City Council and Authorities Concurrent - meeting_joint

Hello, hello. Check in the dais. Mayor's mic, one, two. Check, one, two. One, two. Check.

One, two, check, one, two.

This is Albert's mic, Albert's mic.

Okay, Don, that's a full check of the microphones.

Thank you.

Good luck.

How do you do that? Thank you.

Good evening, everyone. I'd like to call the meeting of the Santa Clara City Council Stadium Authority Concurrent Board to order. Confirmation of a quorum, Assistant City Clerk?

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Yes, confirming quorum.

Thank you. We have two items for closed session. City Attorney, would you like to read those, please?

Yes. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Two items. 1A is conference with labor negotiators, city representatives as designated on the agenda. The employee organizations under discussion include Santa Clara Firefighters, unit number one, Police Officers Association, Unit 2, City of Santa Clara Employees Association, Unit 578, Unclassified Police Management, Unit 9A, and Unclassified Fire Management, Unit 9B. In addition, we have conference with legal counsel regarding existing litigation. The case is Windsor and others versus the City of Santa Clara. It's in Superior Court as identified on the agenda. Thank you, Madam Mayor.

Thank you, City Attorney. Do we have any members of the public that would like to speak on these closed session items?

We do, Madam Mayor, online. We have two hands up.

Okay. Can you call them since I can't see them yet?

Yes, the first one is Judy.

Judy? Yes, I wasn't planning on speaking on a closed session. I was waiting for the non-agenda items so I could speak about the kikes. I'll wait my turn.

All right, next.

Linda.

Linda, go ahead Linda. Okay, no Linda? She's muted. Unmute yourself Linda, please. Linda? All right, well that, we are going to adjourn to closed session. We'll be back at 7 p.m. Thank you. City Clerk, are we ready? Could I ask everyone to take their seats, please? Welcome everyone to our Santa Clara City Council Stadium Authority Joint Concurrent Meeting. I'd like to call the meeting to order. Could you please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance and remain standing for our Statement of Values. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

As we gather, we humbly seek blessings upon this meeting. May we act with strength, courage, and will to perform our obligations and duties to our people with justice to all. Let us seek wisdom so that we may act in the best interest of our people, our neighbors, and our country. All this we ask so we may serve our community with fairness and respect, putting their needs before all. Thank you. Please be seated.

City Clerk.

Council Member, Board Member Shahal.

Present.

Council Member, Board Member Hardy. Present. Council Member, Board Member Park. Here. Council Member, Board Member Jane. Here. Council Member, Board Member Cox. Here. Vice Mayor, Vice Chair Gonzales.

Here.

Mayor and Chair Gilmore.

Here.

Thank you. The AB 23 announcement. Members of the Santa Clara Stadium Authority, Sports and Open Space Authority, and Housing Authority are entitled to receive $30 for each attended meeting. Statement of Behavioral Standards. The City of Santa Clara has adopted a code of ethics and values and behavioral standards for public meetings to promote and maintain the highest levels of conduct. This includes mutual respect, robust discussion, and allowing city business to be done in an efficient and consistent manner. Please note that as a presiding officer, the mayor's and chair's direction in matters of process and decorum should be followed and that use of the gavel indicates all conversations must conclude and everyone in attendance should come to order and attention. Welcome and thank you for your participation. For those joining us this evening in the capacity of a registered lobbyist, we ask you to please identify yourself as such and disclose the clients and organizations that you represent. This is pursuant to city code section 2.155.110. Thank you, Madam Mayor.

Thank you. So good evening everyone. For today's meeting the Council is back in person and is conducting its meeting in a hybrid manner. The public is welcome to attend in person and the City continues to use a Zoom feature to allow participation from your home or office. Members of the public can still join via the link and or call into the Zoom meeting phone number shown on the screen now. If you would like to speak on an agenda item or during public presentations, please raise your hand on the Zoom application or press star nine on your phone. Please only raise your hand while the item you're seeking to speak on is presented. Staff will enter your name or the last four digits of your phone number and I will call on you to speak. As a friendly reminder, members of the public have two minutes to speak on an agenda item and three minutes on public presentations, and those are reserved for topics not on the agenda. Prior to each agenda item, staff will lower your hand to ensure that members of the public are seeking to speak on the appropriate agenda item. So we'll now move on to the council agenda. Reports of action taken in closed session. City Attorney.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Council did meet in closed session on items 1A and 1B. Item 1A is conference with labor negotiators. The employee organizations discussed include Unit 1, Unit 2, Unit 5, 7, and 8, Unit 9A, and Unit 9B with details as listed on the agenda. However, there was no reportable action for that item. Council also met on item 1B, conference with legal counsel regarding existing litigation. The name of the case is Windsor et al. versus the City of Santa Clara et al. Also no reportable action on that item. Thank you, Madam Mayor.

