City Council - Regular Meeting

Hi, good evening everyone. Just want to call the meeting to order for the Auxar City Council for Tuesday, December 2nd, 2025. Madame Clerk, may we have the roll call and posting of of the agenda, please? Uh, Councilwoman Basila, here. Council member Palo here. Councilwoman Bettis here. Councilwoman Rodriguez present. Councilman Star here. Mayor Promteran here. Mayor MacArthur here. The agenda for this meeting was posted in the kiosk at city hall, the Ox Public Library, the city administrative offices, and on the city's website on Thursday, November 20th. Thank you.

Thank you. Prior to close session, we will take public comment on the close session agenda. Can the city attorney please provide a statement prior to close session? Thank you, mayor. City council will recess to a close session pursuant to government code section 54956.9 subdivision D1 to confer with its attorneys. The matters being discussed are Thompson versus City of Oxnard, Schwabau versus City of Oxnard, and Alberan versus City of Oxnard. Thank you, city attorney. Madam clerk, do we have any speakers for public comment session? Excuse me. Uh, mayor and council members, we do not have any public speakers in person or virtually for close session. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Clerk. The city council will now recess to a close session and at 5:00 p.m. we will begin with an appointment item followed by our regular council meeting. Thank you.

Good evening everyone. Uh, city council just emerged from close session. I will ask Mr. Fischer, our city attorney, for any announcements to make. Thank you, mayor. There are no reportable actions out of close session this evening.

Thank you, Mr. Fischer. We will next move to uh the appointment item. This is D1 on your agenda. This is the fire and police departments presenting. It's the public safety workshop both from the police department and from the fire department. the recommendations that the city council receive and file an update report from police chief Jason Bonitz and fire chief Hamilton concerning information related to functions priorities challenges and anticipated future needs. Thanks, Chief Hamilton. We'll we'll uh we'll start with you. Thank you.

Uh good evening, Mayor, Mayor Prom, members of council. Appreciate the time tonight. Um, and Diego, when you get a minute, if you pull up the slides. Um, and so before I start, um, Chief Benise and myself spoke earlier today. We were hoping that we could maybe save questions till the end. Um, I know we're we're a little bit behind time and so I won't go through the entire presentation. Um, I think it was about a 40minut um, measure M video. Uh but it um I'll touch on the sort of the high points um and allow uh Chief Bonitz to to go through his slide deck and then we can answer questions if that's okay. Um and so I'd just like to start by uh acknowledging the the excellent relationship that Oxnard Fire and Police Department share and uh myself and Chief Bonitas. uh I feel very grateful to have uh such a good partner in Chief Bonas and I think our departments work really really closely together and work have a great operational relationship. So with that being said, let me jump into into this. Um so that's just a very uh a basic breakdown of our um of our organizational chart you can see there and broken down a little bit further you can sort of see the the station operations. That's sort of more the exciting stuff, I guess, with the lights and sirens. Uh, for a a medium-sized department, we do a phenomenal job in in those various disciplines other than just EMS and fire. And um and I think um council should be very proud of that. And you can see there um with our administrative services, uh fire prevention, our Kooper program, and then obviously our emergency manager, our emergency management division. Um very quickly um how we serve the community you can see there uh primarily it's public safety but we also do provide some economic benefits. Um we uh

um sort of um help with community fostering good community bonds and then the community engagement and education piece is something that we've been uh working very hard on particularly um through our smoke detector programs and workforce development programs that we've been doing. So, one of the things I spent some time on the video on is our ISO rating. Um, so this is the insurance service office rating. Um, and so as you can see there, it's um the rating is reflected in that scoring matrix right there where it's communications which is done by the Ventura County Fire Department um fire department operations and then finally the water supply. And so um I wanted to just highlight that as uh our public works department does a phenomenal job in um in our water system and we always score very competitively in that area. So essentially the our our current ISO rating is um class 2 um which is an excellent rating. Uh we have we are close to a class one. We're sort of a high B+ if you will. I think we scored somewhere in the 88% range. Uh getting above 90 would be us would give us a class one rating. Um so we are very close but even as a class two um we uh we are considered uh exceptional in capability and effective emergency response. Um there some of the benefits um provided by having that um that class um or the ISO rating class too. And obviously our our our hope in in the next uh evaluation process we'd become a class one department. Uh so just to touch on our um our course for service. Um this is sort of where where we get uh where we do get busy. Um and so you can see there the um uh the red line there is calls for service. So

that's someone calling 911 to report an emergency. Um the unit responses is how many units responded to those emergency calls for service. So or emergency responses. So as an example uh the the Suniss fire that we had in March of last year that was one emergency response that involved over 50 units responding to that. So just to give you a little bit of context to those numbers. Um one of the other things that we touched on so we have an an ISO class 2 rating. One of the other ways that we are measured in terms of our effectiveness as a fire department is this National Fire Protection Association or NFPA standard um 1710 which is um it's called an assembly standard. How quickly we can get uh personnel on scene of an incident. Uh so they have two standards there four people in four minutes or a full 15 people in 8 minutes. Um this is a standard that we um the one thing about this standard that we can control is our is the amount of time it takes us to get out the door. And so you can see there those dotted red and green lines. Um they're they're our time standards for leaving the station. So we get 60 minutes on an on an EMS call and excuse me 60 seconds on an EMS call, 80 seconds on a structure fire response. we get an extra 20 seconds to dawn that that equipment or our personal protective equipment. And you can see that that yellow line along the bottom shows that we are bow below both that green and that red line. And you can see our average travel time. Um we've been able to maintain that and even bring it down a little bit as we've added a couple of response units uh which has been great. um our 1710 compliance. We had um issues with the numbers uh in 2021 with CO um but ultimately that the NFPA standard says

um that we should be should be meeting that standard at 90% of the time. Um we are not when it comes to four personnel in four minutes. We only have a couple of units that have four personnel on them. So if we had um four personnel on all of our engine companies, you'd see that being a very different compliance. Um we just added a fourth um a fourth body to one of our engines um from the Sakioka development. It took the the compliance just for that engine in that district. It basically doubled their compliance from 30% to 60%. Um because that there was four bodies on that first arriving vehicle. So you can see here we've um we have been slowly improving still way below where we should be um with this standard uh but we have been slowly improving our compliance with the 15 personnel in 8 minutes. Um so just switching gears a little bit to to um our uh the last round of council priorities that we had. So one of those was uh developing a modern disaster preparedness program. Um and I think it was uh just a couple of months ago he's um got an update from Candy Campbell, our emergency manager, but she's been doing some fantastic work in these different areas. Uh working on updating our digital presence. Um working on updates to our emergency planning and certainly uh her and I have been working through updating our EOP as we speak. um uh developing better readiness within the city um as we as we have both planned and unplanned events occurring and then community outreach. Um one of the other one of the other council priorities we had last time was maintaining emergency response times. Um that's something that we have been able to do and we've even lowered our response times when it comes to EMS calls with the addition of of an ext additional paramedic squad. Um so this is actually I guess two council priorities in one um was restore and

increase paramedic squads and then maintaining 911 emergency response times. Something I just wanted to highlight very quickly. It wasn't one of our council priorities but uh we've worked really hard in um main um taking care of the behavioral health need or excuse me the health and safety needs of our personnel. Um so we recently added two emotional support canines. So those handlers when they're on duty at the stations, the dogs live at the stations with them. Um and they've uh they respond to after uh potentially traumatic events and they've even um provided assistance throughout the city as well for city staff. Um we now have two culturally competent clinicians that are on contract uh for our staff um to help keep problems at the lowest level possible. And then finally, we are participating in a number of different uh research studies. And in fact, the the PAS levels in serum study that you can see there in the middle on the uh right there, we are we are just finishing that study today and tomorrow where we're taking the final blood samples u from our folks that participated in that study. Uh, one of the a couple of the other things we wanted to highlight is how the fire department sort of indirectly um has supported other council priorities um in in the previous round of priorities. And so one of those being quality of life. And so we work closely with um some of the other city departments on the homelessness task force. Um working on the um unpermitted food and vendors um and working through that and then doing a lot of public outreach and education particularly as it relates to smoke alarms because that's been a big issue for us. And then the other uh council priority I wanted to touch on also was um investing in staff training and development. We've had uh we have had a great relationship with the Oxnard College. Um we've sort of continued to build on our relationship with the school district. Um and obviously we have our our

workforce development grant um workforce development grant program yearcore and our far explorer program has been around for for many years. Um one of the challenges we had with our council priorities um was implementing a lifeguard program. This is something that we were not able to accomplish. Um it was one of the one of council's priorities. Um you know um identifying funding for the program has been difficult. Um there were significant staffing challenges uh for all lifeguarding agencies coming out of co um some of those challenges continue to exist today. Um but I just just for um just for reference I wanted to put those costs up there. it would be about $1.5 million to establish a program and about $800,000 um as an ongoing cost and that would be for a relatively uh modest program. So looking looking ahead now to the future and over the next few years um so some of the some of the big challenges we see um you know we we have um as as I know exists across the city we have aging infrastructure and so uh we're continuing to work to u modernize and update our fire stations. Um so we have uh a couple of projects that will hopefully be coming before council early in the new year. Um and then we uh almost got caught up in um updating our our big apparatus um which we we sort of got a little bit behind prior to the passage of measure E. Um emergency response um we're going to continue to feel the pressure of trying to maintain response times um as our call volume increases. And so um and that that continues to challenge us. Um and then also how we can best deliver um paramedic services to our city and as I think I mentioned in the video there's there will be changes coming at the

county level in the way ground ambulance services are delivered. Um and we're looking forward to those changes. So um other issues we can see there um training is is um particularly in the sort of in the immediate in the in the short to medium term um we've benefited um phenomenally from federal grant funding. Um it seems like those grant funding dollars are quickly disappearing unfortunately. So that that is going to be a challenge for us to to be able to meet the u meet the needs making sure that that our personnel have the training they need for the risk that um Oxnard presents things like hazardous materials, urban search and rescue and those kinds of disciplines. uh technology is a um an everpresent challenge for us and we could we really need to start updating um some of our systems and then how we how we use the data um and better ways of analyzing the data so we can make better data driven decisions. Um we will continue and need to continue our efforts in emergency management disaster preparedness for our city. Um I think as we've all witnessed over the last few years um the environment uh continues to change at a rapid pace and continues to throw uh some pretty challenging uh events at us um that we need to be able to meet. Uh and then for prevention finally we we um looking uh we're in in the final stages of recruitment for a new fire marshall um and that fire marshall will lead our prevention bureau. Um and we some of the things we we'd like to see is um essentially getting cost neutral where we're allowed under state law um but then also building a comprehensive risk reduction program which we we haven't had for a while. And so, um, one of the other things that I wanted to talk about sort of past these next three years when we're looking at council priorities is we have some we have some big challenges that

are that are going to take longer than than sort of a a threeyear time horizon. Um, so we we continue we're going to continue to need to um update. We have five of our eight stations are in in dire need of of updating and upgrading. Um potentially a new training facility. Um we currently host our training classroom at the old um Oxnard High School building. Um that building is slated for demolition. So um it's obviously we need to be able to train our personnel, but also um it's a part of our ISO rating and those kinds of things where we need to make sure that we have something to replace that. uh once that building is demolished. Um there are some really exciting advances in technology and that um we we really do need to try and get caught up when it comes when it comes to technology. And then looking sort of longer term um the costs of personal protective equipment, costs of communications equipment um these things are all going up um and seem to be going up fairly significantly. Um and then looking at um longerterm planning for emergency response. Um I acknowledge it's expensive. It's a big investment to add additional um responders. Um but the reality is we we are going to need to look at adding more responders into the future. Um and maybe look at the the calls that we do respond to. Um it's certainly not in the not in the fire service ethos to if someone calls 911, we're going to go. Um there's a old saying about no call being too small. Um and so it would be it would be a change if there was calls that we decided we weren't going to respond to. So um but we may yet have to reach that fork in the road. Um because we um that's one of the things that we I think need to consider and one of one of the um one of the ways we're going to look at this when we talk about making data driven

decisions is do a a standards of cover study. So looking at where our resources are and then how they're spaced out, but also looking at the workload of each of those resources. So the private ambulance industry uses this all the time, a unit hour utilization. Um for them, it's more a measure of profitability. And so um you know the the the higher they can get that number, the more profitable that unit is. Um we're looking at more more through the lens of workload. Um, and what is how much is too much work uh for our personnel, particularly if they're working uh you know, they work a minimum of a 24-hour shift um and can work up to 5 days straight. So, what does that look like in terms of workload? So, um that's something we're going to look to do to to um uh start coming bringing in some metrics about when it is the right time to start adding resources. So, hopefully that'll help inform this sort of longer term discussion. So, um, and I think with that, um, the last thing I'll add is here is our commitment to to to all of you and the residents of Oxnard, um, primarily to protect life, property, and the environment, continue to build a resilient community um, and working on developing a strong and diverse public safety workforce and then um, really looking ahead to what the challenges that are coming at us and how we can best prepare for those today. So, with that, maybe I shouldn't get to the question slide just yet because I'll let the police chief come and say a few words.

Thank you.

Good evening, Mayor and Council. I'm Jason Bonitas, the uh police chief. And Diego, if you wouldn't mind u going to our slide deck. Um, as the fire chief had mentioned, uh, we have a very strong relationship between the with between PD and fire and, um, I appreciate that as we mentioned in our video, uh, which the police department's video, we had a 44minute video. So, I'm going to condense, uh, what I'm saying, uh, considerably. So, I won't be diving into the line item uh, portions of this presentation, which are available on the video. I can be I'd rather be make myself available for questions for that. But as we had mentioned, purpose of this video is to actually serve as more of a backdrop for your future priority setting for the city council. So largely speaking, um the Oxnard Police Department, we are a medium-sized police department. So where, you know, as we've heard that Oxnard is about the 22nd largest city in California, you can figure that we're about proportional uh to that in terms of our size. There are some police departments that are actually slightly uh disproportionately large and some are small number are disproportionately small. Um for example, if you go to cities like Pasadena, Anaheim, u San Monica, they generally have a higher ratio of officers per 10,000. Now, that ratio is currently something that has been set by a standard. It's a it's a known standard. It's a longtime standard set. The Department of Justice reports on this. And so West Coast cities uh between populations of 100,000 and 2499 have an average uh population of officers per thousand at 1.22 and that is that is where Oxnard is. Um that is with our authorized complement of 242 officers that we have now. We were at a height of 254 officers between the year 2011 and 2015 but had to scale back uh during those years.

We are about 36% of the general fund. And I think the natural question that comes with that is where does that compare to other cities? And I looked at about 13 other cities and we're right about at the average. This is a quick uh view of our structure. Um, we have three bureaus in our department. And I will say that each bureau is overseen by an assistant chief. And I cannot uh forget to point out that with me here are two assistant chiefs as well as two of our commanders. And we do have fire assistant chief as well as some battalion chiefs that are here as well. But this is our organizational structure and how we are broken down. This is um something we've said in a number of venues. These are our basic functions. These are the things that you can refer back to as what is it that we do if you were to boil it down to the most the simplest seven or eight points and this is this is it. These are our department priorities that we state. Um it's kind of a mantra for us. We uh go to our workforce every year. We talk about each of these three community safety, community engagement as well as organizational excellence. That's more of an internal uh priority that we have as far as running the organization. Uh but we talk about these every year. We u go back to all of our small units uh and talk about um what it is that we do and what our bottom line is and what things we want to prioritize. But uh these are it one of the council um the two priorities that relate specifically to the police department that were set in this uh priority group include uh maintain 911 emergency response times as well as restore the neighborhood policing team. I'll speak a little bit about these as we go further into the presentation. Um, just pointing out that um, number one, our goal is to generally arrive to the highest priority emergencies in 5 minutes or less, as well as talk about our neighborhood policing team, which for literally my entire career has been

a more or less a flagship uh, effort or program that our department has fielded with our beat coordinators um, that you may very well be familiar with. Just some general these are the this is the widgets slide where we just kind of show kind of the a number of things that our officers and staff uh issue or produce in terms of work product or face in terms of workload demand. I'll talk a little bit about some of these in the presentation as well. So looking at progress things that we have done well this as I as we go through this uh presentation we're going to talk about some of the things that we've been successful at some things that we are either challenged with or struggling at and then we'll talk about moving forward but uh responses to emergency uh response to emergency calls for service we have consistently maintained that sub fiveminute goal um during this period of time I went back uh during a six-year period to show you that trend 2022 was especially difficult. We had a as I as you'll see further into the presentation, we had a large number of vacancies back then that that drove this and a lot of this is based on officer availability and sometimes that could be the number of officers working and when you have more vacancies that becomes a factor. So I'll I'll speak a little bit more to that later. Over the past few years, we've done some we've managed some progress in a number of areas uh in upping our game in terms of some of the the basic functions that we do. information management. Um we're currently um on approaching I would say we're on the maybe the five or 10 yard line to moving to a new radio communications infrastructure. We've been in front of the council over the years a number of times talking to you about how challenging that has actually been to a degree where it's unsafe for our our our officers and staff. Um use of uncrrewed aerial systems. We've been in this game now for over six years. And we've up at the time of this report, we

had well over 700 flights where we were responding in some way, shape, or form to some type of public safety problem. And believe it or not, it was not just police calls, but we were even going to fire calls like the Suniss plant fire. We actually deployed our drones to that to assist. So that is actually something that we are looking at um moving forward. We um it was actually a year ago today, I believe we were at a council meeting, the council approved our drone first responder effort, which uh we currently are are uh we have three operating uh uh drones uh that are responding to calls. We're further fine-tuning that program, but we're one of the very few in the country that are actually doing this right now. We're the first in this region. Um, I would say we're probably within about maybe 60 to 70 agencies that are in our country that are doing this. This is a new portion of policing. Um, less than lethal equipment. We've moved towards uh improving that inventory. We're now moving to uh 40 millimeter rounds versus the um the wind sock the the bean bag shotguns. We are looking at and you'll see this in in two weeks at a future council item to uh upgrading our less than lethal with the taser 10 which is a a more dramatically improved product from what our officers are currently carrying. Body war cameras are part of that. We've managed a very successful deployment with that and as such uh that is a a very big tool that also it it uh it beha it changes behaviors and it also holds accountable on both sides of the camera. Um our communication strategies uh you may have seen our recently updated website. Uh we may have seen some of the podcasts that we've been putting out trying to keep our community informed. Uh we've actually tried to increase our outreach and to the Spanish speaking community. Um, and we've really up the game there. Um, and as well as providing the

community with uh critical information related to the things that we do, especially when it involves a critical incident. Now, looking at crime, this is the uh the 10-year picture. Um, one thing to note is we've been on a declining trend. We're kind of flattened out now. The difference, the delta between over the past few years is not huge. But you look at the past two years on this chart, they're on a different reporting system. Those are two years where we went from the uh the uh uniform crime reporting standard that had been in place for decades to the national incidentbased reporting system which is a whole different set of statistic keeping. And so I' I've spoken to that in a in past presentations, but it's basically the prior reporting was an apple. This is an orange. And so this graph here is our correlation of those offenses and we've kind of tried to match them to what it would look like if we were still on the UCR um uh crime reporting system. Taking a step back, this is the longer term picture. This is a 34year picture of crime in Oxford reported crime. You can kind of see where we're at. Um you can see how much crime has trended down. Obviously, this is a s cyclical thing and so you can see where we are now and we've been in amongst our lowest years of overall reported crime. We've seen declines over the past couple years in both homicides and and traffic collision fatalities. Both of them have been significant issues in our city. I believe 2024 was one of the lowest years we've had on record for the past several years. Um to give you some perspective on terms of homicides, if you go back about 20 years, it would not be unusual for us to have over 20 in a year. So this just kind of gives you a little bit of perspective as to what what it looks like. Challenges. Uh this slide is an entire conversation on itself. Um this has been

