectiveness, and they may be discontinued simply by not renewing. The drone program is bound by a written policy 612. Our records are in evidence rules. aligned with California laws, SB 34 and SB 54. If council determines over time that this program does not believe or it's appropriate, we always have the option of coming back and revisit it. And I think I've answered all 10. If I didn't, I'll answer any questions that you have.

Chief. Thank you for that thorough response. I think it was really helpful that Nolan gave this to us in writing so we can see his questions in writing and give you some time. Sure. Got what I was going to ask on top of that. so it'll come back to me i hope but i'll make the motion that we we can discuss it more but just get going with this make the motion that we adopt the resolution authorized city manager to execute agreements with the flock safety for the deployment of the drone first responder program and mobile security trailer program subject to approval as to form by the city attorney is there a second a second some discussion council member mccarthy

Thank you, Mayor. I think first, as a courtesy, I would, as a gentleman that sat here for six hours, just would like to ask if we can reopen public comment. If he has something he'd like to say, he may not, but I'd like to reopen public comment for a two-minute comment.

Any objection? I object.

I'm okay with it, but of course we opened it up for everybody then. It has to be opened up for everybody.

That's what I said.

Yes, you said two minutes. OK, will open up public comment for everybody up to two minutes. Would you like to speak Nolan? So we'll go to people present first and we'll go online.

Thank you again for addressing the questions that I had posed at the beginning of the meeting. I just wanted to go into a little bit of detail about the other things that I provided for you. The first three-page report is a summary report written by John Gaines, a security analyst that did an independent review of FLOX hardware and security features and security flaws with that hardware. And then the second report, while it does contain biased language, it does provide information that proves that flock employees were unauthorized and accessing flocks cameras in other jurisdictions. And I have currently have a. records request in with the city to find out what the past and current user logs, access logs have been for the cameras that have been installed in the city so far. And that's it.

All right. Thank you. We look forward to hearing from you what you find out. Chief, that was my other question, but anyone else online or in the room here that would like to speak to this, please raise your hand. Let's go to Tommy Bollea. Welcome back, Tommy.

Yeah, I think this drone thing is pretty cool. I mean, but Marina's a windy town, so if your flight time is normally 20 minutes and you have a crosswind and you're trying to get to the objective or a location, I mean, that can be compromised. We have a lot of fog. I mean, I haven't but i mean if it's a tool that the police needs i mean i mean i'm i'm all in for it but if that thing hits a power line then it crashes and hits somebody you know you got to be you got to think about that too but you know i guess this thing is pre-programmed so you could just press a button and say hey go to this park and it'll fly to that park say whatever part or whatever and it'll get there do what it needs to do on as far as surveillance but it's got to remember it's got to fly back or go to this trailer maybe it's in a strategic location so yeah and then they can give the upper hand to the police and they can make a quick you know decision in in seconds where um somebody's driving away or there was a shooting or whatever so it can be a Very useful tool, but I'm sure it's automated. It keeps track of its battery. You know, it's only got so much flight time. It's got to go out there, do the recon, confirm, knock, you know, whatever, and fly back. I mean, if it's a tool, it's a tool. I mean, we're in the 21st century. We better take advantage of it. I mean, sounds like just a piece of tool that the police department could use.

but there's two sides to every story i guess thank you thank you tommy let's go to carrie hansen welcome back carrie thanks for being patient all night yeah of course again i just want to disclose that i do work for flock safety um i'm also you know a person within communities that use these technologies um do want to say as far as bugs vulnerabilities external um you know independent researchers looking into these um flock looks into all of these um they ask that these people you know disclose it to them if they are real vulnerabilities um there are white papers and blog discussion posts all over our website as far as um disproving many of these and how a lot of the hardware that has been described as having vulnerabilities was, you know, not directly taken from the flock lineup, meaning, you know, flock software not installed. So you're essentially taking, you know, raw hardware that, you know, doesn't have the security features of what we would actually be providing. And in no instance have we ever like lost PPI, like, you know, personal identifiable information, customer data, anything like that. All of that has been misinformation. And so as far as Flock and all of the technologies that we do offer, I definitely recommend looking at some other pieces of information, seeing what's out there, seeing what we've done to combat some of this misinformation. And then just a short comment on these drones. They are such a huge value to the community. We're talking about having eyes on a level one priority 911 call at the time within minutes, whereby many people, the police would not be able to be there for several minutes. There was another community member that mentioned, we're getting these calls and the police aren't there in time to catch the people. It's like, this is the technology that allows for that.