Thank you. All right, next we have, hold on one second here. Continuances, exceptions, reconsiderations. We have a very long agenda tonight. So I'm gonna try to manage it the best way possible. I wanna move consent calendar item pulled for discussion number five to the end of the agenda because we have two kind of very major issues. And also city manager, did you have an item that are we gonna continue or city attorney?

Yeah, I've got that one, Madam Mayor. Thank you. Item number 11, which is a public hearing for the adoption of the third zoning code cleanup ordinance and rezoning of properties currently designated TN transit neighborhood to R6 transit neighborhood residential. has some issues that need to be addressed before that item can be properly heard. So staff is requesting that council keep that, note that that public hearing remains open, and take action to continue that item to the council meeting of August 18th.

Do we need a motion for that?

Yes, Madam Mayor.

All right, Council Member Jane.

Yes, thank you, Mayor. I would like to move item number seven. No, no, no.

I'm asking for a motion with what the city attorney just requested.

I'll make a motion to continue the item. He moved, Madam Mayor.

Did you, I didn't hear, I'm sorry.

You just made that motion.

The city attorney's request?

Yes.

Okay, and there's a second by Vice Mayor Gonzales. All right, we have a motion and a second for the city attorney's request to move the item number 11, but keep the public hearing open. Please register your vote. Thank you. That passes unanimously. Councillor Jane, you had another item?

Yes. We have a number of members of the public that are here on the Benton Lawrence project. I would like to move that after public presentations. Item number seven.

We also have a lot of members of the public for the charter review as well. Okay. Is there... Do people want to entertain that? I'll second that. All right, motion and second to move Benton and Lawrence above charter review. I'll support, but I'm not in favor, but I'll support. We have that city clerk. Sorry, we're moving so fast, your fingers are typing so fast. Please register your vote. Oh, I voted, but I'm voting again. There we go, that passes unanimously, thank you. Do we have any other continuances, exceptions, reconsiderations? Alisa online, is this somebody that is on this item?

She had the same request, to move up number seven.

Okay, all right, so now, next item, do we have any members of the public that would like to reconsider, move, continue? Seeing none, we'll move on then to consent calendar. All items are approved with one motion unless an item is pulled for discussion. Do we have any consent items pulled for discussion? Any member of the public? A consent item pulled for discussion? Vice Mayor Gonzales.

I just want to make a motion for the consent calendar.

Second. All right. We have a motion by Vice Mayor Gonzales, second by Council Member Chihal for approval of all items on the consent calendar. Please register vote. And that passes unanimously. Thank you. And that included the stadium authority consent calendar. All right, next we have public presentations. Do we have any members of the public? City Clerk? Kathy? Kathy? Please come forward. Welcome.

I just wanted to come here tonight and just give a big shout out to the Economic Development and Marketing Committee. What a wonderful job that committee has done and equally I am so happy to have been a part of that committee for almost the last year. Through the last year that committee has worked on a lot of community events. that have brought tens of thousands of residents into the public to enjoy their city and see what the city has to offer. I want to thank the staff. I want to thank the very generous sponsor that donated $500,000 to make sure that we had the right activities, the right amenities to make sure that these events were going to be successful. And they certainly were. And they certainly were. What I would also add is that the important thing is that we had community visiting the stadium. We had community attending Lunar New Year events, which the city has never done before. We had community visiting the watch parties after World Cup took place at the stadium. Our residents had an opportunity to enjoy in their own city a watch party and be able to cheer for their favorite teams. I was at the event on Saturday and I was so amazed at how packed the Mission City Ballroom was. I mean, there had to have been over a thousand people at that event and it was really wonderful to see so many families that were happy to be there activities for the children and great food selections and people were there from early in the morning until late at night so i really want to commend the city for more importantly listening to the residents and i know some surveys were done and i hope we'll get the results of those surveys so that we can learn from them i mean was everything perfect no not everything was perfect but that's how we learn and we learn to make different changes for the future to make things better. So again, thank you to the staff, thank you to everybody who just made this opportunity possible, but also the Economic Development and Marketing Committee that took the time to really engage and see what was best for the residents. As they say, it takes a village, and I see this being successful and that village getting better as we bring more people to the table to make sure we have events that people in this city want to be a part of. So thank you for the opportunity.