one of the more challenging things that uh uh municipal police departments uh have had to um navigate through u this year um with likely to continue into future years. Um that's a whole other challenge that has diverted a lot of our our energy our our resources uh towards that issue. Now, service volume. This is just provides the council and the public with an idea of how many calls for service that we uh encounter during a given year. So, it's about 118,000 calls for service per year if you to look back at this particular snapshot. So, these are all calls of priority one plus being the highest emergency calls down to priority 7, which are considered to be our lowest priority calls. In the previous slide, I talked about five minute response times or lower. So, we've managed to hold that line, but I wanted to make sure that the council and the public also see the other side, the other priorities of calls, the lower priorities of calls. These are for calls of things like loud music disturbing, a theft that occurred earlier, um those types of things, crimes or reports of of uh property crimes with no suspect information, non-injury accidents. So, these are the response times that we struggle with. These are the ones that that police departments catch the complaints from the residents on. Why did it take uh an hour to get to the loud music call that I was calling on my block? That type of thing. So, this is a a challenge for us. Calls involving the unhoused. In previous conversations, we've talked about how this has become a leading call type in our department. So last year it was almost 10% of our overall call volume was related to calls related to the unhoused. That number that you see there is based upon whenever a person whenever a call comes in our dispatchers

if we immediately are told that the unhoused are involved we will we will give that particular call a code like all other call types to note that that is that type of call. Now, there are some calls where the officers go to and then they learn as they're on the call that this is related to the unhoused, they will modify that CAD code and they will that give you so it gives us a better number of of we wanted to know what percentage of those 117,000 calls that we go to are related to the unhoused. And it is a significant number over 11 almost over 11,000 last year and with that come encampments. These are the 311 numbers for the encampments. As you can see, uh they have trended upward um on 311. And I think part of it is the success of the 311 program has actually become more uh readily available to people. So they're more likely to report. Um but these encampments are they are complicated uh challenges. And so you look at last year how much money it took to address two large encampments in our city. one out by Fifth and Harbor, one down by uh near the dead end of Perkins that costs millions of dollars to to evade. And these are it's not just simply officers responding to these. And I also want to point out that, you know, our first approach in dealing with the unhoused is not enforcement. It is trying to get them out of this situation, recognizing their situation is not a crime, and getting them into services that can help change their lives. So with these encampments, we face uh multi-jurisdictional issues. For example, if it's in the river bottom or if it's out by the beach, there may be other entities. There's private property, there may be railroad property, there may be other things that require coastal commission action for us to actually take an abatement. So it's not it's not just a very easy thing where we can just show up and and and take the encampment down. It also does take considerable resources from our

public works department. Uh I believe uh public works director is here also. But we do have a lot there's a lot of material and a lot of things that go with that. Injury traffic collisions. I went back uh to 2015. This is the 10-year picture. Looking back further into this number, these are this is fairly consistent over uh probably even 10 to 15 years before that about a thousand per year injury collisions. And as that as such, as of 2022, the Office of Transportation Safety uh has ranked Oxnard as being number three out of 61 cities in California of comparable size in terms of injury traffic collisions. So this is where you don't want to be number one. But historically, we are looking at being number one, number three, number four. We're generally in the top five or six cities in that category. Now granted, there are um you know uh I believe close to 400 cities in California, but the ones we're looking at here, we're number three in our category. So this is an issue. Um this is something that we uh spend a lot of time on. These injury accidents also need to be investigated as well. So, which takes us to DUIs and in the same um r ranking category, Oxnard was also number three out of 61 cities in terms of DUI related collisions. So, that's not good. U but these are the numbers that you see over uh the past several years. Um generally 2020 in a lot of respects was uh kind of an outlier. We did see a decline over these past years, but they've been fairly consistent. Each year we're in the ballpark of of these numbers and that this again is a serious um uh ch public safety challenge. We do our best. We come to the council with grant requests from the California Office of Transportation Safety to fund checkpoints to fund DUI enforcement or specialized traffic enforcement designed

to address this issue. But it is it is a very um uh challenging matter. In past years, we've spoken to all the number of guns. You've seen videos of me presenting officers encountering people who are armed. Um, this is just a very quick snapshot of the number of firearms arrests and the number of firearms that are seized. The numbers are actually different because that we may find a gun, a suspect may throw a gun. We may not actually tie the gun to a person. So, there may not be a charge associated with it or a person could be arrested and they could have multiple weapons. So, but as you see this this number is something I can tell you that 32 years ago when I first started this job, this was not anything anything to the extent that it is now. It is it is it is a virtually every day or near every day instance where our officers are contacting somebody that has a firearm. Narcotics, I won't go into all the the numbers here, but what I can tell you is that that is very significant. The big one that you see here are fentinyl and methamphetamine as being some of the leading um illicit drugs that that are out on our streets and we're doing our best. This if you go back to the slide later and you look at this gives you an idea of what our department has seized over these past six years. And so one thing in mind like a number of fentinyl for example 15,782 grams of fentinyl I think you've heard from some other experts about how a very tiny amount can be fatal. This is a lot. This is a lot to deal with. Um, which takes us to overdoses. You've seen the videos from uh us that we presented in our annual updates to council. Um, very uh very resource inensive uh call. Uh we get a lot of them, a lot of them. 535 uh in 2024. Now, this is bear in mind this is police rolling out. This is the fire department. This is EMS rolling out

on these types of calls. Um you can see the fatality rate here um that has declined over the past years but part of that is also uh given some attribute to the more greater availability of Narcan Nlloxxone which is now something that more and more people have. So they're actually able to save more people uh as they're overdosing. So but to give you an idea how many Nlloxxone applications our department uses these are the numbers. They've gone down last last year, but but you think 84 times our officers were using this on somebody to revive them because they had overdosed. But you look at the deaths here, very very significant. So 53 out of 61 deaths, overdose overdose deaths in our city were attributed to opioids. And when you look at this from another perspective, this is the lethality trend here is that you see the bars in black are the fatalss that are are from overdoses. And you can see that they dwarf the uh combined the sum total of homicides and traffic collisions. So if you look at 2024, 13 total homicide and traffic fatalities, 61. So you're looking at about four times more deaths that year. Four. So, four times, four-fold um of people that are dying. And as I've said to the council and the public before, this no no group, no socioeconomic group is actually safe or exempt in this. And the people that are passing away, they are they are somebody's family members, they're somebody's parent, somebody's child, somebody's brother or sister. Now, staffing, I I I alluded to that earlier. Um this number here shows u our patrol staffing numbers. Every six months our officers pick shifts and they pick uh that is our primary first responder element in our department. You

can see over recent years you look at 2022 when we only had 74 and then the following six months period 73 officers selecting shifts. That's because we had vacancies. And so, uh, we have to aortion our workforce in a way that we can still get other jobs done, but we also have to recognize that patrol is a core function. So, with that, we made some hard decisions. This goes back to the priority of talking about restoring neighborhood policing. We took members of our neighborhood policing team and we folded them back into patrol for and as it stands today, um, three4s of their days are working in patrol shifts covering. And there's some added benefits there. The drawbacks are we don't give the um we don't have the luxury of having proactive resources that are not responding to calls out out there involved in neighborhood u problem solving crime prevention through environmental design assessments. So they are now handling 911 calls. They're handling all the calls that everyone expects as the base level expectation. So we had to do that. We we uh we made a big move on that last year and you can see the numbers are better. Uh we just had our uh most recent u selection in the past weeks since this video was produced and we have 90 officers selecting patrol. So our intent is actually to start releasing officers back to the neighborhood policing team. The vacancy trend, this is kind of what I was talking about. It comes and goes and generally this time of year, December, we start seeing service retirements. And it's not unusual for us to have over the past couple years anywhere from 9 to 13 service retirements. That is in addition to people that don't make probation or decide to lateral to another agency or have a medical retirement. So these these vacancies, these are positions that are that are there's nobody in that position. And so I have to also point

out that when you talk about this issue um is that there are also officers that are out on injury leave. There are officers that are on military leave, family leave, whatever the leave period is, whatever the reason is. There are additional officers that are not oh also in training that are they are hired, the position is filled, but they are in the academy or they're in field training. and we call it, it's for lack of a better word, non-productive positions because the positions are filled but they're not actually responding to calls. So these are just the baseline numbers. So for example, you look at uh January of of July of 2023 when we went from nine vacancies when we had a handle on it. Next thing you know, we were at 24. We lost a lot of people that year. And um when you add the injured on duty and that other list, that number can easily double. And as such this has been a declining uh trend not just in um California not just in Oxnard thing but industrywide um especially got worse after 2020 events that took place in our nation um because not everybody that applies either. So you you might say hey there's 778 applicants that you had. Why didn't you fill your your ranks? Why do you still have vacancies? Well, generally in this job, you may have heard um uh former mayor prom McDonald say is that maybe a small percentage, maybe 3% of them get hired. There's a reason for that. There are a lot of things that they have to go through before they get hired. And so, we can't just hire 778 people. But what this said is that when you have a number like that, you you're only going to hire a fraction of them. And this gives you an idea that the trend we have. This shows you kind of like what's coming in, who's coming in the door, and how many are going out the door. And this gives you, you always want to have the blue ahead, but you look at 2023, like I said, that's a that's a a big loss, a se net loss of

seven. And so that's it's something that we are always always chasing. Dispatchers are another one. Um that's we currently have five vacancies in our dispatch center right now. Um and if studies have shown that our dispatch center actually handles more calls on its own than that of Ventura County Sheriff and and so there's a significant number to that. Staffing studies have actually prescribed that we should have 31 dispatchers, seven supervisors and a manager. We work with 22 six in one. And so um in those widgets in the widget slide I think you see how many calls we handled in that center like 342,000 calls in a year. Those are phone calls coming in and out of the center. Um, and to make things more challenging is that the hiring time for police officers and dispatchers. I've said this before, I won't I won't beat this one uh to death this evening, but it takes a long time to get them from hiring to the time that they are in service. So, um, these are just some of the other general challenges that we are are facing. Um, you know, um, some aging infrastructure. You've heard public comments about camera systems in in in our city um in certain ports parts of our city. Um supply chain issues for vehicles. Um we've we've talked about this before. Um but other things, for example, booking time at county jail. It it now takes about three hours to book a book an arresty at county jail. This is because of a number of medical evaluation requirements, but it's almost kind of like you book a you book one person, you're done. that's that you're almost out of commission for the rest of the shift. And again, going back to response times, it hinges critically on officer availability. Um, so moving forward, um, employee wellness, these are some things that we really want to focus on and continue to up the game. We've talked a little bit about the, uh, annual check-ins that our

officers do. We've talked more about our peer support team, which is, uh, very valuable resource because we want to keep our officers, uh, in the game. uh facility improvements, having vehicle fleet, that's always something that we have struggled with. There have been years where we've deferred purchases or deferred vehicle acquisitions for patrol vehicles. And when you do that, you start to get behind. And I think about 10 years ago, we were talking about, you know, police vehicles that were breaking down daily, being towed out of our lot, some were catching on fire. Um this is just one of those things that we have to always keep up on. um staffing levels. As you can see here, uh this one does not actually prescribe more officers. Nowhere in this presentation are we asking for more officers. We're saying we need to fill the vacancies that we have first. And when we get to that point, we can consider that. We're not there yet. In the meantime, where we think we get the most support is through our professional staff, through our traffic service assistants, through our community service officers, through that staff that actually help work things that that make it easier for the officers to do their jobs. For example, some professional staff positions that can actually take reports rather than an officer having to take the report. So, the officers stay available, therefore, better response times, greater ability to engage in neighborhood problem solving. this one without going into every single one. Um I think this is a very important slide. Um we can't continue to do things in this industry the way that we have always done. If you go back 30 years for example, there weren't we didn't have cell phones, we didn't have computers, we didn't have all this technology, we didn't have drones. There's a lot more technology out there that is necessary for us to solve cases, to make connections. This job, a lot of it has to do with is information access, information management. These are just some things that we think that are very

valuable to us moving forward because an agency that can't manage its information in solving crime and getting information that we can get to officers in the field, if we're able to do that better, we're able to resolve cases a lot faster and sometimes right there at the time of the call. But these are the things that we see as a challenge. And as Chief Hamilton mentioned in his presentation, technology has a cost to it, but it is also a very very effective uh efficiency um u enhancer for us. It's a force multiplier. So those are all the questions. I wanted to throw all those out there and um just consider those in in future in your future priority setting. Thank you.

Thank you, Chief. Thanks uh Chief Hamilton for both of your very comprehensive presentations. I appreciate it. Do any council members have any questions at this time for either Chief Hamilton or Chief Bonz. Yeah, council. I'm sorry. Go ahead, council one. Mayor Portend. Go ahead. I was just going to say that I see we have some speakers. I'm willing to take the speakers just in the interest of time as well. Okay, we'll do that. Um Mr. uh Ray Blattell and Ray, you'll be followed by Sylvia Robas. And then Alicia Parcell, mayor, Mayor Bartam, council members. Uh, Miss Roas has seated her time to me. Is that okay? Yeah, that's fine. And we also got your written Thank you.

a comment. Thank you.

Thank you. Um, very good presentations. Thank you. Uh, police chief and fire chief. Thank you very much. Very good, informative. um relative to the police department presentation on slide number eight, the presentation indicates there were slightly over 35,000 California vehicle code violations in 2024 consisting of uh parking and traffic violations. I recently submitted a public records request number 25-516 for all civic violations issued within the entire Oxnar city limits for 2025. The city's initial response included the time frame from January 1 to 31 October 2025. There's more promised than um December 4th. Adding all of the citations issued from the city that I got so far, parking and traffic violations included, the total came to 4,750. Using the monthly average of citations issued thus far and extrapolating to the year's end, that comes to almost 5,000 citations. Now, that's a big drop from from 35,000. So why is this? I can think of a couple of things. The one is uh the motorists within Oxnard city limit have dramatically turned over a new leaf and have started driving more carefully in parking more legally and from what I've observed that's highly improbable. Or the OPD has become increasingly lax in their enforcement. This is certainly possible but from 35,000 to 5,000 that's a big drop and I think that's improbable also. and you can draw your own conclusions, but uh maybe I'll do a P for uh all the citations in 2024. Furthermore, OPD has claimed in writing that just under 2200 CBC 2500 in parenthesis N citations which covers the new daylighting parking law have been issued in 2025. In addition, a police

corporal also in writing has claimed he personally has written CBC 2500N citations himself. The funny thing is remember the P I just talked about where I asked for all the CDC violations issued in the city. Uh the response that I got from city was provided in the XLSX format which includes a search function. When I search for 22500 uh parenthesis N citations the tool finds zero nil nada. That's strange. So is the data valid? It's not my data. I'm just reporting what the tool tells me on the staffing slide. The slide indicates 242 sworn officers and an estimated one an estimated 198,733 population as of 1 January of this year. If one considers that 26% of this population is over 65 years of age and under 12 years of age and then recomputee the ratio of officers to the population most likely to use or need the police force, the new ratio is 1.65 65 officers per 10,00 population vice 1.22. I submit this may be a more meaningful or a useful ratio. Uh slide 19. From 2015 to 2018, there was a steady climb in injury collisions. 2024 had the second highest in the past decade. Speeding is certainly a contributor and prevalent on Gonzalez Road. I've complained to OBT before on this. And uh as the chief said, if only 3% of the 778 applicants in 2024 make it to the police force, that would fill the 22 vacancies. I did the math. Uh relative to the uh fire department, here's something that I observed just just last month. An ambulance with an emergency lights and sirens activated turned from Gonzalez onto onto Entrada and stopped at a house at the first block. Then a short time later, a

firetruck ladder also with emergency lights and signs activated after ambulance has already arrived. I was wondering, is there such a thing as the ambulance saying we got this and and you don't need to respond? Was I just wondering if that FD response was necessary? There was no fire. Do they get credit for for this instance? In another incident several months ago, there was an accident at the Oxnard Boulevard intersection to Wagon Wheel. that new uh complex over there. As I drove up, the tow trucks were loading up the damaged vehicles and the multiple police vehicles were there still. Then comes the fire truck. Why? The game is already over. No sense showing up in uniform. I just wondering if they got a credit for a response there. Also, it would seem that the major takeaway from the presentations both is a continuing plea for more resources. You want to rebuild the fire stations. What's wrong with the current you currently have? You don't need a facility designed by Frank Lloyd Wright to do your job. In my opinion, if you have all the necessary and best equipment and technology, personnel, and training, you should be able to provide adequate services from a barn. The bottom line for both fire and police, there is only so much blood that you can squeeze from the taxpayer. So, it would be prudent to use the existing resources, uh, funding, buildings, etc. wisely and as efficiently as possible. There's only so much to go around. Thank you. Thanks Mr. Blattetell and Chief maybe I don't chief Anita or Hamilton after the speakers if you want to address any of the questions and Alicia Purcell. So the presentation on the police department data indicates that 9.4% of

their calls for service last year were due to the the homeless population that we have uh o over 11,000 calls we're talking about. This is not a trivial cost to society. Councilman Star has asked the council to consider enacting an anticamping ordinance which would give the police department leverage to incentivize uh homeless people to accept the services that are readily available or else face a penalty. Doing so would reduce many negative impacts. Let's think about some of the impacts that they have, both financial and uh quality of life issues. Uh the city would never tolerate a business that dumps sewage into the streets. Uh yet the homeless leave their feces in public places for it to eventually wash into the ocean untreated. They leave behind drug needles which endanger other people. Businesses have to clean this filth away before they can open their business for the day. mounds of trash left for others to deal with. They start a lot of fires, a huge cost, including the one in the riverbed which burned near a bridge. If you remember, wasn't that long ago in Los Angeles that um they had to close an interstate for a little while because of a fire under under an overpass that did structural damage. How many other building fires How many other buildings have had fires started by the homeless? Even if they don't start a fire, damaging someone else's property by breaking into the building is not acceptable either. That happens all the time. Businesses have to put up fencing to reduce overnight damage. We have a lot of thefts from people stealing for their drug habits. The millions we spend cleaning out encampments. Uh during the last rain we got the city

parking garage became a homeless camp. um people just trying to live their lives out in society, get accosted by them in public places. This is not a complete list, of course. Um no one would join Councilman Star's request for an anti-amping ordinance to come to council. Instead, he was accused of being things like cruel and heartless. No. What's cruel and heartless is allowing a small number of people, many of whom are voluntarily homeless, impose high societal costs on the rest of us who end up paying the bill. Um, it's cruel and heartless to tell the rest of us that we just need to tolerate this. Um, tough love is an effective technique and people with drug addictions and mental health problems generally are not going to reform themselves. So, we need to use the the leverage that we have by implementing an anticamping ordinance. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Miss Barcel. Uh, Mr. Greg Renan. Thanks, Pastor. Good.