All right, thank you very much, Carrie. Chief, let's go to Council Member Biala.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I want to clarify that this was a consent agenda item that was pulled. I want to just clarify that a member of the public does not get to pull agenda items, correct? That's correct. Okay. So that somebody had mentioned that and it's not true. Somebody up here pulled it. The other thing I want to ask, Chief, Are all the things that you just relayed to us in 10 minutes, are they all things that could be found in our policy? yes absolutely uh policy 612. so in general we we respond to public comments by referring them to the person who would know the best the most about it and i i presume that you have talked to our city attorney and our city manager and we could refer a person to the policy So that I'm saying that we pulled it and he has just reiterated in 10 minutes what we could have done in our reading of our own policy. So I'm just making a statement. Thank you.

Yeah, it's rare that we get something as organized in writing. And it takes a long time to do this and make all these copies to provide us. So I think when a resident goes the extra mile to bring something to our attention, it's respectful for us to go the extra mile to listen. and and evaluate the information we just this is unique i don't know if we've ever gotten something this well put together maybe we have it's very rare so it was worth the time i learned more because of it uh chief the other question i couldn't remember that i wanted to ask is did you have time to look through the rest of this paperwork and did you see anything that alarms you that may be pointing out a weakness that the city of marina has

I've read through all of it. I went back to my office and scanned it just so I could have it on my laptop as well. And there was nothing in there that concerned me at all. Everything that I address, everything that's in our policy, everything that we state that we're going to do in our staff report covers everything.

Okay. The most concerning to me was that it says in here that flock sales employees had access to footage and they were using it in unauthorized ways.

Anyone can say anything. I can't put value on that.

So does flock sales employees or other flock employees have access to the City of Marina's footage?

We have a representative from every vendor that we have that's an administrator for that machine that we enter that relationship with. So there would be someone, whoever our representative is, that would have access to it. But again, we view our logs. I view it with my coordinator, who is Scott. We go over it monthly. That's our audit. And then on our portal, it's posted every day, every day it updates. So anyone can go on and look at how many flights we had and how we purged our data and what our policy is. That's transparent. So if we see something that's unusual, either in our audit or more numbers, and we know we haven't had any flights, then that's a flag for us.

Okay. A lot of this concern was footage in gymnasia where children are doing exercises that doesn't relate to what we're doing not at all not nothing at all now when we get the aquatic center going are we going to have any reason to have camera footage that would be flock camera footage with inside the aquatic center sports center

no we have a separate we've hired a separate firm called client first that's working with our architects to look at all that and absolutely we will not we'll be on top of everything like that but at the same time we will have have appropriate um security and cameras in the building um to keep an eye on everything but um but no this client first is we'll make sure nothing stuff nothing like that happens

When I worked for nine years in a federal facility on Fort Ord, we had cameras everywhere. My assisted living where my mom lives, they have cameras everywhere. So I guess it's fairly common. And Nolan, you have to talk to me afterwards because we can't go back and forth with more public comment. Maybe have more public comment. Or you don't. I suggest that you make an appointment with Randy to have more give and take than you can do here. This is a very awkward – it's very awkward for back and forth. But I think the two of you would be really great if you could talk because you put a lot of time on this, so it's not just a –

conspiracy theorist you know you put a lot of time into this okay so there's a motion on the floor uh councilmember McCarthy you have more yeah it's the brief comment I mean obviously this issue is very controversial controversial you know this article what the flock from a couple weeks ago made the minority county weekly um I also had six hours to review the police A manual while we're waiting here, going through the other items and so I do see some pieces where I feel like the language could be tightened a little bit and I'm happy to share those maybe offline. But more importantly, I want to encourage the public. No, and then maybe review that and offer constructive feedback to the police department. You know, if the police department agrees, then maybe it's too easy. If they don't, then maybe you can forward it to the city council and have a look at it also. But. I don't want to do all your homework for you, but one example is it says that these will be used in circumstances where it's more cost. Well, it's always going to be more cost effective because guess what? Police officers are expensive, right? So some of that language is just kind of a little bit too feel good for me. I'd like to see it a little bit more objective. But as I've always said, I'm a huge fan of a lot of these technology mechanisms that really help solve crime. So I'll leave it at that. Thanks, Jared.

All right. Let's go to a vote. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. All opposed, please say no. OK. Thank you, everyone. Thank you, Chief, for all the work you did to get the staff report put together with your crew, also to respond from the family. And so we are adjourned. Good night, everybody.