Thank you. And I just want to say we had more than one sponsor. We had several sponsors, very generous sponsors. Brian, please come forward.

I certainly do not possess the right to read this because the man who spoke was a much better person than I'll ever be. For in the final analysis, our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air, we all cherish our children's future, and we are all mortal. And I think we should remember that, especially in these times when peace seems so elusive. Santa Clara is sort of a bubble in a lot of ways. You know, the world's, but that bubble's shrinking, and I think the reality's coming home to us These words of truth have a lot to do with every day to day life, and I think we should remember it. The man that spoke them was John F. Kennedy. He was not a perfect person, and sometimes to understand these kind of words and try to live them out, you have to have a small PT boat and get run over by a cruiser, and then carry your men, eventually leading them home. And he definitely was not the perfect, but he was an American. and before that even, he was a human being. Thank you.

Thank you, Brian. Next we have Howard. Is Howard here? There you are, way in the back. Welcome.

Thank you. After getting in trouble at yesterday's meeting, I figured I'd just sit in the back, not get in trouble. We had a good time. You know, I've been part of the Economic Development Committee and I've seen a lot of stuff happening and I hope the citizens of Santa Clara really appreciate the hours that everybody in that committee put in. You know, you just went there and hours and hours. And yesterday, what, the meeting went an hour plus past? There's a lot of people putting stuff into that. So anyway, I was talking to my brother and he said, I really need to talk about this. I know I've been keep coming here complaining about how I got screwed over by the FIFA, locked out, couldn't even go to do my train people, basically 21 days with no income. And you know, last time I made a challenge, anybody do it. But he said, you know, you should really go there. You know, I'm 67 years old. I'm going to be 68. I was going to retire at 65, but I knew there was a Super Bowl and a FIFA in two years. Hang on. I'm going to really rack in some bucks on those suckers. But what happened? I hung on, I chased that carrot. I ran after that carrot. I should have just stopped at 65, been out in my RV enjoying the country, seeing things, but I was here getting ready to chase after that carrot. I haven't said nothing about it, but my brother says, I really need to say something about it. That way when people do decisions for other times, you start thinking about other people. And that's all I can really say about that. But I don't know. You only got me to kick around too much longer. But anyway, people really need to get involved in that economic development. Need to drag it out, don't let it die. If you let it die, you'll never get it started again. And there was a lot of stuff came out of that. And I know each and every one of you guys up there went to those events and had a good time. And you partied with your citizens. I'm going to leave time on the clock again. Thank you.

Thank you, Howard. Vitaly, please come forward. Welcome. If you could speak in the microphone so people at home can hear you.

Welcome. Thank you. So I want to confirm that Santa Clara is an American city. It's not controlled by foreign governments or anything like that?

We don't answer, we just give you up to three minutes to say what you want to say.

It's a question.

I know, but we want to let you have your full time. We don't- So I assume it's an American city, right? That is correct. Public presentations are, if we can stop it for a second. It's okay, I'm gonna fit in. Yeah, that's fine, but it's for your time to say whatever you want. We can't respond.

Okay, and you, the mayor, you're responsible for what happens within the borders of the city, right?

I can nod yes. So the bus stops with you, right? For the most part, usually does, yeah.

Okay, good. And so I have a question about why do we have a Mexican and a Spanish flag flying alongside California and US flags? As an American citizen, I find that offensive.

You can give us your opinion. I'm not here to respond to your opinion. Go ahead. You still have lots of time.

Well, so what do we need to do to take it down? to take those flags down? Why are they flying next to the American flag?

Again, not a question and answer. It's time for you to give us your public presentation.

Well, that's my presentation.

I mean, this is an interaction. It's not supposed to be, so... I'm just going to let you continue your time. You have up to three minutes. I don't want to take your time, so you can finish.

And...

Well, how do I get answers to those questions? You can give us your opinion and we can refer to staff to respond back to you.

So I noticed that some traffic lights in the city have a yellow frame around them. Can you tell me what that signifies?

Does anybody know? We would just like all your questions and then we can refer them to staff.