Hey, how is everybody? Um, I have a a little different take on this and so I I hope it comes out okay. Um, public safety is always going to be the biggest part of a budget. Um, and how that money is implemented is part of why we elected you. Um, I can tell you that these things are expensive, but they are very inexpensive if you need them. Uh, I've had have paramedics show up to my house twice in the middle of the night. Once was for me and once was for my father-in-law and that was um both of us probably would have passed away without that. So, I don't know how much, you know, we value that for every resident, but I I think it's important and I think it's important that we do look at things from a perspective of are we spending my money our money wisely? But if you start cherrypicking things, um, it has a very negative and kind of a a a very uh ugly thing that happens. I I'm not speaking well right now. Um, homelessness, drug addiction. Uh you hear so often now that they want police officers to be social workers and then when they're social workers, you want them to get tough. Um this the thing that I'll tell you as a former drug addict, you can't make somebody do something they don't want to do, but the second you quit trying, they will never do it.

So trying to come up with different programs are great. But I'll tell you what the police department wants without even asking. They want people to come alongside and to work with them to help them to make their job easier. You know this, Mayor MacArthur, community policing is all about the community stepping up and us doing what we can. Um, crime rates have gone down not because I think people have gotten better, but because I think we've decriminalized a lot of things. People behave the way they do because they're either allowed to or they don't care. And, you know, it's up to us that we care. So, as a council, I just want to implore you that when it comes to public safety, don't look to save money at the risk of not saving lives. Thank you.

Thank you, Reverend. Madam Clerk, are there any um public speakers online? Um mayor and council members, yes, we have a virtual speaker. Um virtual speaker ending in 1622. Please press star six to unmute and you have three minutes starting now.

Thank you. Uh I appreciate and uh I know we all all do and uh many of us are are praying for our police and fire chiefly chief Benny Dez and Chief Hamilton. And uh thankfully there some of these numbers have gone down like the the murders I know for most of the last several years they had been uh like one a month and any little bit helps you know one life is precious. So, uh, that that has gone down as as good. And, uh, uh, I think generally speaking, uh, although, you know, some of us have had problems with different, uh, uh, votes that the council has made, I think we've appropriately, unlike the defund the police movement, uh, funded the police and fire, uh, uh, rifle. I mean, you got to watch every dollar. you know, there might be ways still to to save that would not hurt the act the uh the purpose of the police and fire, but the they're there really, you know, as ancient wisdom states, they're to prevent crime, but also punish punish evil and praise those who do good. And uh you know, there's a lot that goes into why people commit crime. Fatherlessness has always been for years uh a big reason for that. as uh I believe people like James, the late great James Q. Wilson uh uh uh wrote about um uh and I know we've gotten that James Q. Wilson award before, the police have um but uh I think with the uh the drugs, the ODS being more than the other categories, the driving deaths and the uh murders, I think one way is a spiritual revival would help against that. Uh but also you know what the governments are doing. I know there's some controversy what the feds are doing right now but uh you know they've uh tried to do tariffs. I'm not a tariff guy but they've done tariffs against China specifically on their developing

fentanyl to go through Mexico. We've stopped you know a lot of the the passing illegally at the border in the last few years as government has. And also um uh you know there is the actions down in Venezuela and all that and hopefully have wisdom. We pray for wisdom for them on that. But uh you need to stop it on that end too. Uh that is killing a lot of our people with the the fentanyl and I'm sure meth goes through uh that access through Mexico as well. So um you know uh hopefully that that will continue and uh and also the council in in with wisdom will you know keep giving enough funds for police and fire needs to to help uh keep the city safe because we have not had what the big cities have had a lot of trouble over the years with a rise in crime. So uh thank you.

Thank you for calling in and for your comments. Madam clerk, we'll go to the next virtual caller. Um, mayor and council members, that actually concludes our speakers in person and virtually for um, this appointment item. Thank you. Thank you. Um, Chief Bonita or Chief Hammer, do you want to address any of the questions that were raised here?

Thank you. Uh certainly, Mayor and Council. Um I first just I I do want to actually give uh Pastor Ren some acknowledgement on what he said about, you know, learning to work with us versus trying to tear us down and that makes for a more healthy public safety environment for everybody. Um homelessness is a big deal and we have heard talk about the homeless uh camping ordinance that one speaker had mentioned and you know, I can understand the thinking behind that. Um but that kind of would that's something that in our experience has taken us back to years past where you know taking a strictly um more punitive approach towards this has two two problems. Number one, it it has a very strong tendency to move the problem from one location to the other and then it becomes a cycle of rinse, you know, lather, rinse, repeat where we're just simply dealing with the problem at another location. And to think that they would be incarcerated is not not likely. Um jail space uh is not is a is is very limited. Uh many times these uh persons would just be cited or they would be detained briefly and released right back into our community. So it's just it's it's a complicated issue. It's it's not a one-sizefits-all. It does there is some enforcement that is necessary for this. We have to be very judicious about it. Usually applying uh time, manner, and location restrictions to things versus a general you can't camp here. And I but at the same time I do understand the the issues that the public experiences when they when they experience the things that were described by the speaker. So a complicated problem. Um I did receive a copy this afternoon of a written uh statement that was was read. Um, you know, there's a lot to unpack in this statement and I I don't want to be tickytac about this, but I think that in

this case, uh, to things that just cast a lot of reasonable doubt out there with matters that is of incomplete information or inaccurate information is frankly problematic. And for example, the speaker actually has an open public records request for the citation data which has not been completed yet. Um he was told very clearly that you do not have the complete amount of data but the shot was fired with this. Um the standard of saying that uh changing our standard just by excluding persons under 12 or people over 65 years old that to change the ratio. It's hard to think that we don't that we would discount children who are victims of crimes of abuse um that are involved in whatever unfortunate circumstances take place. I hate to even think that we're discounting that people over 65 don't need the police. They they need the police. We need to count them. They are victims of of abuse, crimes, frauds. They're in traffic accidents just like everybody else. So I I I I can't say I jive with with the u the methodology that was being presented there.

Um injury collisions it you know we do have like there I do I am in agreement with that. It is an issue in our city like I've I've said in my presentation

us asking for more more money and more officers and I I think in my presentation I said we're not asking we weren't asking for any more officers in this presentation. So maybe just watch the presentation again. It might you might see that um hiring uh you know based on the number of applicants. I also said we we don't hire everybody and there's very specific reasons for that. It's 3% is actually kind of a it's generally between 1 and 3%. Um, you know, we're like I mentioned in in the presentation as well, when you look at our general fund proportion of what our police budget is to our general fund, I use the general fund as the core because the other other funds include grant funds and things that the department has sought to provide some relief to the general fund. For example, state state supplemental law enforcement funding or asset forefeiter funding. That stuff provides relief to the general fund. So the PD's general fund proportion is not as great. Um I mentioned we were just at about 36% and when you look at cities in California that are comparable to this, you'll see that that is about the average. It's this isn't an extraordinary number. That narrative continues to be to be pushed out. So, um those are really, you know, I I can say that the comment in the writing about the citations that we have written over, I believe, uh 26,000 uh uh parking citations this year, and that material is still due to the speaker. Um initially, uh that will be provided, but it's it's

um it's not what you heard. So, okay. Thank you. Appreciate it, Chief. um you taking on each of these questions that were raised by the speaker. Thank you, Chief Hamilton.

Uh Mayor, thank you. I think the um to Chief Man's point there there is a bit to unpack um in all of that, but um a couple of comments that I will make is that um you know, I made made mention that core volume is outstripping population growth. Um and maybe I should have provided a little bit more context to that. So in 1995 we ran 8,300 just over 8,300 calls. We had a population of about 150,000. So now in 2024 we ran 22,000 calls 2 and a half times that amount and our population's only gone up by about 30%. So um call volume is outstripping uh population growth. That's going to be an issue we're going to have to have to deal with. Um I can't speak to the individual cases that the speaker mentioned about um arriving on calls. Um uh I can tell you that our response units, they're not looking for work. They're not going out. Oo, we can add another statistic here. If someone calls 911, we respond to the call. It's as simple as that. If it's a medical call, there'll be at a minimum there'll be an engine and an ambulance that will respond. Um all of our personnel sworn to protect the members of this community. That's what we're going to do when we respond to incidents. On lower level incidents, we may say to the ambulance, you can cancel your response. This person clearly isn't going to need to be transported to the hospital. And occasionally the ambulance will do that that same thing for us where it's a low enough level call. However, that they'll take care of the rest of the call. Um, so whether the fire engine was coming back to a traffic collision response, there may have been somebody who originally said they didn't want assistance and now decided that they actually do have some neck pain. That's happened to me more times than I can remember in my career. So, there's a myriad of reasons why that may have occurred.

It's still a single emergency response in that. Um, as for stations, speaker might have been dating himself a little bit. Unfortunately, we can't hire Frank Lloyd Wright. You think he passed away in the 50s, but um but one of the things I will tell you is that uh we hired architectural firms that specialize in fire station design. And when we did the interviews uh for that, the the firm that we hired, we hired um in particular because they they gave the most educated response around um our response time out the door, right? How how how we can design the station so we can most efficiently get to the rigs uh to respond on the call. And so the firm that we hired, one, they were the most experienced. They've designed over 95 stations in California, but also they had the most educated answer to that question. And that's important to me because again that's the one thing that we can control around response times. Um our current fire stations, our personnel take pride in what they do and with those fire stations as best they can. Uh many of those fire stations, our oldest station is over 70 years old. Uh it doesn't meet essential uh building safety standards. Um I can't tell you what it's going to look like after an earthquake occurs. Um it doesn't have any room for expansion. It's full. We can't add any more personnel even if we wanted to. There is a whole host of reasons. We are not the not the highest paid agency um around. We never will be and that's okay. Um but that's not all that that comes with the job of being in the fire service. And so there's something to be said for uh the camaraderie and the aspree core that exists. That's something that we focus on to maintain our personnel. Um but we we are obligated to be able to provide an environment that encourages a diverse workforce. sleeping behind a curtain in a common space does not do that. So, I can I can go on and on about the the reason and the needs for these. Ultimately, these are these are council decisions and council priorities. Um,

and you know, we'll be directed by what the council decides and what's important. So, thank you. I appreciate it, Chief. Thank you. Yeah, we'll go to your com. Go ahead, Mayor Po.

Just if I was the city manager gonna add to that? No. Okay. Just regarding um those particular stations, I made notes of the um from the presentations and uh I was asked I was going to ask if the chief could touch on the proposed relocation of station 4, but he already did. and also the um the u rehabilitation or redoing of stations two and three which uh I just want to point out for the public both serve uh South Oxnard and those residents and are historic um sites. They've been there for I think the chief said over 70 years. At least one of them. I see his head nodding. Yes. And so um they serve a uh a very um important purpose and also a uh part of town that looked different when those stations were originally built. and they have to be modernized to better serve the people they're intended to serve in that part of town and beyond um in 2026 and beyond into the next several decades, not just today. So, I appreciate the chief chief Hamilton touching on that. And the last thing I'll say in regards to both our um public safety chiefs up here is um and I see our public works directors in the back. I've had a number of conversations with members of the public about um the issues of speeding and running red lights and collisions that happen at intersections, sometimes seemingly high frequency at certain intersections. And there could certainly be assessments and there have been assessments on what our intersections are that uh need to be looked at and re-engineered and modernized in in some cases. But what I pose to the public is we could have the most beautifully engineered intersections ever. Yet, if there are still people who choose to run red lights and choose to go over the speed limit or choose to do things that we all

have agreed when we sign the the form to get a driver's license, when they don't do what we are trusting other drivers to do, doesn't matter how well engineered the uh intersection is or how great our response times are, that's where those collisions and those injuries and those deaths are going to happen. And the city manager reminded me people who choose to drive under the influence as well. And so I just want to throw that out there that um we can't have a police officer at every corner. We can't have a firefighters ready to go for every collision that happens and we can't um engineer our our ways out of um people choosing not to follow the rules. Uh where there are things we can address with those issues, we will. But we need to also remember that we all have a stake in this as well as drivers on the road. So anyways, those are my comments. Thank you, mayor, and thank you Chief Hamilton and Chief Bonitas. Thank you, Councilwoman.

I'll keep my comments brief. I just really wanted to thank um both um public safety, our our police department, our fire department for the presentation. Um Chief Hamilton, really wanted to thank you and your staff, Lupe and others. Um Candi, who have been at pretty much every neighborhood council meeting in District 6 on the south end. You know, we held a meeting there around um just disaster preparedness. Um, we did a smoke alarm installation program knowing that South Oxnard has one of the highest home rate fires. And so really getting that information out to the community about what plans they have in place for any kind of disaster I think is really important. Um, I'm a big believer in prevention and community outreach. um and really just inspired by the work um and excited to expand um not just the smoke detector installation program but looking at um also offering a um light installation program in the south end to kind of help bring uh more lighting to the area um with a lot of the concerns that we hear from community. So really wanted to applaud your team for um just the the outreach and just level of of commitment to the community out in the south end.

Thank you, Councilwoman. Any other comments? Yes.

Like to thank the public speakers. I'd like to thank the chief and both chiefs and the fact that this is a presentation, a large presentation. Um health, safety, and welfare are the highest things you can go for as an elected official in my opinion. health, safety, and welfare. None of that is cheap, but a lot of that has to do with your own attitude and your own circumstances and what you're willing to put up with and what you're willing not to put up with. When people disparage public safety, if you read the newspapers, there are opportunities to disparrage some in public safety. But in this community, I don't feel that there's that opportunity. and mostly because the people that are leading these departments are holding their staff accountable and that makes a big difference. The fact about uh running red lights, it never fails. When I come to this council meeting, I make sure that when I'm on H Street and I'm crossing by Gonzalez, I'm not going to jump out when it says green. Somebody's going to run the red light. It happened tonight. I don't expect a cop to get him. I don't have time to take a photograph, but I always think maybe the guy's gonna hit a tree and it'll serve him right. That's a bad attitude. But unfortunately, he could hit a pedestrian or another car and kill an innocent person. The issues about self taking control of yourself is a big deal. If people are going to blast public safety, they need to have accurate information. And I'll be the first one. If you've got accurate information, I'll follow you, back you up, and we'll get to the bottom of it. But if you're going to come up and state falsehoods, I'll be the first one to call you a liar. As far as needing the services, um, I had to call 911. I had a wife that went down, fire showed up, ambulance showed up, outcome was not good. They were there. I don't ever want to have to see that again. But these guys chose the

profession they're in to do that. Public safety is the same thing. When you see a car with lights and sirens going, you have no idea what he's going to see when he stops his car and you have no idea what he's coming from before he went to that call. Um, I feel very fortunate to be a representative for this city and having the public safety people that we do here and feel very fortunate that the residents have supported tax initiatives to help fund this because again, people complain about costs. I don't want to waste money. If I waste my own money, that's my choice. Wasting public money is something I can't do. If people can show that there's waste, abuse, fraud, corruption, bring it on. If you can't, make sure that you're willing to accept the consequences when you're proved to be stating falsehoods. Thank you for the service the public safety does here.

Thank you. Any other comments, Council Member Star? Yeah, if I could start with uh Chief Hamilton, I guess a question and then and then maybe a comment. So, in in the uh pre-recorded presentation, uh you mentioned that mutual aid response has increased significantly in the last few years. I just wanted to kind of get your your sense. Do you think this is a permanent change or do you think or would you expect a reversion back to the mean? just kind of watch your your perspective on that.

Um, so I'm trying to think back to the to to the recording. So mutual aid responses where we are we are going out and assisting sort of other areas of the state and things like that.

Um from from where I sit today, I believe that's going that is not going to change for the foreseeable future and likely increase. The reason I say that is uh it's very difficult to sort of maintain a standing army if you will. Um although Calire is is quite the beast. I think they have 12 or 13,000 employees but they rely very heavily on local government to augment uh the responses to those large large scale incidents. Um I don't see that changing anytime soon. Um but then different things this year, certainly the beginning of this year, we we saw incredibly tragic events, but for our traditional wildland season, which would be around now, it's been very very quiet. Um so it's some of this will be be driven by the weather and I I I guess we're going to see more extreme weather events that will necessitate the more need for personnel. So

Okay. And um uh also in your pre in your pre-recorded presentation, I I think you were a little hard on yourself actually when it came to the NFPA standards where you know we want four firefighters and four minutes and 15 firefighters in 8 minutes. Uh I know we're not real close to meeting it, but uh from at least from what I can research just to kind of give perspective almost no one meets that perspect that that standard. I mean, you look at any big city and I I don't know of any big cities that meet this 90% uh threshold. So, I I just I just wanted to say that I think uh you know, you're performing at a level that that I would expect and I I think that you're providing a lot of value uh to the community even even with a percentage that you're not happy with. Sure. aspire for much more, but what you're doing is uh definitely not lackluster in any way. So, I just want that to be clear.

No, I thank you. I really appreciate that comment. I think um a long-term goal for our city, we should look to um getting to four person engine companies. Um and maybe that's part of a longer term plan. uh because it it does it it does increase how much work we can get done in a short amount of time. Reduces the number of units that we have to ascend on a on a single uh residential fire for example. Um it makes our personnel safer and certainly in the event of a of a critical medical emergency. We've got more hands to go to work. Um so that would be something. But I I would agree with you that the the 1710 standard uh sets the bar very high. Uh I think on a with a city like Oxnard that's going to be that's going to be a hard measure to attain.

Right. Great. Thank you. And I I have some questions for Chief Hamilton. If there's any way that the I'm sorry, Bonitzas, thank you. Uh if there's any way that the slide uh presentation can be brought up on screen, I I'd appreciate Pyre help with the uh conversation a little bit. Diego, could you bring up the slide?

Okay. So, most mostly positive comments. I've got just one small small criticism uh on on slide nine and if that can be brought which shows is that the response time.

Yeah. My my my only criticism of it I mean the numbers are correct. My only my only criticism of it is that we're you're we're truncating the bottoms of the bars. Looks like it's starting at 3 minutes and it kind of gives a distorted impression as far as the severity of of the change. The numbers are right. I guess my my only request in in this respect is uh I want to make sure that we come across credibly to the public. I don't want them to think we're using any sort of slide of hand or giving a distorted view of what's going on. So, my my hope is that in future presentations that we start the bar charts at at the 0% just so that the the public doesn't think that we're trying to do something that's um less than straightforward.

It starts at zero. Uh yeah, I guess when I'm looking at the four look at the 4 minute 54 versus the three minute 46, you can see that it looks like it's more than double the size. And I think it's because whoever put together this particular slide probably truncated it starting at 3% as the zero line if you will rather than zero at the zero line too. It was based on Excel time minute calculations and that's how it produced it. Okay. Duly noted

any anyway. Um, as far as um as far as the response times for these emergency plus calls, I guess that code three, lights and siren, life-threatening calls that require immediate response. Do we have a count of the number of such calls per year we have that are at that level and what the percentage of that would be of let's say the total number of calls typically about uh I would say between 265 to 300. And I'm giving a ballpark. Okay. So, so 265 to 300 such calls a year, you said. Okay.

I can tell you. Uh, yeah, it's a it was about 265, I believe, last year. I mean, I Please bear in mind, I'm going off the top of my head of a a statistic, right? I mean, that kind of makes sense. I I I was imagining at least one a day. Yes, that's that's safe to say it's about that. Okay. Sometimes more.

Okay. And um I want a little more clarity on if we go to slide 11. So So I think you gave me some information that I didn't have before. Uh so I I was under the impression and maybe I I got the wrong impression that the new standard that we're using, the National Incidents Based Reporting Center, that was required of like all agencies starting in in 2021. And I'm wondering if maybe we were doing it both ways in 2021 2022 internally. Is is that what's going on here or am I just completely wrong about the start date for when agencies around the country were required to start using the new

I won't say it that way but I would say that agencies were implementing it based on their abilities typically on their existing records management systems. We were able to get it started. I believe it was November of 2022 when we first record started reporting on the new system. So, we figured we would start with 2023 as the first full year under the new system. Okay, that makes sense.