So then the next question is, what is going on with the International Swim Center? Who controls that? And another question is, I have a final question, is why are public schools, they're public schools, right? Why are they fenced off? Normal people can't access those, like you have loans there or you have fields, soccer fields. Those are, they're fenced off. What's going on there?

I'm gonna have the city manager answer those. Well, we're gonna refer everything and he'll let you know that's not our jurisdiction. Pardon? It's not our jurisdiction, he'll let you know, but go ahead. What is not your jurisdiction? The school district. The school district is not our jurisdiction. Do you have any more questions? Because we're running out of time.

Okay, so I'll be talking to you about the answers.

Yes, please. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Anthony, come forward, please.

Mr. Becker will have nine minutes.

Welcome.

Okay. Good evening, everyone. Former Councilmember Anthony Becker here. Most of you know why I'm here tonight again. I'm here for the 13th time. I mean, basically a baker's dozen. I have come before this Council asking for one simple thing. Put on the agenda a simple discussion regarding the May 7th, 2024 FIFA disclosure and the investigation that followed. Put this on the agenda. Let's have the open dialogue about this. I made this request first on February 10th. Now, months later, here we are and no action has been taken by this council, no action by the city manager, and this directly impacts public trust and the confidence in our local government. From the beginning, I have repeatedly requested the truly independent investigation into the disclosure that ultimately appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, and this city avoided investigating the entire council, and only its city employees were investigated. And it's my understanding that the conversations at the time were concerned about individuals, specifically the mayor, not telling the truth. I am not surprised by this council avoiding this discussion publicly. I am not surprised that constantly there's been delays, probably excuses at one after another. It is not a city employee that did it. I think we all are getting sidetracked when the city attorney has stated many investigations that took place and looked into this council. That's a fact, but this is a different one. That was wrong because I don't think it happened. It didn't happen when I was there and I was never investigated. The city council was never questioned and therefore Suds and Kevin Park, the council members were actually in my emails that I suggested, why are the employees only being investigated? But what I am very surprised about, though, is the Council not making a motion to put on the agenda my other 030, and that was requesting that the City agendaize and consider securing an independent elections ethics and democracy consultant for the 26th election cycle. The last time Santa Clara had an elections consultant was in 2016, a full decade ago. Since then, there has been a lack of holding candidates accountable for misleading the public. The last time we had one was when Councilmember Watanabe was held accountable for lying about me and other candidates in the race, like Suds Jane, taking money from a certain lawyer. That was fact. She actually got away with it by just saying, oh, I apologize. No, you watched the video. It was just strategically aimed at me and the councilman, other council candidates. But it's funny, I noticed that one thing has been no accountability forum since then, and every candidate endorsed by the mayor has not been held accountable for their misleading information for their opponents. The process in 2016 included the candidate forums, issue discussions, and accountability proceedings for alleged violations of the city's campaign ethics code. A real ethic code, not a phony one created by the mayor's ethics advisor. In 2016, 11 complaints were filed. 11 complaints were filed. So that makes you wonder, how many more would have been filed if we actually had these discussions? So for 10 years, they have gone nowhere, as I said. For 10 years, candidates and residents have lacked a process designed to address campaign ethics concerns before the voters can even cast their ballots. So my question is, why are you avoiding this 030 and also the other 030, given that the nomination period begins now? I think this week is the one where Council is putting out papers right now. So I think we should move quickly on putting this on the next agenda so then the public deserves the confidence that campaign ethics will be reviewed fairly, openly, and impartially. Oh, I forgot, the mayor ends the meeting very quickly, so none of you can actually bring up any of your 030s at that part of the agenda. So I mean, we keep talking about councilmanic interference. Give me a break. So again, both of my questions should not be controversial. Both requests are about accountability and both requests are about transparency. So the request about destroying our public trust. The public deserves answers, candidates deserve fairness, and of course this community deserves a government that is not afraid of that accountability, right? What I find is also, I'm going to talk about something that was at the last meeting too, which is I find that there's a ludicrous opinion piece written today about Council Member Jane. And that was that the same person that Council Member Hardy once told me wrote that opinion piece was the one in charge of putting the seating at the, I think it was a Soropteson event, and that person was in charge of putting the seating, and somehow a grand juror ended up at my table. And specifically that same grand juror ended up calling me in a week later, and then ended up releasing