And uh as far as comparing the UCR summary report system with this new standard, this national incident based reporting. So my understanding and just you know just for my education and for the publics my understanding is that the old system it makes use of a hierarchy rule which ranks crimes in the order of which is most severe and classifies a crime only according to the most severe offense. So you can have several offenses but you're only looking at the very most um severe one. And that's that's how they're counting that. But that the new method, as I understand it, will actually uh try to uh tabulate all those crimes that are happening at one time uh not just the most severe. Is that is that kind of right or

That's correct.

Okay. Okay. So if I look at slide actually the there was a public comment already made it on slide 17 so let's not go there about the homeless issue and I think I think I wouldn't say I wouldn't be saying anything that wasn't already said but let's go to slide 31. Okay. And I guess the one thing that that that shouts out at me the most here is is the time that's required to book someone at Ventur County Jail. Just that the sheer the sheer um uh destruction, if you will, of of an officer's day just doing just handling one arrest. I I I did have a conversation with uh uh another police officer and what he suggested to me is something we could look at is perhaps we can make some sort of arrangement with the county where they can hire an additional booking officer, which I my understanding is a booking officer is a lot less costly than uh a standard arresting officer would be. I'm wondering if maybe there's uh an opportunity here to look at talking to the county, maybe hiring or pay or paying for a portion of a booking officer to handle the off the the Oxnard arrest so that our officer can get back onto the street where he's going to be uh where his time I think would be most valued. I was wondering if you have any perspective on on that. anything that we could do to get uh the turnaround time reduced is would be helpful. But what I will say is that the choke point is not necessarily with the number of booking officers or or deputies. Deputies also

work in the jails as well as well as the sheriff's service technicians who do bookings. But the problem actually has to do with uh liability reduction and that usually takes place in the form of medical evaluations. So, for example, an arrestee that has been involved in a traffic accident will first have to go get medically cleared at a local um hospital. They'll have to get a form that says cleared for booking. After that, they'll have to go to the county jail. There's a second intake where a medical another medical screening is taking place. And so if you picture the intake point where there are about 10 10 arrestes coming in and there may be two u intaking medical staff that's where the choke point actually is now. So absent uh absent the scenario with an accident or use of force or something like that a non-complicated arrest can take approximately three hours.

Non-complicated arrest with with medical issue or without the medical with no medical issue. That's bearing in mind just the transport, the medical assessment by the county staff and then uh the booking paperwork that's preceded after that. That does not include the pre-booking time that is done at our station prior to going uh to county jail. So, it's it's a long time. It used to be about an hour, now it's three hours minimum. But I will say that Ventura County is actually relatively better poised than most counties. I have been told Sacramento County is an eight hour wait. That's crazy.

And these are these are discussions with other police chiefs. But it is it is a thing that frustrates a lot of um you know police chiefs because it is a is a lot of officer time processing one person that may or may not be released in a few hours after the booking is completed. Right. Maybe there's some sort of conversation we can have with the county for how we can better work together and streamline this because that that three-hour hole is just we haven't made any progress with it at this point. I don't think any other police chief in the state has either. Okay. All right. But I agree if we can if we can lower that time that would be awesome. Okay. That that's all my comments. Thank you.

Appreciate the I appreciate it. I'll just close with just thanking the executive leaders from both fire and PD that are here. Uh thank you for your time, for your presence. That's important and certainly I think it's unquestionable how important public safety is for our city to provide a secure environment for members of our community to live, work and and thrive without the fear of harm, crime or emergencies. So it's absolutely vital we have a secure city to allow for social and economic development uh to flourish. So, I thank you for um the great job you both are doing at your departments. Thank you very much. This is only a receive and file item. Um we don't need a motion or anything else. So, with that, I apologize to to the other members that are here waiting. We fell a little behind. But with that, I just want to call the now we're going to call the meeting to to order. All right. Good evening everyone. Just want to call the meeting to order for the Oxner city council for Tuesday, December 2nd, 2025. Madam clerk, may we have the roll call and posting of the agenda, please? Uh,

council member Palo here. Councilwoman Perez here. Councilwoman Rodriguez present. Councilman Star here. Mayor Prompteran here. Councilwoman Basua here. Mayor MacArthur here. The agenda for this meeting was posted in the kiosk at city hall, the Oxarn Public Library, the city administrative offices, and on the city's website on Thursday, November 20th. Thank you.

Thank you. And for that, we're going to call the student from Delo High School, please, to lead us in the pledge of allegiance. Uh, this is the first time we have Delo High School here, giving us the newest high school we have, and this is the first time we have a junior here. So, if you can lead us in the pledge, and then we're going to take a moment of silence. I've I've learned that uh Kenneth Austin, who was with our IT department, recently passed away. I think he was with our city for just shy of 10 years. So we'll take a moment of silence and from that we'll go into your presentation. If I can have everyone rise for the pledge of allegiance please. You want to lead us.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Thank you everyone. Thank you very much. Lily, go ahead. Yeah.

Good evening, Mayor MacArthur, city council members and guests. My name is Lily Shrunka and I'm a junior at Dul High School. It is an honor to be here tonight and to share a little bit about my journey and what this community means to me. As a member of the first graduating class, I can truly say that Dul has shaped who I am today. When I first arrived as a freshman, I was scared and shy. I didn't know anyone since most of my friends from middle school went to Rio Mesa or Pacifica. So, I walked onto campus feeling completely alone. But Delo quickly became the place that pushed me to grow. It encouraged me to take risks, try new things, and believe in myself. Our incredible faculty, staff, and administration played a huge role in that growth. From the very beginning, they supported me, challenged me, and helped me build meaningful connections. Looking back, my first season of freshman volleyball became a huge turning point. It showed me that I could challenge myself academically, athletically, and that I should get involved within my school community and creating a brighter future for myself. I am currently serving as the ASB junior class president and has been one of the most impactful experiences of my time at Dul. It has allowed me to represent my peers, contribute to our evolving school culture, and become a more confident leader. Through planning events, organizing activities, and listening to student needs, I've learned how essential communication, collaboration, and teamwork are in creating a strong, supportive campus. My three years of service in ASB have also helped shape who I am. ASB taught me the importance of creative problem solving, dedication, and showing up for others. Whether we're planning spirit weeks, supporting fundraisers, or establishing new traditions, I'm learning how to build community and helping to create an inclusive environment where students feel connected and valued. As vice president of the school site council, I've had the privile privilege of helping make decisions that directly

impact our school. One of the accomplishments I am most proud of is helping to establish our student care closet, which provides essential items to students who need them. Knowing that our work has made a real difference in students daily lives is something I will always carry with me. Outside of leadership, competing as a three sport varsity athlete has taught me discipline, resilience, and valuable time management skills. Balancing athletics with academics and leadership roles isn't always easy, but it shows me how capable I am and helped me develop confidence, close friendships, and some of my favorite high school memories. I've also had the privilege of serving as the lead anchor for our school's news broadcast, a role that has strengthened my communication and public speaking skills. It allows me to represent our student body in a meaningful way and helps me grow into a more more polished and competent communicator. Being a part of Dul's first graduating class is something truly special. We don't just attend the school, we help build it. We create traditions, shape the culture, and set a foundation that future students will continue to improve upon. It has been an honor to contribute to the history of our school and to know that the work we've done will have a lasting impact. Looking ahead, I plan to attend a university where I can compete at the collegiate level while studying pharmaceutical science. As a first generation college student, pursuing higher education means opening doors not only for myself but for my family as well. My top college choices include the University of Texas at Austin, the University of Hawaii at Monoa, and UCLA. I'm excited for the future, grateful for the opportunities ahead, and deeply thankful for everything Delil has helped me become. Thank you.

Wow. Jesus,

I don't I don't even know how to follow that. That's That's impressive. That's very very impressive. I know when I reached out to Mrs. Romero, who I want to highlight, is here, the assistant principal to Delo High School. We were talking about students to come here, and you're the first one that came up. Um, I heard you're a superstar, and I can clearly see that. Thank you. Um, you know, I I believe things don't happen by accident. They certainly happen because certainly with I think your parents are here, right? Yes. Uh, do you want do you want to highlight them? Who do you want to point them out? Um, I have my mom here. I have my brother and my dad. and then my ASB director, Mr.

That's wonderful. You know, this is one of the the reasons that when the mayor prom came up with this idea to bring students here, we all immediately got behind it just to highlight just the capability of our students and I mean, you're a perfect example of that and that you're certainly going places and to highlight the great work that our school district is doing and we're just so proud of it. Uh, and that you're representing Altnard, right? This is We have a Should we vote on which of those universities, right? Yeah. I didn't hear USC in there. I No, I know. But I heard the Longhorns. Yeah. Go ahead, Mayor Tim.

Thank you. And thank you, Lily. Um I you just uh you know uh our students never cease to amaze and I always love hearing uh your story and what you're doing now and what you're looking to do in the near future. Um, something that jumped out at me is, uh, you are certainly one of the first graduating class for from Deloul High School. And, um, I had the privilege of working at Pacifica when it was a new high school, and I'm dating myself on that, but early in my career. Um, I started working there the second year they were open. And I certainly don't pick favorites, but I will say there's something very special about the first graduating class at a new high school. uh because you get to uh do what hasn't been done before and really set the stage in the culture for those who come after you and it sounds like you are absolutely setting that foundation for your peers and the other underassmen who will follow in your footsteps. So congratulations on the amazing work that you've done and please keep it up.

Thank you.

Absolutely. Lily, we have a a certificate for you up here if you want to come up. And if your your parents and brothers, they're welcome to come up as well and we'll take some photographs for you. want you to say something about how wonderful she is.

Oh my goodness. And how exceptional she is. Tell her why she's practicing her public speaking. Oh, really? Okay.

Okay, sure. Um, good evening everyone. I'm Nicole Corona, the ASB director and I have the privilege of uh working alongside Lily and um did not know I would be speaking this evening but uh just so very proud of all the hard work that she has done to Yes, come over here Lily. uh so proud of all the hard work that Lee has done these last three years to help lead Dell Soul and build the culture of our campus and um as you all have heard just the amazing things that she has done as three uh sport varsity athlete. She leads the junior class. She's a president. She's on our school site council. She just does so many things for Adele Soul and we are just so proud of her and all the work that she does and she has such an amazing family here to support her. So thank you so much Lily just for all that you are doing for Adele Soul. So thank you Ditto.

No yes Lily is amazing and I just want to point out too that her parents are amazing. They're at every event volunteering. They're also on our schoolside council and everything. I mean, I get special handmade gifts from mom all the time. Thank you, mom. She's a really great example for Lily. And I also want to thank the city. Uh we've had a few u community events that mayor uh MacArthur and and some of our council members have shown up to and supported. So, thank you to the city of Oxnar for continuing to support Deloul and our mission that we have for our students there in that community. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I'm telling you,

Mayor, can I say a few words before this family leaves, I would like you to know that it's before this family leaves, I would like you to know that it's a big deal that the um individuals coming from the brand new high school. But I'd like you to also know it was a very big deal that the past city council fought like heck to make sure you got the building that you wanted, the public works department, the management, the legal department, there were a lot of bumps in the road. this city council and specifically the last city council did a tremendous work and u that's enough to say but I hope you remember that

y

and we have one ceremonial item and I'd like to call up Celia Daniels and uh Elaine Ibara Please, if you're here in the audience to receive this proclamation and this proclamation is for AIDS Day, December 1st, 2025. Annually on December 1st, we commemorate World AIDS Day and reflect upon our worldwide response to the HIV AIDS epidemic. 2025 marks the 44th year since the first five cases of what later became known as AIDS were officially reported and we honor the more than 36 million people including 700,000 in the US who have died from AIDS related illnesses globally and this year's this year's theme for World AIDS Day 2025 is overcoming disruption transforming the AIDS response emphasizing the importance of healthcare access and the empowerment of individuals managing their health. In 2021 2021, HIV AIDS coalition for the count of Ventura launched a world aid states collaborative which includes a network of individuals, business leaders, public health and higher education professionals and nonprofit organizations leading a public awareness campaign called get to zerovc.org or to stop the the spread of HIV infections through community education, awareness, and action. Therefore, I, Luis MacArthur, mayor of the city of Oxen, do hereby proclaim December 20, I'm sorry, December 1st, 2025 is World's AIDS Day. And Celia, um, and Elaine, thank you so much for coming here to receive this proclamation and thank you for the work that you do. Thank you.

I don't know if you want to say a few words or anything. Sure. Yeah, absolutely. Posted. Yes. Let me take that so we don't get this on the photo right here. Lily told me you want to scooch in. Yeah. Come on in.

We'll take some photos. Thank you so much um mayor and the city council. This such an honor to be here representing diversity collective and especially being part of u this amazing event and I I I had the privilege I saw the police officers presenting today. I was I had the privilege of um um putting together the police academy course training course in Sacramento couple of years back where we were doing the training and it was so intentional that California is doing a lot for the police department and I have done lot more trainings for the police department and I thank you for what you're doing. I really appreciate it. So having said that um it's it's such a joy to be here. Um especially I am uh an immigrant from India. When I grew up in India, everything was very different there. Back then AIDS uh probably a couple of decades back AIDS was such a shameful thing in in the culture that I grew up. And um I never knew anything that was going on. And after I came to this country, I never had any contact with anyone who had HIV and AIDS. I you know I'm a trans person but I've never had any um I've never knew anybody but I came to Ventura County and I met my first friend and my second friend and now I have a lot of friends who are part

of the community. I heard that stories including um the promp uh Doug Doug Halter u from Ventura. There are a lot of stories that I heard about people and the humanity that they struggled with. And today I'm proud to be part of uh Ellen and I, we are proud to be part of diversity collective where we are doing a lot of work with um HIV and AIDS. We help um council. We also provide STI testing for people with HIV and AIDS and removing the stigma that exist in our society. And it's so important to focus on the humanity of what we are and that's what matters to us today. And thank you so much for giving us this platform to talk about it.

Thank you. Um thank you mayor and the entire council for the city of Oxard. I think all of you very much. Um this is really important and it's personal. Um, the first person I knew who died of age of AIDS was um died in 1986. His name was Greg Hammond and he was my brother-in-law. Um, in 1986 there was no support from the government at all. And this proclamation is so important because it provides visibility. Visibility decreases stigma. It decreases shame. And that's important because people are dying of AIDS in Oxnard. They're dying in Ventra County, across the country, and around the world. This proclamation provides visibility. And visibility also allows us to do our work and educate more people about the prevention that's out there and the medical treatments and medications that can keep them healthy. And more importantly, it allows people to feel safe when they're pursuing the treatments and the prevent preventatives. So, it's important and I thank you all very much. Thank you.

Thank you so much for for sharing that personal account and thank you thank you for your for your kind words up here. Thank you. Mayor I'd like to make a statement on the aid.

Um, this is not this is just my personal statement. These are facts. The speaker and the things that they said about what happened in the 80s. I remember when the AIDS crisis first made the newspaper and the president that was in place at the time, Ronald Reagan. This is not a slam at any particular president or any political party, but similar to things that are happening now. Mr. Reagan and his administration did not want to push this. And because of the silence and the ignorance that happened, many more people suffered and died. I became aware of this through the news, but also from a wife that worked in medicine. And at the time the stigma was it was simply gay. But I became aware of the people that had babies, needed transfusions, that got AIDS and passed away a lot because of the ignorance and stupidity of the elected officials at the time. I hope we are not entering a similar time now. Keeping your head in the sand doesn't make things go away. I appreciate the fact that we gave an honor and I appreciate the fact that the two individuals that spoke shared with us. Thank you, mayor. No, thank you, council member, for giving us that historical perspective. Thank you. Much appreciated. We will now move to the next item in the agenda and this is for public comments for items not on the agenda and we have a few speakers on this item. I will first call up Alicia Parcel, followed by Claudia G, and then uh Valeria Reyes

at the November 18th council meeting during the item for the gem agreement. Uh because the city manager was sensing some public opposition to the deal, he pretty intentionally violated a measure in by proceeding to give a 45minute live presentation in addition to the pre-recorded 24minute presentation. When a council member objected to this, um Mr. Roselle, who had clearly been expecting an objection, he he came prepared to respond. So he read a sentence from the court ruling in which the court of appeal upheld the validity of measure M and he gave a citation knowing that it it would sound authoritative to you. What he didn't tell you is that he was reading dicta which is comments or statements that don't have binding legal authority. The holding of a court case is binding on the parties but that's not every word in the opinion. So what was the holding of the case? Well, it was generally just that measure M is legislative in nature as opposed to administrative and thus it was valid. That's the holding. Um the case did not decide at what point um you know staff's actions in a meeting become a violation because it's a reenactment of the pre-recorded pres presentation that was not litigated in this case. Um, I don't know why the court threw that sentence into the opinion because like I said that that issue wasn't wasn't uh litigated and even the city's own briefs argued its own understanding that Measure M would not allow what the city manager did with that presentation. Uh, the sentence is not part of the holding. You shouldn't rely on it to believe that you can just continue to

undermine the core purpose of measure M. Once the council got to item M2 later in the meeting, several people who had signed up to make comments were no longer here. They lost their chance to make public comments because the meeting ran late and they had to go home. And that's one of the very things that Measure M was designed to avoid. Um, so we're we're getting back into the same problem uh that existed before. So, you know, if the city just forges ahead relying on an argument from Dicta, it's likely going to find itself again in litigation, which is, you know, not great for any of us. Uh, circumstances are much more unconsrable when you're under court order uh for failure to comply. But, you know, sadly, it it seems that's the only thing that gets the attention of your administrative staff. So hopefully we won't have to go there, but I just want wanted to make the point about what the holding was or wasn't. Thank you.

Thank you, Alicia. Clary G. Mayor, may I ask a question of you? You if a name is called, if a name is called and they are not here, does that mean they lost their opportunity to speak or they gave up their opportunity to speak because they left? How would your interpretation be of that? Mine is they gave up their opportunity to speak by leaving. Nobody took it away from them. Yeah, that would be Do you have an opinion on? Well, yeah. My my own opinion is so so we can't enter into a discussion. You can have a request for a clarifying question. That's kind of going into the issue rather than asking for clarity. Okay. Okay. Thank you, mayor.

I appreciate that city attorney. Thank you. Appreciate that. um city attorney. We'll move to Claudia G and Claudia, you'll be followed by uh Valeria Reyes.

Good evening. Um so my name is Claudia and I'm a volunteer with 805 Undocu and I just wanted to share some numbers for the month of November. As of November 14th, Ventur County has been the hardest hit um county in our region with 640 kidnappings. Oxnard continues to be the number one targeted city in the county. Over 40 people were taken in a single day on June 10th and over 300 people were taken during the Glass House farm raids on July 10th. For November, these are the dates we have recorded that someone was taken. Tuesday, November 4th, a minimum of four people. Tuesday, November 11th, one person. Thursday, November 13th, one person. Sunday, November 16th, one person. Monday, November 17th, three people. Thursday, November 20th, one person. Saturday, November 22nd, one person. Uh and then remember, these are the minimum documentation of cases that occurred. These are reported cases of those uh who have had someone reach out for to support uh support finding their loved ones, support paying immediate needs, and support with basic needs. Over 50% of the emergency assistance fund has gone to families in the city of Oxnard. Some cases are probably not reported. There are cases that our volunteers weren't able to get to fast enough. And we thank you for uh voting yes on M2, but know that we'll continue to be here to ask for help because this isn't just a oneanddone deal. We have the privilege of going home to our families, but every date on that list represents a day when someone else couldn't. Thank you. Thank you, Clar G. Valeria Reyes and then Valeria, you'll be followed by Marlene R and then Victor Solis. Good evening, city council members. My name is Valeria and I am a resident of

Oxnard in district 4. I'm a youth fellow with Buescino, a nonprofit that works along the central coast for social, economic, immigrant, and racial justice. I would like to thank the Oxnar City Council members for passing measure M last month. I encourage the city council to allocate this funding as soon as possible to hire an additional public defenders for immigration defense. Measure M is important to me and other Oxnard residents because it will help keep our communities intact. Since studies allow so since studies show that over 75% of undocumented immigrants have been living here for over 10 years. Additionally, I would like Oxnard City Council members to conduct know your rights trainings in multiple languages so all the residents know their constitutional rights and stay safe during immigration rates. Thank you again for passing measure M and thank you for your time. Thank you, Valeria Merlin. Hi, good morning major at Oxnard City Council members. U my name is Marllin, a resident of Oxnard in district 5, a student at Oxnard College and a youth fellow with BuSino. Um Buascino will proudly um participate this year's 40th annual Ventura County Martin Luther King Jr. day in Oxnard on January 19th. Um we encourage everyone to save the day. Um this year's theme is a living legacy cultivating compassion and justice in Ventura County. Um the event includes a freedom march and a keynote by Dr. Kane Teresa Johnson, associate professor of black studies and director of the Blum Center. Um, we encourage everyone to attend because the issues Martin Luther King

fought for remain relevant. Racial justice is still urgent. The ongoing ICE raids and the number of I mean the the murder of Haime Alen during the glass house raid shows that black and brown people um continue to be targeted. Um, I also encourage the Oxnner city council to pass a city sanctuary ordinance to no city staff resourcees or facilities are used to support ICE or federal immigration agency. Um, and that's it. Thank you. Thank you, Marilyn. Um, Victor and then from after Victor, we'll go to two virtual speakers.

Good evening, Mr. Mayor. uh council staff uh as well as our two chiefs. I'm glad you're here today. Uh I'm Victor Solis. I'm a resident of uh District 1. So I'd like to present uh first the ongoing threat, federal agents, DHS, ICE, Border Patrol. Um in the context of the recent October 29th incident on a street, the problem and a potential solution. Um, I'm also speaking uh in the capacity of being a community organizer with Indivisible of Ventura County. Uh, as many of us might have seen ABC7 with their chopper in the air, they covered that incident where federal agents conducted an operation on the 200 block of North A Street. Um, they deployed pepper spray, chemical munitions, batons. Uh, we can see in that footage that they did indeed strike civilians that were in that area. They included a legal observer, uh, rapid response volunteers from 805 and document. We've have several folks that are often watching out for these incidents and an assortment of residents and now they are facing they are the front line against these federal agents. um as we've heard in a number of the shareholders meetings with the mayor that's convened those and thank you again for chief bonuses to attend all of those and we've heard recently um thank you chief chief Hamilton for attending uh the recent meeting where we understand now that in this scenario where for example I am a volunteer seeing what's going on in my city and I'm trying to communicate to other civilians I am on the front line against these DHS agents wearing a mask like this trying to communicate to somebody who may be experiencing respiratory distress or cardiac event.

When I attend protests in Los Angeles, many of us carry our own first aid kits on us. And the problem that we face is who is the first responder? Is it somebody who happens to have a backpack and just happens to be trained to be in the role of a street medic then and there when federal agents are facing civilians? And I've learned that it's possible we might have to move a person who is injured, who is experiencing respiratory distress to a quote casualty collection point and then EMS can treat this person. So, this isn't a situation where EMS is coming in first. There may be a police perimeter. There may be a location, and we don't know how far away that is. It's interesting if now the public must be serving the first aid and then working with our local uh first responders. I think there's an opportunity here for a solution for us to learn in a public safety fair what we can do. Thank you so much.

Thank you, Victor. Thank you very much for your comments. We'll now go to virtual speaker numbers ending in 3259 3259 followed by 16221622. Um so mayor and council members we're going to go to virtual speaker ending in 1622. If you can press star six to unmute and you have three minutes starting now.

Hi this is Larry Barbarine. I want to thank again the police and fire for their presentations and and blessed to be one of the commenters on that. Really appreciate that uh they have that. Uh I was able to watch it on YouTube before today. Um happy Jesus birthday, happy Christmas navidad and bon natal to everybody coming up and happy Hanukkah to our Jewish friends starting on the I believe it's the 14th. Uh if people don't want to do it out of their hearts and say merry Christmas instead of the oddly generic happy holidays, it is a your Christmas is a federal holiday. So you are a uh following the law if you're if you're uh in a good way if you're if you're uh saying merry Christmas. I want to thank those at the council who were saying happy Thanksgiving, not forgetting Thanksgiving in that last meeting there. I want to thank uh Pastor Renan and Dayby-Day Ministry, Paul, Angela, and Greg for providing all those free turkeys that they did uh including to my mother and those at her board care. And uh uh also uh Councilwoman Basula and her mother for inviting people to Thanksgiving. I think that that takes guts, I think, for a public figure to do that nowadays. Uh I was not was hoping to make it was un unable to make it with uh some health problems that mom had that day which she overcome thank God but really appreciate uh your uh giving as well. Um I want to thank u uh former President George W. Bush and the Congress of the time 20 plus years ago for uh starting the fight against HIV AIDS and according to the website which you can read article today on the bushcenter.org or is it has saved with

you our tax dollars that they President Bush led the fight on uh to to spend on saving over 26 million people from AIDS and dying of AIDS and nearly uh 8 million kids were born HIV free worldwide and now they're trying transitioning this president's congress too nowadays they're trying to get transition it to local funding from the you know countries that are most most in need. I mean, ours was nothing compared to what was going on in Africa was just decimating people. So, uh, thank God for those strides and more to come to they're trying to eradicate HIV AIDS by 2030. Um, and lastly, uh, depending on how much time I have, uh, I want to, uh, ask for a little, u perspective, uh, on the other side of things, like with the ICE situation, there there's apparently more than a thousand crimes are being investigated against ICE. You know, we saw in Camaro there the instigation, including a shot against ICE. uh and you know what if they trans transgress they need to be looked at too I but the uh generally they're trying to follow

sir sir thank you for your call um your time is up thank you thank you for coming thank you much y is the other person back online um mayor we're going to go to virtual caller ending in 8771 you um press please press star six to unmute and you have three minutes starting Now,

hi, my name is Chris Meeros. I'm here uh as a member of Buenosino. I'd like to thank uh the city council for recognizing AIDS Day. it uh is very um yeah, it's big and it's very important to pretty much go and recognize those who have survived and recognize those who haven't made it, but uh essentially we're very grateful that you're yeah doing something to not leave them. Uh and also I'd like to just remind the uh city council that there's a lot that can be done just to remember that you guys have a very big power and and and just influence that is being pretty much uh taken from just the federal government uh by just allowing them and and I know that it'd be something that is hard to kind of take care of,

but um but it'd be um something that can be passed on to just uh kind of like up the ladder and um it'd be Yeah. um don't let them take and for a couple dollars for false promises because it'd be going down just the uncon uncon unconstitutional road and um yeah that is a very big uh uh negative thing that can just be e either good but or bad but they do have a lot of resources that can essentially go to just helping us out and uh but not in that way. And the responsibility is being taken uh by the people that are responsible uh for criminals and just cuz one is undocumented um they're still criminals and can be handled just uh as criminals. Um, and it'd be just making the other ones who are uh non-citizens and who can essentially be a citizen just be not uh treated well and a wrong place at wrong time. Um, but I thank y'all either way uh for everything you've done uh and everything you've provided and everything you've recognized. Thank you.

I appreciate your time. Thanks for calling in. Thank you. Madam clerk, does that conclude virtual callers? Um ye. Yes, mayor. That concludes um virtual caller 32 ending in 3259 um is no longer joining us. So that actually concludes our speakers. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. We will next move to item H. This is the report from our city manager, uh Mr. W.

Thank you. All right. Um, this is going to take some time. Uh, Diego, can you bring up the slides? Okay, so guess what? It's that time of year again. The Oxnard Tamalei Festival is upon us. It is uh this Saturday and um most importantly, it is free and open to the community, to the public. It will begin at 9:00 a.m. and run all the way um pretty much until sunset till 6 pm. So, it's right here downtown at Plaza Park. This happens to be the 18th annual Tamalei Festival. Uh so, my guess is there'll be uh quite an assortment of tamales there for people to to enjoy. So, that's this Saturday. Um now, uh this is a a city event and you can see we have a a slew of sponsors across the bottom banner here um that help to make this possible. But there are also other events happening. I know there's Christmas parade also Saturday morning. Uh there's a a slew of toy drives and all kinds of other events uh large and small. And then the following Saturday, I believe, is um while it's not a city event, it's it's pretty well known the um Santa to the sea uh what is it? A 5K and a a mini marathon. So, lots of festive events happening um this holiday season. Okay. Next, uh this is um hot off the press. Uh I just received this today. I assume it's taken some time for Santa to settle the labor agreement with the elves, but the Santa float uh is going to be upon us again this year between December 10 and December 19. It will happen in the

late afternoon from 4:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. in these various uh neighborhoods all throughout the city. I'm not going to read all the specific locations but you can see on the screen here uh this information is available on the website and more importantly for all the hip young people you can get the information on the social media uh channels and the handle is oxnardre um and if you um don't know how to do that like me you can just call if you have a phone you can call and find out uh where and when the float will be be near you. That phone number is 8054243. So there you have it. Um uh the southwest community on Wednesday, December 10th, the central community the next day, Thursday, December 11. Uh nothing that nothing on Friday the 12th. That must have been part of the elves labor agreement. Uh, Del Norte community Saturday, December 13. The Southeast community on Tuesday, December 16th. So, no Sunday, and then Northeast Community Wednesday, December 17, Northwest Community, Thursday, December 18. And the final day for the Santa Float tours is Friday, December 19th, um, in the South Central community. And you can see again all the locations where the Santa float will be passing by. And with that, I believe we have uh Mr. Chubby from the North Pole. Uh and I'm always eager to say ho ho ho. So, come on in.

Ho ho ho. Merry Christmas everyone. Feliz Navid. Ho ho ho. Ho ho ho. Hello everybody. Hi. Hi. Hello. Hi Santa. Hello. Hello. I'm Santa. And uh it's a pleasure to be back in Oxnard. Santa loves Oxnard weather this time of year. Also, I brought my number one uh employee of the year, Cinnamon, the elf, to come talk to everybody.

Hello everyone. I'm Cinnamon. Um, I'm gonna be reading some information about the float and some other things we have in English and Spanish. Santa, so I'm gonna say in English first. Good evening, Mr. Mayor, mayor pro team and council members. Um, Jolly Staint Nick is back. Yay. and his helpful elves like me, Cinnamon, are returning to Oxar to spread holiday joy across the city. Beginning Wednesday, December 10th through December 19th, we will be having Santa's float and he will be making stops throughout the city of Oxnard. The schedule is available on ww.oxnard.gov/events and on oxnardre.org and on our Facebook and Instagram at Oxnardrec. You can check out out our daily post on the glimpse link on our social media for a live tracking for our flip tour. This year, Santa and his helpers will be expect accepting letters from all the good boys and girls of Oxnard only. Um, and make sure to bring their bring them, write them out. We're going to take them to this closest spot um that you have. Sorry. Um, write the addresses nice and neat because Santa's going to have a nice surprise for you. The Flo will also be flying down Sea Street for the annual Christmas parade and we'll be landing at the 18th annual Tamalei Festival um at Plaza Park. So, stop by on December 6 for some photos on the float and for some photos of Santa. We ho ho hope to see everyone there. And happy holidays. Okay, one more time in Spanish. Um,

yay. Um, in Oxar Rick um Facebook and Instagram. Stagram. Oh, sorry. the Oxnard. Plaza Park. Oh, we have some flyers in English and Spanish. Sorry. And so if you want anyos, we have some. So that's it. Thank you.

Thank you, Canela. Thank you very much. I don't know. Santa, thank you for being here. Thank you. I appreciate it. Absolutely. Appreciate it. It's Santa's uh looking forward to being at the tree lighting ceremony on Thursday at Pleasant Park. That's right. Also, the tumali festival on Saturday. Santa will be very busy cruising around Oxnard on the float. And uh it's Santa's favorite time of year to come back to Oxnard. And please everybody, don't forget Santa loves 2% milk on uh Christmas Eve. And last year I said last year when I was here with the council uh I mentioned chocolate chocolate chocolate chip but walnut cookies will be fine this year. All right. Thank you. Appreciate everybody. Ho ho ho. Merry Christmas. See everybody soon. If if you'd like a photo on his lap, you can have one right now.

Thank you Santa and Canella. Thank you for dropping in. What a pleasant surprise. Uh Mr. Are you uh does that wrap up your the report? Okay. We'll next move to item uh H on the agenda. This is the city council uh reports. U is it okay, Councilwoman? Start with you. Yeah.

Thank you. I first wanted to um thank Kathleen and her team. Um, I was able to provide some introductory remarks and also join the community um, regarding the South Oxnard Connect project that's coming to the area. Um, it was really just a good opportunity to get input, feedback, um, recommendations from the community on that project. Um, but for those of you that couldn't make it, um, and you'd like to stay connected or just request more information about the project, you can contact South Oxnard Connectnard.org. or um in light of a lot of the holiday spirits that are coming up, I also wanted to thank all of the partners who supported the turkey distribution at Southwinds, um including the Southwinds neighborhood council, the Port of Weini in Lakesesh, IBW, the Oxnard High School Flag Football Team, and everyone who helped make that event possible. This uh Thursday, December 4th, at 6:00 p.m., Southwinds Neighborhood Council will be holding a meeting. And the last thing I wanted to include was um to add on the agenda to um to direct staff to bring back a resolution to oppose new offshore and gas leasing off the central coast. And that is my report.

Thank you, Councilwoman. Council member,

thank you, Mary. Mayor, first I'd like to say hello to Bill Terry and Gloria Raman. It's great to see you. Thank you for coming and sitting in the front row and I remember for years that was your guy's place. Thank you. Um earlier the high school student and I made a comment with respect to the city helping them. The one department that was very instrumental that I omitted my fault was development and planning. They were instrumental along with city management, the city attorney's office and public works. The last um we had a moment of silence tonight and for welldeserved for the individual. But ladies and gentlemen, the gun violence in this country, in this nation, this world is out of sight. Four kids killed in Stockton. I don't know what more we want, but it's going to be, you know, those people up there are going to have funerals. elected officials are going to make statements. They're going to get their pictures in the paper. And when it happens here, we do the same thing here. I don't know what the fix is. But when the police department's telling you the numbers about the um guns taken off, it's a big deal. You have no idea what that police officer is going to walk into. You have no idea what you're going to get it when you walk outside and somebody's coming towards you. I don't know how we fix it. I don't have a solution. But please don't don't forget there's a tremendous issue in this country. Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member. Mayor Prom.

Thank you, Mayor. Just a couple quick things here. Uh first, this Thursday, December 4th, at 6:30 p.m., Orchard Park Neighborhood Council will be meeting at Sierra Linda School. And uh they have on their agenda to hear from our assistant public works director, Mr. pallet about uh Orchard Park, the park. And so if you live in that neighborhood or you frequent that neighborhood and that park, uh it is a public meeting. Folks are welcome to come and um be able to hear the information and provide some input as well. And I also want to thank Mr. Terry and his guest for coming out as well. I see councelor Pearl is out there. I know in parks and wreck when I was on the commission, he was a uh a regular voice on all things um from uh his area of town and so thank you for all of his dedication. Uh the last thing I'm going to say um just regarding a statement that came earlier during the presentation or regarding the presentations for public safety and um there was a statement regarding uh substance use specifically fentinyl methamphetamine being brought um over the border from Mexico or from Central America into the United States. We could certainly have a conversation about supply and demand and the economics around that and if there was no demand um the supply certainly wouldn't be able to follow but that's not where we are. But I I want to point out also that um the uh assumptions around customs and ICE actions through DHS and that impacting the um transportation of fentanyl and methamphetamine over the southern border. Um, I look at DHS's own statistics showing that the majority of people who've been taken by their actions, their federal actions, have no criminal record or the criminal record they have is things like traffic citations or other vehicle code violations, uh, minor

infractions that many people in this room right now might have themselves. And I'm not trying to minimize the impact that these substances have on our society, on um our own community, but I want to point out that I think the number we had was uh 640 removals mentioned earlier by uh Claudia. If those folks were the ones bringing the drugs over the border, wouldn't we have a proportional decrease in overdoses? I don't see that. And before anyone tries to take credit for it, I want to point out that public health efforts, education, and harm reduction through wide availability and education around nlloxxone, that's decreased the number of overdoses and that predates the current administration and goes back a number of years even uh prior to the previous administration. These are things that actual experts in the field have been working on to save lives. And I hope no politicians or parties from either side of the aisle try and take credit for that. But to insinuate that um the folks who are being targeted, who are putting food on our tables and working in our communities to get by are somehow directly linked to the epidemic that we have um around these uh substances. missed the mark on that. I'm sorry. So, anyhow, remember when ICE was originally going to target criminals? Whatever happened to that, right? But here we are. Anyhow, I appreciate the extra time on that, mayor. I just felt that that needed to be um stated just uh so we have some open conversation about it. Thank you.

Appreciate your insight, Mayor Prom. Thank you, Councilwoman Basul. I don't have any updates. Thank you. Thank you, Councilwoman. Council member Star. Yeah, I'll be brief. I just uh want to give a shout out to the Pacific High School football team that had a wonderful uh uh game last Friday. Congratulations to Mike Moon, the coach, and all the players. Uh Pacifica beat Palace Veries by 20 to 10. It makes them it makes that football team only the second public school in our county history to win back-to-back CIFSs titles. And I I guess they now advance to the CIF state play. Yeah.

Um I believe the state finals will be completed before the next meeting. Uh whether or not the team becomes state champion. I believe it would be a wonderful gesture for Mayor MacArthur to officially recognize the team for its amazing achievements. So, I'm hoping that on I know it's short notice, but I'm hoping that staff can put together something where we can just honor uh the coach and and the whole team for for their uh remarkable achievement. And that's all I have. Absolutely. Thank you, council member. Council.

Yes. Hi. Um we had a very busy Thanksgiving break or or lack of break. Um very exciting. I know that uh we fed over 365 individuals at Kasala Lopez uh the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. a warm meal for open to the community and that's um 365ish plus 125 volunteers. So probably over um 500 folks that came. So thank you Mayor MacArthur for swinging by and uh helping rolling up your sleeves. I did see you working hard cleaning dishes and um that same day we also kicked off a toy drive with I'm a kid who can. So I've been volunteering for both of these efforts uh for many seasons now. I think this is 14 15 um and that's always the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. So, that distribution will be on uh the 23rd uh the day before Christmas Eve. Um I'm having office hours. I'm going to see if I could reschedule my office hours from this Saturday to Sunday because we do have the the parade, the festival, and the tamali. Um so, if so, I I will make sure that we if I do have the room reservation change, then uh we'll promote that through social media. So, feel free to reach out and uh confirm. I am either at the library Saturday morning or we'll push it back to Sunday morning. But um as always, the first Saturday of the month, I'm usually at the library 11 to 1. So, uh, come and chat with your council woman, District 4. Um, what else? Uh, Saturday. Okay. So, Candy Cane Lane. Um, I know that I've been looped into some conversations. Candy Cane Lane, um, on F Street and G Street. They are officially launching their display for the whole community at large on December 7th. And, uh, it's going to run December 7th through the 27th. So, folks who are interested in that, please go check it out. I know it's a it's a nice way to celebrate the holiday season at a very cheap cost to any patrons walking by. Just be be very safe with safety crossing the streets back and forth. Um I know it's been become a tradition for my family to just go and enjoy uh the displays that our neighbors put together. Uh last but not least, I did uh get approached by Roxan Ho. She's um part of the Open Door Studio and I know that they've been doing art classes for

folks with special needs and different abilities. So, um, I know as part of our arts tour, we walk through a lot of the the good work that they that they do and they have a tiny space. So, I'm hoping that staff can follow up with a conversation that I flagged for the city manager. I know that she is asking if she can use two of the rooms that two of the boardrooms that we have at the Carnegie Museum in the bottom. So, I know Carnegie is sensitive because I heard a lot about it uh in the campaign trail, but if we could have staff just follow up with her and just see she is not in a position to launch something huge. She just wants additional space if possible and she's right next door. So, um I did say that I would uh bring it up and see what we can do to come and bring some life back into that space if possible. All right, those are my reports.