reports that our city clerk actually was sitting on that grand jury as well. And yet we're over here citing the grand jury reports as Council Member Jane's bad behavior, but they never specifically said where. However, Council Member Jane, myself, and many of you provided evidence to prove that fact wrong. They ignored it. They ignored it. But you know what the funny part is? I was never put under oath when I was in front of that grand jury. Ain't that another funny fact? So, moving to that point of what Councilmember Jayne said about the former Councilmember, I don't specifically see that as a problem. I don't see it as a problem when Councilmember Jayne said specific words. I don't find it disparaging when it's actually based on fact. But however, I see it as a problem when I was first elected, I was warned not to hang out in directors' offices or city employees' offices as Councilmembers has done. That's plural, past Councilmembers. So that's more than one. It is not disparaging, as I said, as a factual basis. Or I guess it's okay for the mayor and other people here to make disparaging remarks against each other, but that's okay. We just ignore that, just like the Civil Grand Jury and other organizations. Again, the mayor disparaged me at the last meeting, interrupting me and saying those accusations, oh, those are nothing but lies. Does she apologize to me? I don't think she has. So, and also in that part, I'm gonna close with this, which is about that performance review that the city attorney and the city manager were supposed to have and that was consistently delayed and the mayor asking questions, why is it delayed? Everybody stomping their feet, why has this been delayed? Well, it's funny because when I was on the city council, it was you, mayor, and council member Watanabe that were never available to have those discussions, to have those performance reviews. That sounds like you are creating a problem and acting like the one who finds it. That's wrong of you as a leader to do this to this community. When we told the staff, let's just have the reviews and stop playing the games that Kathy and the mayor are playing, the city staff said that would look bad to do it without them, and yet we lapse in time and continue to have this, and it's never been done. And then you have people like the mayor's friend, James Rowan, going and filing complaints online saying, He's filed civil grand jury complaints about this and, you know, it should be investigated. Well, it's felt like at that time, you know, it feels like you guys have been at the hands of terrorists when they were holding us hostage with a bond measure for not supporting a $400 million bond measure. Instead, it's, we're not going to support anything north of that. That's concerning. But yet, I did some digging to actually find out some information from the 1980s. I think it's 1987 to be exact. And it talks a lot about specific things that the city council had to go through in the past, which was about code of ethics, conflicts of interest, and also that the city attorney and the city manager need to have a performance review. Yet now here we have James Rowan saying he's filing complaints about that. Well, it's interesting that the person that was interviewed in that civil grand jury happens to be none other than Mayor Lisa Gilmore. What a coincidence that is. And then lastly, which I think is another interesting, it recommends about nothing but conflicts of interest and nothing about putting code of ethics in place and getting the city manager and the city manager to follow through on their performance reviews and the city council holding them accountable. Yet they continue to do that, but now here we have a situation where we're creating a crisis that says this has never been done and now you're gonna probably be interviewed for that process. But I just find it convincing and a little interesting that I found that. I think it's a little interesting too that I have a picture right here. You have Lisa Gilmore sitting right here on a civil grand jury in 1991, it says. So it's history doesn't lie. So, but anyways, you know what my two items on the agenda are, which is to put zero thirties to talk about the FIFA investigation and the leak. I mean, mayor, I don't think that should be a problem. And, you know, you might want to smile about that. but it shouldn't be something you want to talk about. I think we should all have that discussion about what really happened and what went down. And secondly, you have the opportunity right now to do a ethics advisor during this election so then the people of this city have a transparent process of who's running because in the last 10 years when people were constantly misleading the public, Suds, myself, Kevin, Karen, and Raj, we had nowhere to go to hold people accountable. And it's time that the city clerk's office outside of Nora holds these people accountable and holds candidates accountable. So I ask that you put this on the next agenda, and don't dismiss the meeting at the end at 030. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Next, we have Leonie. Leonie? Online. Go ahead, please. Unmute yourself. Leonie? There you go. Lee. Oh, Lee. Go ahead.

Normally, I call about another council members behavior. But this time, it's such a shame. Debbie Davis was a friend of mine, but she was also a good council person. Not everybody agreed with everything that she did, but she was She did her best at all times. And to have somebody badmouth her, such Jane, and the fact that she's also passed away is disgusting. You need to apologize to her family and to the citizens of Santa Clara using your position as a sounding board for something that was totally out of place and in bad taste. Thank you.

Thank you. Linda, go ahead, Linda. Unmute yourself, please. There you go.