Appreciate it, Councilwoman. And I'll just conclude with essentially just piggybacking off of what Councilwoman Rodriguez said. We had a very busy many of us here um engaging with community for their Thanksgiving events including with Kasa Lopez served just shy of 400 meals. So, uh we were both there um not only donating our with money but time and service but then I also was present at the um Mary Star of the Sea uh with the Knights of Columbus uh down there with I think it's um 12805 and they prepared a lot of meals for our homeless population. And then right across the street here, um, Tacos Bonita did close to 800, um, servings of meals for our most vulnerable in our community. So, uh, it was wonderful to see that. And then thanks to Stevie Cruz who organized and thanks for the kind invitation to go out there for the Alice Vega 15th annual toy toy drive. You know, one of the things I just want to highlight and I I posted this on social media. Um, the enduring commitment of parents. I saw a gentleman who I recognized from my time in policing um who was in and out of homeless shelters but ran into him as he formed the line to get a meal at Castle Lopez and knew he had five kids and asking about how his kids are doing just enduring commitment of these parents to see their kids thrive. So he shared with me that his son Luis Perez um was about 26 years old is now a PhD candidate at Cornell University. Uh just to show you I think the collective effort from our school districts from people that care uh and parents despite their the hardships that they face nonetheless their commitment to see their their sons um and daughters thrive. say was like it just warmed my heart to hear that here he graduated I think from UC Davis with a masters and

got accepted Cornell for for a PhD in mathematics of all things. So it's u I just thought I'd highlight that um you can see the talent we have not only with Lily who came up here and spoke but the many others who have come up before us and they're products of our school system um but I know we you know there's more and more that we want to do. So, I just wanted to mention that. So, I'll just I'll conclude there, but thank you everyone for sharing um what they've done here in the last couple weeks. So, we will now move to the next item on the agenda. This is from our city clerk. This is an appointment of a member uh to serve on the city's community relations commission. And the recommendation is that the mayor with the concurrence of the city council make the following appointment to the community relations commission in Miss Renee Camper Stewart. uh being recommended by district 4. This item did not originate in committee. Uh any any council members have any any questions at this time on this appointment?

Yeah. No, I have a comment. Um I met with um Renee and she seems very enthusiastic about just serving our community. I know she was in the homeless commission and um you know there hasn't been too much activity in that commission and uh she really just wants to put her time, talent, and energy into something productive. So, she was interested and had approached me. Uh, we had coffee and I she seems like an excellent candidate uh who's, you know, born and raised here. So, I really appreciate her enthusiasm and I just want to put good people to work as volunteers. Thank you. Thank you, Councilwoman. Is there any um public speakers on on this appointment, Madam Cler?

Um, mayor and council members, we do not have any public speakers for this appointment item. Thank you. So, so mayor, procedurally at this point, I think actually you're the one that makes the motion because you're actually doing the appointment and then somehat some of us can second and then vote on it. I appreciate that. Thank you. Uh I make the motion to appoint Mrs. Camper uh to the uh community relations commission. Is there a second? I'll second. Well, Madam Clerk, I call for the vote. Um Councilwoman Perez, yes. Councilwoman Rodriguez, yes. Councilman Star, yes. Councilwoman Basua, yes. Mayor Prompteran, yes. Council member Palo, yes. Mayor MacArthur, yes. And this motion carries seven to zero. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you again, Council Member Star. Um, and for and Councilwoman, for the appointment. Thank you. Uh, we'll next move to uh the review of the info consent agenda. Do any council members have any consent items they'd wish to discuss? Yes, Mayor Port. Mayor, I don't have one that I'm going to pull for discussion, but I just want to call to attention item L3, the uh agreement for um closest resource automatic aid between Oxnard Fire, City of Ventura Fire and the Ventura County Fire Protection District. Um in looking at this item, uh the Ventura County Fire Protection District is a separate legal entity from the county of Ventura. And as you all know, I have um recused myself from uh votes that have to do with the county, but uh in also in my um FEPC guidance has to do with uh even appearances of a remote interest. And in this one, because I um couldn't find some uh information that satisfied me to show a completely separate uh financial relationship between the county and the protection district, I'm just out of an abundance of caution going to recuse myself from item three.

Thank you, Mayor Prom. Any other uh Yes, Council Member Star. Sure. I'd like to have uh L3, L5, L6, and L7. Um, yes.

Um, sorry, mayor and council members. Um, I'm asking I'm requesting that item L1, the minutes for the November 18th um, city council meeting be removed from the agenda. They will be rescheduled for the December 16th meeting. Thank you. question. Okay. L7. Okay.

So, so that really only leaves um two and four, right? And four requires no action. So, basically we can we need to take public comment first too. Thank you. before you launch into the consent agenda discussion or any motions to do anything. I appreciate that. Thank you, city attorney and mayor and council members. We do not have any public speakers for the information and consent agenda um in person and virtually. Thank you. Thank you. And thank you, Council Member. Sorry. L4 is only a receipt file item. Is there a motion to to approve L2? L2. I'll move. Is there a second? I'll second. Madam Cler, call for the vote.

Uh, Councilwoman Rodriguez, hi. Councilman Star, yes. Councilwoman Basua, yes. Mayor Prompteran, yes. Council member Palo, yes. Councilwoman Perez, yes. Mayor MacArthur, yes. And this motion for L2 um carries um 7 to zero. Thank you. Thank you. We will move to item uh L3. This is from the actually gate. May I pretend you're recusing yourself from L3? Correct.

Yeah. Did someone want to discuss L3? You did. Okay. This is from the fire department. The subject entails closest resource automatic aid agreement between the city of Oxar Fire Department and the city of Ventura Fire Department, the Ventura County Fire Protection District. The recommendation is that the city council one approve the formal adoption of a closest resource automatic aid agreement between the aux fire department, the Ventura fire department and the Ventura County Fire Protection District and two authorized the fire chief to execute the closest resource automatic aid agreement. The community services public safety housing development committee approved this item 30 back on October 28th, 2025. And uh we'll go to you council member Star. Go ahead.

Yeah. So, I'm in favor of this, but I just have I have a question about how something works. So, my understanding is that if there's a 911 call from, let's say, Oxnard, it goes to a different dispatch center than say a phone call from Ventura County or El Rio. Uh, so my my question is, how does the computer aed dispatch work when it comes to trying to dispatch resources that are closest to the incident when you've got disperate centers that are receiving the calls? Uh so uh mayor and uh council member uh star Alex Hamilton fire chief. Uh so the answer to that question is all of the the fire and EMS resources for Ventura County Fire Department uh are dispatched by the Ventura County Fire Department out of the dispatch center in Camaro. So any any call regardless of what which um uh which public safety dispatch answers the call first, those calls will get routed. If it if it's a call for fire or EMS, those calls get routed to the dispatch center in Camaro. Uh and then all of the vehicles um both fire and EMS in Ventura County have vehicle locators on them. Um, so all they're all GPS tracked and so the system figures out what's the closest unit regardless of of what the badge is on the door of the engine. Um, and dispatches that as the closest unit. So,

thank you for educating me on that. Yeah. Any other questions? No. Okay. What's Councilwoman? Would you have a question? No. Okay. What's the What's the desire of council on this item? Wonderful. Madam Clerk, call for the vote. Uh, Councilman Star, yes. Councilwoman Vasua, yes. Council member Palo, yes. Councilwoman Perez, yes. Councilwoman Rodriguez, hi. Uh, Mayor MacArthur, yes. And the motion carries six to zero. Thank you.

Thank you. And mayor prom, you can come back. Okay, there he is. Okay, we'll now move to item L5. This is from public works. Subject entails purchase of walking floor transfer trailers and deep drop tipper transfer trailers for the environmental resources division. The recommendation is that the city council approve and authorize one the purchasing agent to execute a purchase order with the trailer company Inc. for a total contract amount not to exceed 1,400,000 for the purchase of four walking for floor transfer trailers and seven deep drop uh tipper transfer trailers and two a budget appropriation of 228,207 from the available fund balance in the er um development fund 634. Public risk and transportation committee approved this item 30 back on October 28th, 2025. We'll start with you, Council Member Starter. Go ahead.

Thank you. I got a softball question for you. So, we have u walking floor transfer trailers and we have deep drop tipper transfer trailers. I was just wondering if you can kind of let the public know what is the distinction between these two and when would you use one versus the other?

Uh, good evening, mayor, mayor prom, council members. Michael Wolf, director of public works and so we I can cover if you want me to, Brian. So, we like these fancy names, right? So, um the walking for trailers, uh typically we use those for like green waste. Um they're able to unload and treat wood at different sites. Uh we utilize them at places like New Indie where we go pick up their um municipal solid waste or their commercial solid waste. Um they provide flexibility to load and unload at any time without waiting for equipment to pull out. Um and so they they serve that purpose for those kinds of things. Uh their capacity is anywhere between 19 and 21 tons. Um the tipper trailers are similar but they have a significantly larger payload. Um and they reduce so they reduce the number of trips that we would take to the landfill. um they're able to unload a fully loaded trailer in a very short amount of time, five or seven minutes. Um the the um minimal manual handling during the unloading process uh in once positioned in the tipper floor. So it has the ability to do that without any external pieces of equipment as well. Um we mostly do this for um dense and heavy materials um that benefit from a single control dump. um rather than maybe uh when we're hauling uh and putting in green waste, things like that. So they they have little different needs, little different um ways to be loaded and unloaded um and different abilities to take certain types of loads or weights if you will of loads. So they have a little bit of different need.

Yeah. My my understand at least from what I've read is that the walking floor trailers unload by they it moves the contents horizontally through

you I guess through lat slats or whatever that might be called. Uh which makes it really ideal for confined locations. Uh whereas the deep drop tipper trailers unload by tilting the bed upward which is uh faster for free flowing materials but it definitely requires more space and stability and it certainly it's better for things like sand or gravel or anything like that. Yeah, we mostly are doing municipal solid waste, so not a lot of sand and gravel, but yeah, the same concept, something that could be easily um unloaded in that fashion.

Right. Uh got a question for you on one part of the staff report on page 145 says on June 16th, 2025, the city issued a request for a bid uh RFB PW25-13 to solicit bids from vendors for four walking uh floor transfer trailers and seven deep drop tipper transfer trailers. These three proposals were received by the submission deadline of June 27th, 2025. So, I'm kind of noting the June 16th start date for when we issued the requests and 11 days later having received the bids. I know we've been really good lately about having five weeks, six weeks time for people to solicit bids. Um, I I know 11 days is pretty compressed and might cause fewer people to bid, but I was wondering if maybe you can kind of let us know what was different this time.

Um, well, before when Brian comes up, Brian Yas will come up and answer that question, but I will note that we did get three bids. Um, that's great. And so the the amount of time I don't think precluded anybody from bidding. Um, these are preset processes. It's not like they have to go out and do research about, okay, what kind of workforce do we need to have? It's so it's not a capital project. This is pull it off the shelf. I I I supply, you know, trailers and here's my here's my bid amount. So, there's not a lot of work involved in putting together a bid. Maybe Brian can cover why we went with a a truncated time frame. Thank you. Okay. So, so that was the answer

because there's not there's really not a lot there's really not a lot that needs to go into putting together the bid, right? So, okay. So, it just wasn't necessary. It wasn't like a complex, right, project. Yeah. So, you'll see later on tonight when we have a very complex capital project, you know, that's when we start putting in a lot more time for for folks to assemble their team, get uh sub subcontractor bids, things like that. So, this is really just pull off the shelf, submitted as part of the proposal. Okay. Thank you. That's my my question. Thanks, RO. Yes. Go ahead. Yes.

If I can ask, Mr. Star, um, and I appreciate you doing the research and looking here and coming up with just a number of days. Are you suggesting possibly having a fixed number of days between bids or is there an implication that you think something could have been uh, in proper in this manner?

I'm just saying that it it was out of the ordinary for us. I mean, lately we've been uh really good about doing five to six weeks. It was it was a criticism I had early when I first got elected that I thought there wasn't enough time because there was like sometimes it was two weeks, three weeks. I think the minimum requirement for certain types of projects was two weeks is what I recall hearing from staff. But uh I thought that it's been a big improvement since then. uh having now five weeks to six weeks typically. Uh I was just kind of really curious what happened here because we do do you suggest possibly firming up and making a set number of days or weeks between?

I I'm I'm not prepared yet to make a proposal. Okay. Mostly I was just trying to understand what what was different this time and and you know you that's mostly it. Thank you for sharing that with me. Yeah. Thank you council member. What's the What's the desire on councel on this item? I move to recommend action. Okay, we have a first and a second. Um I'm sorry, who is the maker? Um council member Pllo and the second by council member Star. Um thank you. Um Councilwoman Basua. Yes. Mayor Prompteran. Yes. Council member Palo. Yes. Councilwoman Perez. Yes. Councilwoman Rodriguez. Hi. Councilman Star. Yes. Mayor MacArthur.

Yes. And this motion carries seven to zero. Thank you.

Thank you. Thanks, director. We'll now move to L6. This is the third amendment to agreement with Black Gold Industries for on call citywide hazardous and unknown unknown waste identification, collection, and disposal services. The recommend recommend recommended action is that the city council approve and authorize the mayor to execute a third amendment with Black Gold Industries increasing the amount to 420,000 for a new total amount of the contract value of 920,000 for known and unknown hazardous waste identification collection and disposal services. Just as a reminder, uh this did not originate in committee since this is a continuation of a previous item approved by city council back on October 17th, 2023. Um we will start with you, Council Member Star. That's okay.

Thank you. So, um, so originally previous council approved a half a million dollars for this agreement, which I assume was for the entire three-year period, and now we're seeking this $420,000 increase to wrap up this three-year period. I I I do recognize that at the sec time of the second amendment that there was uh the price was increased by 6% across the board. Uh but I just wanted to be sure that would it be fair for me to conclude that the uh increase in the contract amount is more a function of increased activity rather than an increase in the price of the service? Yeah, that's correct. The the staff report kind of goes into that a little bit about the

significant amount of illegal dumping that's been occurring specifically for hazards waste that just wasn't anticipated. These aren't things that we can anticipate. Um, so we do our best to estimate based on prior prior usages and that's how we would then put together the original contract request. It's just we're going out there having to have this company go out there more to pick up um, right this hazardous waste.

And and and I guess I'd like to uh point out that I think the contract allowed for I want to say it was 3% increase up to 3% increases per year. I saw one increase for 6%. I I wanted to note that unless I missed it, I didn't see any increase for this third extension. So, I don't know what you guys did to uh avoid that, but but good. Yeah. I guess you arm wrestled him for it, but uh but thank you for that. I just wanted to make a note of that. Yeah. Yes. Go ahead, Mayor Tim.

And thank you, Mr. Wolf. And I see Mr. Januz is here as well. Um, I know that in instances where I'll do a 311 report on um, illegal dumping at an alley, for example, there may be an assortment of items, furniture and other bulky items, but sometimes there will be used motor oil left in an a milk jug or in a an oil jug container, um, or antifreeze along those lines. And I've noticed that our staff will pick up the bulky items, but then um, those items, those haz hazardous items are left to black gold. And so, um, just so it's clear for me and for the public, um, that's one of the functions of this contract, correct? When we have hazardous materials like that that need to be picked up,

correct? And and we're hoping that it's oil. That's the only thing that's really left in there. Uh, because there's other other things unfortunately that get left out. But, uh, that's the functionality of this contract. the the amount the the type of training, the type of equipment, the type of manifesting, the the handling of these kinds of materials is is well regulated. And so we have these contractors that that do that. Um the other things that you mentioned, let's just pick on like a couch or a or refrigerator. Th those are things that can can get handled at our at our MURF, right? The hazardous material component cannot. And so we go through this process with a third party for that.

Thank you. And just as a followup to that, just so the public knows, if they have used motor oil or any of the things listed here, oils, oil filters, solvents, antifreeze, um are there, um other consumerf facing uh resources for them to send these items to that are at no cost to the consumer. Yeah. So Brian can cover the specifics where we can deliver that. There's some some of it can be delivered at our uh the buyback center. Uh, some of it has to go to our our third party and Camaro I think it is. So, but Brian can mention those things.

Brian Yannis, assistant public works director. Mayor Pro Tim, great question. I can do a little bit of outreach here. Um, yes, we we accept household hazardous waste at the Del North site. It's open Tuesday through Saturday 9:00 a.m. to 300 p.m. So, we take household hazardous waste, paints, anifreeze, oil, um, batteries, fluorescent bulbs, etc. So, we'll take those. But some of the things that we are unknown that are that we have no idea and they're left to somewhere to be picked up. Um, we don't do that. And most of the time people bringing it to the to the Delorth site. Obviously it's an individual. It's a resident. They know what they're bringing to us. So there's kind of that trust relationship. But we also have a contract with the Clean Harbors that will accept other items that we don't accept here. And it is free to Oxar residents by appointment. and I don't have Clean Harbor's number right off the top of my head, but uh it's available. They can call the 385860 and we'll definitely help them dispose of the materials that they do have.

Great. Thank you very much. And I'll just add that most um auto parts stores will accept these items that they sell also. So, oil, antifreeze, as long as you're bringing that and they do require you bring it in approved container. You can't just bring it in a milk jug or anything like that. But typically, if somebody's doing their own oil change and they put it back into the um or they have it in the uh catch uh containers that we also sometimes give away at no cost through the Delorta site, they can bring that and they can dump it into a huge uh collector that the auto parts stores have. So, and that's at no cost to consumers. So, I just want to throw that out there because there is a cost to you ultimately when we have these contracts to come pick up stuff that people leave in the alleys.

So, thank you very much. Those are my questions. Thank you both. I appreciate the uh the report. Um and also know that a lot of us here are doing a lot of outreach too with our community letting them know about where they can dispose of these items to try to discourage those from doing illegal dumping. So I think it's a collective effort that we're all doing. If there's no further comments or questions on this, what's the pleasure of council on this item? I'll move the recommended action. Oh, I'm sorry. Do you have a question? The second. No, I'll second your motion. Okay, madam cler call for the vote. Uh, Mayor Promteran, yes. Council member Palo, yes. Councilwoman Pettis, yes. Councilwoman Rodriguez, hi. Councilman Star, yes. Councilwoman Basua, yes. Mayor MacArthur,

yes. And this motion carries seven to zero. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Clerk. We will now move to item L7. Uh, pulled for discussion by council member Star and and I think Council Member Bareell also has some questions on it. Uh this is a special tax and bond accountability act reports uh annual reports for fiscal year 202425 recommendation. Uh staff recommends the city council receive and file the special tax and accountability act report CFD annual reports for the fiscal year ending June 30th 2025. This item did not originate in committee. And we'll start with uh you council member Brello. We go. Okay. I'm sorry. Go ahead.

Thank you. I just note that uh we used an outside consultant to prepare this report NBS and I just wanted to point out I think a couple flaws that they did in when they wrote when they put put this together. I want to draw your attention to page 353 of the staff report. Okay. Tell me when you're there.

Are are you there? Okay, great. So, in the in the case of the uh River Park CFD, I know the voters adopted measure I. It reduces the scope of services for which residents could be taxed and that I saw here that this still says fire protection and suppression services. I know that's wrong because the voters changed that. Uh there might be other categories here that might also no longer apply. I think that's something that we should ask NBS to fix that part of the report. So that's first.

Yeah. I think the way the introductory paragraph says is that it was originally established in 2005 for the following. So maybe just a clarification. they need to clarify to show an update uh to the language and and sort of a similar criticism uh on on the CFDs for CBridge particularly I I think it would be I think it's CFD3 which is the um just a second which page uh that one let me let me try to find that particular page but I I'll I'll describe my issue

uh I know the residents there adopted a measure as well back in 2018 that limited the administrative charges that were possible on the bond on the safety that paid for the bond to $5,000 per year. And I see in uh this report that they're showing administrative expenses of 11,000 and change for six months. So probably about 22 22 2,000 23,000 roughly per year. So, I'm thinking that maybe the CFD needs to be looked at and see are we are we charging them incorrectly, not in accordance with uh I think it was measure H back in 2018. Uh or or what's going on with that.

We can look at that. Thank you. And that's that's all I've got. Thank you, Council Member. Council member Blo.

Yes. Uh thank you very much. The only questions I have is there is a each of these things has questions about delinquencies of payments and on page 478 there's a line and it says NBS which is the consultant that's hired to do this work will continue to monitor the delinquencies and recommend the appropriate delinquency management actions to the city as needed. And I'm wondering you know have they recommended or when will they recommend? how does that get shared to the city council? And I appreciate I was able to talk with a couple of people and ask questions and got good responses and and I think it's worthwhile to share with the rest of the council information.

So I'll let Mr. Miller talk in detail about it, but you can imagine for those who who own property, have owned property in the past, there there are methods by which the county addresses late payments uh whether that's penalties, things like that. Um there's also collections process. Uh those things are all in place. Um and then there are other I want to also mention that there could be reasons why those um the taxes which includes assessments aren't paid because maybe there's a legal um action going on with the property, probate or something like that. So it's it's not being paid because of that. Um, so there there may be other reasons why it's delinquent other than just somebody just didn't want to pay or doesn't pay. Um, and so but Anthony can go into a little more detail about some of the other options that that are available to us. Um, and the way he works, his team works with NBS in terms of getting the information to us.

I appreciate that and I'm looking forward to Anthony. But I just wanted to share with the councilman when I'm looking through this and I see delinquencies and I see amounts of money. I represent some of the areas in this item and I know that the people in those areas will be asking questions such such as, "Hey, I'm paying my bill. How come this guy's not and what are you doing about it?"

Good evening, uh, council. Um, Anthony Miller, special districts, uh, manager, public works department. Uh, so, Councilman Pello, thank you for the questions. In regard to delinquencies and how those are typically handled on the city side, um public works director did mention that, you know, city staff primarily lets the county do their process before any real action is taken on the city side in terms of delinquencies. There is a specified um date range in which the county sends out delinquency notices directly to properties which are considered delinquent on their property taxes. you know, generally that happens around May and uh the June 30th end of end of the fiscal year coincides with this uh this report's time frame and actions beyond that point generally revolve around the individual bond covenants that a lot of these special taxes are tied to. So bond covenants generally dictate how and what staff should do or can do in regard to special taxes. And I'll just I'll use CBridge as an example. Um the initial date or time frame in which the bond covenant for Seabbridge calls out um pursuing potentially pursuing uh delinquent taxes is October 1st and the uh methodology available to the city is to initiate foreclosure proceedings. Uh generally speaking, NBS doesn't recommend that uh we follow through with uh those uh those particular processes until delinquencies reach a certain threshold uh which usually in the case it follows along with the bond covenants still. So in CBridge for example that's 5% of the total special tax amount for that given fiscal year. So

thank you. I appreciate the time and effort you spent with me explaining some of that and I hope the council's picked up on that because um I don't think it matters which district in the city. If somebody next door is getting a free ride eventually people are going to start asking they're going to ask their elected official and if they would have asked me I wouldn't have been able to answer the question. I really appreciate your detailed answer especially to me. Thank you Mr. Miller. Yeah. Go ahead.

Thank you. Uh while we have you Mr. Miller. Uh, just wanted to give you an opportunity here if you have any initial information or even just ballpark time frames on any CFDs who will be able to participate in the um budget season process as uh we come into the new calendar year. If you have any um info you'd like to share about that.

Well, I'm I'm glad you actually asked because I was in the process of drafting an email in the back of the room uh to my team because we're starting we started that process yesterday. So, uh, that is going to be something that we'll be doing over the course of the next 8 weeks. Um, so likely we'll be seeing notices come from my office to the individual CFDs and neighborhood councils probably between now and the end of the year and then we'll be scheduling out to the end of January and February. Great. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Oh, council me. Yeah, just I know it was requested earlier what page I was looking at and it was page 278 was the page I was looking at where I see the estimated administrative expenses of $11,65 for a six-month period. It's like that table 3.2 I think it's there. So if if you can if we can look at that and see why that's not 5,000 a year which is what they the voters limited it to. Thank you. And uh and just to kind of like uh to build upon uh PLO's comments about the uh default rate, I I also noticed that the default rate had been increasing versus what we've seen in earlier years. And I'm I'm starting to wonder if there's a lot of I assume there's probably a lot of financial stress out there. I know a lot of people have told me about how they're struggling with u day-to-day bills, and it wouldn't surprise me if we see this delinquency rate go up from here.

Appreciate it. Thank you, Council Member. There's no further uh comments. This is only a receipt and file item. I I would I would suggest one thing. Um Mr. Wolf, can you explain in the numbers? Some of the numbers are points in time. Some of the numbers are fiscal um fiscal year and some of them are cumulative fiscal year when we look at these numbers.

Yeah. So what uh council member Prell is talking about is different parts of the report they they take a snapshot of time whether that's a fiscal year snapshot in time for delinquency and then later on the same report they they'll do an average across multiple fiscal years but in that multiple fiscal year table you'll notice that they're taking a snapshot like in August of each of the years and so while some of some folks may think that the numbers should all match it actually is a different point in time what they're what they're taking those statistical analysis on and the majority majority of the of the averages are are, you know, below 1%. Uh the majority of the current last fiscal year averages are are below 1%. So we're talking about some small numbers, but to to your point to to both council member Star and your point, Council Member Pllo is no free rights, right? There should be money that's paid. Um yeah, and and there's processes by which that that that could be collected through the county first and then as Anthony mentioned, things that we can do after that.

And my understanding is Mr. Miller, correct me or Mr. Wolf. If it does come to the collection, the county does not handle it. They dump it on the city attorney's office. Our city attorney's office.

So, I will say that when it comes to collections, the the property tax payments when they're identified as delinquent, it doesn't necessarily I wouldn't say get dumped on the city attorney's office. the county still does pursue those delinquent payments um through essentially a billing process and then it does potentially get handed over to a collections agency if if it gets to that point. But generally speaking, the county has a very long time frame to collect on those delinquent property taxes. In fact, after June 30th, after that June 30th time frame of 2025, delinquent property taxes are then rolled into the next tax bill and they cannot be separated. So, there are a number of steps that the county takes to address and collect on delinquent property taxes. Um, but I'm sure they wouldn't mind a reminder letter from the on the city's behalf, but more often than not, the county is usually pretty defensive about the city getting, you know, into their processes.

Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Miller. We'll uh now move to item N1.

Oh, this just received. Yeah, this this last one was a receipt and file only also from public works. Uh this is the public project agreement with Philank uh for primary clarifiers and activated sludge tank improvement project. The recommendation is that the city council approve and authorize one a total of 50 56,174906 and project funds for the primary clarifiers and activated sludge tank improvement project. two that that the mayor is allowed to execute an agreement with Felank in the amount of 46,812422 for the project and approve a project contingency amount of 4,681-242 uh with philan for a total not to exceed value of 51,493664 for the project three a project allocation amount of 4,681242 for engineering inspection survey project management for the project. And four, a project budget appropriation in the amount of 22,579552 from the wastewater bond uh state revolving fund as well as the corresponding transfers in the wastewater capital fund for the primary clarifiers and activated sludge tank improvement project. Five, a project budget appropriation in the amount of 5 million from the wastewater operation fund as well as a corresponding transfers in the wastewater capital fund for the wastewater collection gravity main improvement project. uh six project budget unappropriations in the total amount of $18,950159 from the wastewater bond state revolving fund consisting of 5 million for the wastewater collection gravity main

improvement project and 13,950159 for the auctioner wastewater treatment plant reliability project as well as the corresponding transfers in the wastewater capital fund in both projects. And lastly, number seven, a project budget unappropriation in the amount of 3,397350 from the wastewater operating fund and corresponding transfers in the wastewater capital fund for the primary clarifiers and activated sludge tank improvement project. This item did not originate in committee as this is a capital improvement project specifically listed in the city's capital improvement program budget which was previously approved by city council. Director Michael Wolf is here to answer any questions council members may have. Um, madam clerk, are there any speakers on this item?

Uh, mayor and council members, we do not have any public speakers in person or virtually for this item. Thank you. Thank you. Do any council members have any questions or comments? Council member St. Go ahead.

Thank you. So, uh, this is just for, uh, my understanding. So, from what I'm understanding here, there's a maybe a different or maybe more robust bidding process that's used when SRF funds are involved. Unless I misunderstood that completely. So we have certain requirements when certain types of funding sources are used. Um and I'll give some examples. Um ARPA funds have specific ARPA requirements. Other grant-f funded projects may have their own grant requirements. Um and I can have Mr. bean talk about specifically um SRF requirements but I don't believe there are any specific SRF um there are so he could talk about some of the specifics because there are certain funding sources that have their own requirements you know please include this document please include these requirements in your bid package such that it meets the requirements of the of the funding source so if you want to talk about the specific ones for SRF

thank you

good evening city council uh Tim Beman assistant director of public works so for SRS funding specifically it is federally based even though it is done through the state. Um so some of the ones are the Davis Bacon wage and so that's requirements on how much uh laborers and people who are working on the project are paid. Um we also have American iron and steel. Um so that is where procurement of items they must be u manufactured with American um made products and from American resources. Uh the other one in there is the disadvantaged business. And so we have to give the contractors plenty of time to actually advertise and show that they've made a good faith effort to bring in those disadvantaged businesses and give them the opportunity to bid on uh portions of the project as a subcontractor

and and does this particular process the requirements that SRF has uh federal government through SRF has is that any driver of the increase in the cost that we originally had? originally was estimated for 40 million. I think it's we're looking 56 million now, which is a kind of a 40% jump if my math is right. U is there any portion of that that's higher because the federal government has specific requirements on us that makes it more costly? So I would say when you're looking at 56 million that includes the you know staff time that we include in the 10% as well as contingency. So

really we're looking at you know uh right around 46 million. So for an eight, so that original 40 million uh engineers estimate is 18 months old. So we've had this design completed for some time, but because we have the reliability project going on, we don't want you contractors fighting over the same square footage to be able to do their project because that can lead to, you know, they're delaying me, no, they're delaying me, and that can lead to change orders. So we delayed bidding out this project. So over that 18 months with the escalation that we've seen in construction costs, that's about in line. Okay. All right. Thank you so much. Thank you. Any other questions or comments? Go ahead, Council Member.

Um, this is a a continuation of the extremely deferred sewer plant and everything. The last time that there was a potential fine for the city of Oxnard if any liquid sewage got into the ocean, it was $10,000 a gallon. Has that amount changed? That sounds

Yeah, I I I don't know. I don't have that answer right now. I know that there are the ability for certain regulatory agencies to finance by event and by day is there. Um I don't know if they do it by gallon, but um we've seen in the paper multiple millions of dollars of of of fines for other agencies um in Southern California. So that that is a reality in terms of large fines. Whether or not they do it by gallon, by day, by incident, and and the dollar amount, we don't have that right now. I should have asked it before giving you a heads up. Um, the only reason I bring it up is this is a plant that was extremely deferred for maintenance for decades and now we're dealing with it and the costs go up. Um, part of it maybe could be for tariffs or whatever the reasons they went up. Things cost more. I know my sandwich costs more, but the issue is the cost to the public in health, safety, and welfare, let alone purse. if we have problems down there and it gets into the environment and potentially hurts people is tremendous. That's why I brought up that question. I appreciate your both of your comments. Thank you.

Thank you, Mayor. I'll move the recommended action if there's no other questions or comments. Thank you, Mayor Portan. Thank you, Council Member. Madame Clerk, I call for the vote. Uh, Councilwoman Basila, yes. Council member Palo, yes. Councilwoman Perez, yes. Councilwoman Rodriguez, yes. Councilman Star. Yes. Mayor Promptan. Yes. Mayor MacArthur. Yes. And this motion carries seven to zero. Thank you.

Thank you. We will move to item N two from public works. This is an agreement with Corollo Engineers for construction management services for the primary clarifiers and activated sludge improvement project. recommendation that the city council approve and authorize the mayor to execute an agreement with uh Carell engineers for an initial term of three years from December 3rd, 2025 to December 2nd, 2028 with the option for two consecutive one-year period extensions ending December 2nd, 2030 for a total amount not to exceed 3,781680 for construction management and inspection services for the primary clarifiers in activated sludge tank improvement project. This item did not originate in committee as this is a capital improvement project specifically listed in the city's capital improvement program budget which was previously approved by city council and director Michael Wolf is here to answer any questions. Madam clerk, do we have any speakers on this item?

Uh mayor and council members, we do not have any public speakers for this item in person or virtually. Thank you. Thank you. Uh any comments or questions? Uh sure. Go ahead. customer. So sometimes these reports we'll we'll know the identity of the other bidder or the losing biders but I didn't see that here. Uh so we had two proposals. I know staff chose Corollo based on your scoring system. I was wondering as to the identity of the firm not selected.

So our purchasing policy uh does not allow us to uh divulge the information through this process. So this is a different process. The one we just spoke about before is a competitive bid, public project, low bid. This one is a professional services contract. So we withhold the information about other biders, other proposals until the award. Okay. So after the award, we can learn about it. Yep. Okay. So maybe after today. Okay. Maybe in five seconds if you guys vote on it. But yeah, I I think we you you know the other approvals. So, we could tell you, but we have to wait for this process.

Okay, that's fine. So, I guess I was curious whether Brown and Caldwell was asked to bid as that firm developed the design documents and I see they're the firm you're choosing for the next item on the tonight's agenda, but I sort of thought, huh, it would have been a natural fit. So again, public contracting code and purchasing policy requirements, you have to there are certain um um restrictions in terms of who can do these kinds of works if you if you've already touched the project once. So uh the designer of record is typically procluded from doing the construction management work because there's a conflict of interest. I see when they have to decide on who's right or who's wrong. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you. Any other question or comments? Go ahead. Council member question. Uh if if by chance our public works were to go out and ask somebody to bid on a project, wouldn't that potentially maybe the question for the city attorney or the city attorney, the public works city attorney? If our city department goes out and asks a specific company to bid on a project, don't we get into a can of deep worms here, a problem that people will come back and go, you're favoring one versus the other simply by talking to them, asking them versus putting it out in a broad advertised public bid process.

So, so I can answer that. Um we do have procurement policy requirements in terms of who who can and who should not be talking to um expect expected um firms that going to propose and so typically we refrain from contacting anybody directly for for that reason. Um but if somebody comes to us and says hey we're interested in bidding on these kinds of projects then we we get them in contact with uh purchasing they put them on the distribution list. Um but yeah, we're trying to create a fair and equitable process and so uh we don't typically reach out directly to uh vendors, but if vendors do contact us, we say, "Yep, we have these projects or please go talk to purchasing about it." Um so there are certain u rules that we have to follow for that.

Thank you. And I appreciate what you said. You're trying to conduct a fair process and a fair process for the expenditure of public money. Thank you. There's nothing precluding us from from making sure everybody knows about uh you know an advertisement. It's just that there's a there's a fine line and a requirement in our process about who can do that and how that happens things like that. Another question.

So I I I have a question about the just the approach to scoring criteria uh when you select one proposal versus another. I know you're looking at several, I guess, factors. And what I'd like to know is I I know if I was in that position trying to score somebody, I I know there would be this natural bias in my head to think, oh, what what can I do to make this guy look a little better? If it's if it's subjective, I may have that little halo uh effect, if you will. What what what what happens here? So, what what happens? Um, what are you able to do to make it as objective of decision as as possible?

Well, my first comment is I'm not sure anybody's actually trying to steer contract. I I don't think that that was your intent of your comment. That's not my intention. It was a little bit of hyperbole, but I'm just simply saying how how do you how do you how do you maintain an an unbiased uh approach? because I know that for example if I'm hiring a candidate sometimes you think this person walks on water I want to hire this person but that may just be an impression and sometimes you just have to go through that extra effort to say oh what's the objective criteria that I have to come up with to to hire that person

so so the good news is not one person doing the selection process so it's multiple people so it's not focused in on one person um and so that really provides a pretty level process by which if I ask seven different people other opinion, I'm going to get eight different opinions, right? So, I think that that is is by far the foremost of this process.

Um because you're correct in that it's not a numbers process. It's not is it 10 or 11, right? You get these many points. Although um um if you do include cost as part of the evaluation process, that's obviously a numbers process. Um but each individual um having done a lot of these in my past brings their own expertise into this. I wouldn't say biased uh their own expertise. And so when they read a proposal, when I read a proposal, I look at certain things maybe differently than somebody else looks at things, but the scoring criteria is set such that it's x number of points for this category maximum or it's y number of points for the next category. So if that in itself also creates that that process by which you can't sort of game the system by saying well I'm going to give out of 100 points I'm going to give 90 points to this consultant on this one scoring criteria because it's maxed out at 10 points. Um and so I think that's part of the process as well. But each one we want this process to happen because everybody brings their own expertise into the process and everybody's looking at it from a a slightly different lens. Right? And so our operations manager is looking at it from a different lens than potentially our the the engineer, the project manager versus the uh assistant public works director. So each one of them looking at it a little bit different from a different lens on purpose, right? Because each of them have their own expertise. And so I wouldn't call that biased. I would say that that's part of the process.

Yeah, I understand. Maybe bias is not the right word, but you know, people develop favorites. They like to work with certain vendors sometimes for whatever reason. But uh I guess I assume that these scoring criteria it's developed before the it's developed before the actual the process begins. Right. Correct. So the RFP will will stipulate how we're going to score this process. Now some places that's dictated in the code municipal code. Some places that's dictated in the state code. Like if you're doing certain types of selection process, you have to you have to use these criteria. You can't make up your own like, well, we want to score people who wear, you know, white shirts better than we want to score people that wearing blue shirts, right? We can't make up that criteria. Some of that's already preset in terms of the process. And I think Elle has a couple things she wanted to add.

So, what I'm hearing is that there's a set rubric and folks when they apply and they compile their application, they know what they should be including in their application. So, there's a stronger application and not so strong application.

Yeah. And the um proposers are provided the scoring criteria. the categories are broken down so they know which ones are weighted more um or less. Typically, when you're looking at a request for proposal, cost is the lowest portion and in certain instances depending on if it's an architect or an engineer, you're actually prohibited from um scoring based on cost and that's right in the government code. So you pick the one best, you pick the propos the proposal who has the who meets your needs the best I guess and then you would negotiate price directly with them or um you know select the other one and do the same. So do you guys have any other further questions? Yeah, thank you. Go ahead council member.

Yes. Um it seems that there may be something in some of our council members minds about you know people having favorites. Can you share with us how are the people that do the selection? How are they chosen? Are there favorites that get that? Because I could see a person I may like a Snickers candy bar more than a Babe Ruth, but when it comes to giving somebody a job, it's a whole different story. And I would imagine if I get snagged showing favorites and giving somebody a job, there's legal liability.

Yeah. So, a couple things there. So um typically somebody like myself or Tim will will pick the selection team based on again what I talked about. We want to have some expertise selecting this process, right? What is the project actually doing? Is it going to affect operations? Is it going to affect um the administrative component of it? What you know what is it going to affect? And so we try to pick the right folks to to be on the selection team as diverse as diverse as possible. Sometimes we even bring in outside um assistance in that evaluation, especially if it's very technical in its in its evaluation process. And one of the things that um the assistance the attorney mentioned to me as she was walking away was that each individual reviews it on their own. So it's not done as a we don't sit in a room and then talk about points and talk about it's all done by yourself. You score it and you have to submit that information before anybody else actually sees all the scores. And so it's done in a very independent fashion as well. But but your original question is like how do we select the process? Sometimes Tim may select you know his his operations manager, his his project manager and then somebody from the administrative team or he may want himself to be on it because he feels like he can bring a certain type of expertise to the evaluation process. So it's it's kind of that in terms of how we make that selection. Sometimes you have seen a lot of our on call contracts come to to council rec recently and that's uh a usual process you know every three or five years depending on how how frequently we we uh space them out. Um there may just be a pre preset team that does that evaluation process. So that may be the city engineer, the uh senior civil engineer and the project manager. So you may see the same team do it because it's a very wte process in that fashion. So sometimes it's a set team, sometimes it's based on expertise and kind of how the project is going to function. So different ways of doing it.

Thank you. Thank you. I think I'm sorry. I think Mr. Bean had something you wanted to add. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Just on the selection committee. So you know we we have two project managers for all of our utilities. So, Omar Ortiz and George Espinos are both very good project managers and for the amount that they handle um they are wellversed in this and you probably also might have noticed that as these items come up it's rarely the same consultant. Now there are some consultants that do this sort of work and they always go for those um particularly with water and wastewater but we we do not you can become your own worst enemy when you if you're choosing one consultant for a selection. So there's definitely um you know we encourage everyone to come in because we want that variety in who's doing work for us. Um the other part of it that will and as part of the RFP process we can add in there in the processes is if it if we need to we'll hold interviews and so if that scoring process those people that bring it in that's just not sure we can hold interviews with those and so we get the facetoface time to be able to make the correct selection.

Appreciate it. Thank you. Cone Perez. Do you have something? Yeah, I was um looking at the term of agreement on 764 and just wanting some clarity regarding the construction timeline. Does that mean um where it says to December 2nd, 2028 that that would be the the end of when the project will be complete or do we have a sense of when we should anticipate construction to be completed?

So Tim will talk about it, but in the previous item there's a very specific set number of days that they were given to finish the project. Now, that obviously is contingent upon everything going perfect. Um, and then Tim can talk about the specific dates that we picked for the professional services agreement, but you also notice that in section 4B in the same page, there's allowable for extension time as well. So, but he can talk about the the dates picked.

So, the dates on this project because of the SRF funding, we do have a timeline that we do need to complete it in. And so, that's that is part of it. But as Michael brought up, we do add those one-year extensions because we just don't know what we're going to find when we get into the ground. And so we want to be prepared so we're not coming back to you multiple times and saying, "Oh, we were wrong. We need four more days. Oh, we were wrong. We need six more days." So we just add that option in there. Great. My last question is really just around the surrounding area. um any anything that the public should be aware of for the people that live in that surrounding area around environmental impacts or anything like that, noise, things of that nature?

So, our closest neighbors to the uh treatment facility are actually residents of Fort Wayne and um many of them have my cell phone on speed dial. So, uh I and I being honest, I've been over there many times to go over and to meet with people if they have a concern or something that's going on with a fence or something that they see. And so we do address those. Um in terms of Oxnard residents, we are somewhat isolated over there. So our our nearest neighbors are Port Wayne residents and then of course the industrial users uh across the street. Um so there is some interaction but it's pretty minor. Thank you. Mr. Do you have something?

I'm sorry. Just one more thing to add. So this project actually when it's all done said and done there's an o order sorry a o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o odor control component to this project. So actually is intended to be better for the for our neighbors as well. Um we're not as stinky as New Indie because they they do a lot of uh stuff there, but that I'm joking. But um we do have components of our project that are that are that are better that make this better for our neighbors. Um, a lot a lot of that is to control the the smells that that that come off of our plant because everybody knows what we're dealing with over there. So, thank you, Mr. W. Go ahead.

Uh, sure. I just want to remind everyone this somewhat convoluted discussion about the bureaucratic rules. There's a lot of history to this and it's evolved over many decades. Hopefully every iteration is an actual improvement, but it stems out of not having good bureaucratic rules. And basically, if you go back in time uh far enough, well, if you go back in time far enough, no one like me would be a city manager. But let's say I was, uh I would just be able to give a contract to my cousin Vin, who has no uh credentials or qualifications. And that's why uh these kinds of bureaucratic rules have evolved over time. Uh so it's not it's you know we we frame it today as we want to have a fair process but it's really the history of it is to prevent um a lot of corruption.

So just a reminder about bureaucracy.

Thank you Mr. W. Okay Mayor Port. And just along those lines, not to belabor the discussion, but uh the city manager makes an important point, and this is not something that doesn't happen still in the decade we're in right now. I I apologize, I forget which county it is, but down south there was a county supervisor who was recently um I believe convicted of uh these types of actions the city manager is referring to. And now some of the um repercussions from that is a monument that I believe was built for, you know, a million plus dollars that is already seeing um degradation just from the weather of the area. And those are meant to last 100 years. And just a few years later, just because of the um from what I recall on the story, uh the relationship that this county supervisor had with this uh contractor was really just to get that person the contract. They built something that was not to the standard that should have been for that type of project. And now the taxpayers are paying for that. So this stuff does happen and that's why these rules are in place.

At least he's in jail. Yep. Council member. Yeah. My last question, uh, do we after it's all said and done, do we ever tell the losing biders why they weren't chosen or what they need to do differently in the future? Because I don't want to discourage people from bidding again in the future. It can get really discouraging, putting a lot of work into developing these proposals and then just being turned down. We we if they reach out, we will offer them a debrief. Um, that's usually done through the purchasing u proc uh purchasing department or sorry, purchasing division of the finance department. Um, so they could be offered a debrief of of kind of things that that may allow them to improve their their scoring. So we we would offer that.

Okay. Thank you. Thank you. What's the pleasure of council on this item? I'll move the recommended action. Thank you, Madam Cler. Call for the vote. Uh, council member Palo. Yes. Councilwoman Perez. Yes. Councilwoman Rodriguez, yes. Council member Star, yes. Mayor Prompter, yes. Councilwoman Boua is not here. Uh, Mayor uh, Mayor MacArthur. Yes. And this motion carries six to zero. Thank you.

Thank you. The next item on the agenda is item N3. Subject entails the fifth amendment to professional services agreement with Brown and Caldwell for primary clarifiers and activated sludge basin improvement project. The recommended actions that the city council approve and authorize the mayor to execute a fifth amendment to professional services agreement with Brown and Caldwell to increase the not to exceed amount from 1,ion349868 to 2,60975 and extend the term to June 30th, 2028 for additional engineering services during construction required for the primary clarifiers inactivated sludge improvements. This item did not originate in committee as this is a capital improvement project specifically listed in the city's capital improvement program budget which was previously approved by city council and director Michael Wolf is here to answer any questions. Madam clerk, are there any public speakers on this item?

Um mayor and council members, we do not have any public speakers in person or virtually for this item. Thank you. Thank you. We'll move to comment council one. I was just going to make a comment that as I was reading these uh different reports, I really appreciate the comprehensive um uh information and the videos, even the order of which way I should watch the videos. Um it was very helpful to know that I had the briefings and I understand what you all meant by like slush and all of this. So, thank you for the tours that you all have given this council woman. I appreciate that. Sludge. Sludge. There you go. Sludge.

Thank you. Any other comments, council members? So I I I noticed that there was like says you had over 200 responses to over 200 requests for information and that seems like a whole lot. Can you can you kind of give us an inkling of what do we know now that we did know before as a result of all these responses?

So I I could have Tim talk about some of the details, but I will say that 200 RFIs during a bidding process for close to a $50 million project is not it's not out of the ordinary. Um it's a very complex uh project with a lot of moving parts. Um and so the good news is is that you have biders that are diving into the details and and asking questions because that gives us a comfort level of one validating our documents but two them having a true understanding of what it's needed to do the project. And so it's actually a good thing that we see um a certain number of RFIs. Now there may be I have seen in the past not here in Oxnar but other places where you start getting a feeling for the RFIs are being submitted because the documents aren't good. Uh I don't think that's the case here but I can let Tim talk to that.

So yeah the 200 RFIs that we did receive it does as Michael said it's very big on the complexity of the project. Also, these contractors are looking um you know for any efficiencies that they can find in order to reduce their own cost to make sure that they're the winning bid.

Um so we see a lot of them where they're requesting asbuilt drawings so of the original structures. And in this case, you know, some of these are structures that were built in the ' 50s, rehabbed in the '7s, rehabbed again in the '9s. And so there's lots of drawings that go into this. um and they're looking for to make sure that there is an un any unknown that they may miss that may cost them down the line. And so that a lot of those RFIs uh the requests for information are actually record drawings and things that they ask for on top of the actual design drawings. So they are diving into this. These uh these contractors have you know probably teams of 10 20 people working on these at any one time. um diving into all those aspects of it.

And my assumption is that it's it's kind of it's a two-way conversation. I imagine you have lots of requests for clarification of these proposals. Is that I don't know if they actually amend their proposal or if they just give you some sort of statement that says, "Well, we mean this."

So, the way Lisa Shirley, who ran this bid, uh she did an excellent job and she sets up a spreadsheet. So every everything is written all those questions and everything is submitted in writing via email. We document each one of those and then we send it to the appropriate. So if it has something to do with uh you know our agreement or our contract agreement, you know, we can send those to the city attorney's office. If it's something with the design itself, we send those to the uh engineer of record. Um and then they get addressed and submitted as addendums. So those addendums if it does come up with some change or you know uh and and on the drawing it says you know stainless steel 306 and in the specification it says 316. We provide that clarification and then we develop what's called a conform set of drawings and specifications. So if there are any small changes we put that in the conform set um and deliver that as part of the agreement.

I just want to add something there and you said two-way conversation. It's not. We have to be careful about providing unfair advantage to one bidder versus the other. So, as as Tim mentioned, it's all documented. It's all done through a formal process. So, there's not really a conversation that's happening. It's question, answer, question, answer. Um, and then if it leads to a change in the documents, then that would be uh an official addendum that gets submitted out and the contractors then have to acknowledge the addendum when they submit a bid. But it's a very official process. So, it's not like we're having a I just want to make sure everybody's clear. It's not a two-way conversation that's really occurring. It's it's following the process, you know, question answer, question answer, all documented. So, everybody who has plans, everybody who's a plan holder gets all the same piece of information. So, there's not an unfair advantage from one contractor to the other.

Right. So, maybe a better way to say is that it's it's an iterative process. Yes. Okay. Yeah. Go ahead, Mayor B.

I just had one last one. Thank you. Sorry. Uh so I I notice uh in a paragraph on page 8:15 it starts off saying since the completion of the design the primary effluent underground pipe work has failed in another location and let's see I guess it has a lot to do with hydrogen sulfide just rotting away at the piping. I guess my question is how are you able to determine there was a failure in underground pipe to begin with? I what what is the symptoms you see if it's if it's happening underground? Is it I mean is there lots of breaks and maybe we just don't know about it right now or is it or is there something that's obvious because maybe gases rise up through the ground or how does that work? So in both cases of this unfortunately they're found as soft spots in the asphalt and so where that break occurs it does start to eat away or so that when there the H2S hits the concrete it does start to degrade it that will create a void dirt starts to fall in and then you get a small hole you start to see a sinkhole. So because we have so many operators walking around the plant, you know, 24 hours a day, um we are able to see when something like that occurs. Now, unfortunately, those signs are after the break has actually already occurred. Um in both cases, those are fully contained. Um but that's that's how we find them. Someone walks along says that looks like a soft spot of concrete or asphalt or concrete and that shouldn't be there. And we actually will excavate and do an inspection to see if something is going on. assume it must take years sometimes for a problem to be

I assume thank you. I assume it must take years for some in some cases for a problem to even be recognized. Definitely. I mean, so the primary clarifiers were constructed in the early '7s and so here we are, right? You know, 50 some odd years later and that's when we're starting to see those breaks occur. And so that we wanted to integrate any possibility of finding those through construction into this where if it does require additional work to change in design to accommodate. Thank you. Thank you. Go ahead.

So Mayor Port. That's right. Yes. Thank you. Yeah. It's just uh a followup to Council Member Star's question about um the uh request for information and the bidding process as the public works director and Mr. Bean have pointed out. Um any of my colleagues here who have done an RFP process or any kind of RFQS or any of these um uh bidding especially competitive processes uh as Mr. Wolf pointed out um there are uh certain um guard rails in place to ensure that it is an objective process especially for those who are on the um receiving side uh receiving the bids. And I know in my experience, this may be a surprise for many, but when I've been involved in uh writing um proposals, I ask a lot of questions and I I want clarification and I was, oh, he said this, but do you mean this or how does this fit? And oftentimes, especially when it's a state level or a federal level uh request, there will be a period where you can ask questions and they're all received and then all of the questions are published for all of the biders or potential biders to review. um during that time. And so um you know, I I appreciate you making the distinction that it's not uh literally a two-way conversation here, but rather um uh clarification for those placing bids so that it is an objective process, but they do have the information they need to put forward a uh responsive proposal. So, thank you for that.

Yeah, we also include to your point, we include certain timelines in our in our bid documents. questions must be received by X date and we'll respond accordingly and then so that that's also put in there for that very specific reasons. I did want to go back and just make one clarification. It was actually the item before but it comes up in this sort of evaluation process. The question was about do we offer up um helpful hints for for folks that don't win certain types of awards. I just want to make sure that as long as that's allowed through our process then we certainly would give that opportunity up. So, it there may be some places where that may not be allowed. And so, we just got to make sure we're following our our procedures, whether they're inter uh city procedures or state procedures, but for the most part, those kinds of professional service contracts, you're you're able to have that that conversation after the fact. But again, as long as it's not precluded by some of our codes here.

Yeah. Thank you, Kim Po. Go ahead.

Thank you. Thank you for the clarification, both of you. Thank you for adding more insight into this thing. Um, number one, it's great that you have all these questions being asked and things shared. Having been involved with two different school districts on change orders and why the change orders were there and who dropped the ball that there's these change or is a big deal and it's extremely costly because change orders, they don't go out for bid. But the big question I have in the specifically the hydrogen sulfide gas and how it attacks concrete. Is there a set we have in the staff report we talk about the life expectancy 30 years, 50 years, 20 years, whatever. Is there a set time that you expect concrete to fail? And if if you find a soft spot

and the soft spot is say a 40 40 inch pipe diameter pipe half a mile long and you found a soft spot, do you come to the conclusion that you need to take out the whole pipe because the pipe was all put in at the same time and if the hydrogen sulfide gas has attacked the usually they attacked the ceiling of the pipe. um it's attacked the ceiling of the pipe the whole way. How is that determination made? Do you send a camera dive or what do you do?

So in this case, in these particular cases, I believe in my presentation I had a picture of of one of the failures and you can see it's only at the very very top. And when we excavate the rest of the pipe is perfect. If it's fully submerged, I who knows several lifetimes um that that concrete pipe can last because it is fully submerged. It's not getting attacked by the H2S. It is in perfect condition. It's only where the H2S hits. So on our design in this, what we aim to do is change it so those pipes remain fully submerged. Now when we did have that break, we excavated it out and we do do you know we empty the pipe and we do a physical inspection so we can see down the line of okay this is where the corrosion stops. So this is where the pipe becomes fully submerged. Um and now in some cases if it's a pressurized pipe where your pipe is and where your leak comes up can depend on what's above it. So if there's a concrete layer, if there's a certain type of uh back fill, it can come up on the other side of the road, it can come up, you know, in in somewhere else because it's looking for the path of least resistance. So in these cases, this is all gravity. So typically with gravity, I've seen some odd cases where it popped up in other other areas, but typically with gravity pipe, it's going to be directly over the pipe, but if it's pressurized, you can find it in other areas.

Thank you. And the only, you know, just as a councilman driving through the city sometimes, the only thing I can share is I will see various crews for the city trying to find a leak on an irrigation pipe and it's a, you know, a landscaping thing and it's like it's maddening for the guys doing the work and for the people driving by. Can't they find it? Leaks travel. Thank you. Thank you for the explanation.

Yeah, just a clarification on the submerge. Um, so when we're talking about uh gravity fed, especially sewer uh pipes, when when Tim is talking about submerged, we're talking about it being fully a wet fully weted perimeter inside the pipe. So, we don't want to have that air gap inside the pipe. Not submerged like underneath water the pipe, but the pipe itself inside the pipe is all the way up to the top such that you don't create that air gap that allows that that hydrogen sulfide to do its dirty deed on top of there. Um, and so that's what he means by fully submerged. Not that it's the pipe is submerged, but inside the pipe is a fully wetted perimeter. If there is a air gap in a certain length of pipe, can we make the assumption that the pipe wasn't laid level?

I don't know if you can. So with gravity, you do not want to be laid level. That's that reduces your flow. Um, and so there is it's there's entire tables that say here's the size of your pipe. Here's the minimum slope you need to maintain a certain velocity throughout the pipe. Okay? I mean, you can calculate it as well, but we have tables for all of that. I from irrigation systems I've been involved in. I know that there's settling and all kinds of other stuff, but that's why I asked the question. Thank you. Very helpful. Yeah. Any other questions, comments? If not, what's the pleasure of council move the recommended action? I'll second it. Wonderful. Madam Clerk, could I call for the vote? Uh, Councilwoman Berez. Yes. Councilwoman Rodriguez, hi. Councilman Star, yes.

Mayor Promteran, yes. Councilwoman Basua, yes. Council member Palo, yes. Mayor MacArthur, yes. And this motion carries seven to zero. Thank you. Thank you. Before we adjourn, Sure. Now that N2 is complete, who was the losing bidder on that? Kennedy Kennedy Kennedy Jinx Consulting. Kenny J. I guess unsuccessful, not losing. Thank you. and and they're a pretty serious firm. They're not. They're not. Yep. But after all this discussion, this whole council is ready to show up at the sewer plant tomorrow and go to work. Things I never thought I'd learn. Just saying.

Uh there not been any uh further items on the agenda. And if there's no objection, we are ajourned. Thank you. Objection is not