Hi. My name is Linda. I really want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak. I'm going to be quick, out of respect for all I live in District 5. I watched the last meeting's video. I was severely disappointed to hear my council member, Judge James, speak, in my opinion, horribly about previous council member Debbie Davis, with what I can tell included no facts. She passed away last year. This is so, so wrong. I do think I deserve better from my representative. Thank you for your time.

Thank you, Linda. We have 0183. 0183. Unmute yourself please. 0183. Unmute yourself. There you go.

Hello, can you hear me?

Yes. Go ahead, please.

Yes. I'm so sorry. My name is James Rowan. When you're disabled, you have problems with your hands. God love you and the city of Santa Clara. God love you, Madam Mayor. God love the city staff, especially the police force, which I'll talk about in a minute. And God love the residents of the city of Santa Clara and the city staff. Once again, we hear from Anthony Becker, a convicted criminal. perjurer who was found to be a liar by a grand jury. No, not by a grand jury, by a jury of his peers who were taking grand jury reports and leaking them to people. And finally, you want to talk about such a thing? Such a thing, knew about it. Most of the time, in most felonies, when you hear about a felony, you're supposed to report it. But again, we know such a thing is a coward. I'll get that back to you. It seems like Mr. Becker thinks that the person who actually leaked the report to the 49ers was not him. I'm sure that his documentary will prove it was the one-armed man from Richard Kimball days. Not this such James. I worked with Debbie Davis and I opposed Debbie Davis several times, both times. Debbie Davis passed away. Debbie Davis was the heart and soul of the city. I think she tried her best, and I think she did work hard. By the way, Debbie Davis was also something else. She was a spouse of a police officer. I know this from being a civil service commissioner, that a police officer and their spouse have a unique situation. They are asked at times to give their lives or their family's lives in performance of their duties. As Anthony Becker or such Jane Everett but been asked to give his life. No. As a matter of fact, Judge James has had to call the police when there's garbage cans around. The fact of the matter is, you want to talk about ethics consultants at Black Era? I proposed an ethics commission four times in the past 30 years. The only person that voted for it is Lisa Gilmore. Kevin Park has opposed it since the 1990s. But I find it interesting that the ethics consultants that Anthony Becker, a convicted perjurer and sullen, is talking about was opposed by Becker, Park, and Jane, the troubling troubadours of cowardice. Anyway, God love you all. Be well. And who knows? That's the one our man also took the minutes to... from the closed session that Becker was talking about. People wanna talk about Debbie Davis, who dedicated her life to- Thank you.

Judy, go ahead, Judy.

Hello, yes, can you hear me? Yes. Okay, do you have three minutes? Okay, great. I see the clock there. Hello there. This is Judy Stroyer from the world famous nonviolent free speech activist group, the City Council Death Squad. See us online at citycounseldeathsquad.com. On July 1st, 2026, State Bill 707 took effect. Every eligible city in California is now required by law to require remote public comment, even if so-called Nazis or white supremacists decide to complain about genocide or Jewish supremacy. You guys need to listen to it. We have a First Amendment, which also in this case is being protected by the City Council Death Squad. Now every jurisdiction's disabled residents and working parents and elderly citizens and people would never be at these meetings could now be at them, all of them, not just some of them. because of the free speech activism that was going on that was mischaracterized as white supremacy. In light of the federal indictments against the Southern Poverty Law Center for staging white supremacy with Jewish actors, I think we need to re-look at this whole idea of white supremacy and if that was even real in the first place. In the meantime, we defend Jews' feelings from criticism while they spent three years committing genocide in front of the world's eyes while decrying that they are the victims over and over again and forcing us to regurgitate false numbers and call them the chosen ones. This is a public comment is for free speech to defend those who are prey to Jewish supremacy. in our country and it is not at the discretion of your board members. Sometimes fresh out of the nail salon, we got a new board member with a finger on the mute button. There needs to be civil penalties throughout the country. Our campaign showed from 2023 through 2026 that the civil penalties were not enough. Every jurisdiction throughout the country shuts down free speech when you dare to challenge Jewish supremacy, the Anti-Defamation League, AIPAC, or any one of a number of Talmudic manipulations. They shut down free speech, and it happens, and they get no penalty for this. Civil penalties are there for a reason, and instead of these quasi-enlightened boomer supremacists with their kind of little shtick with the $1 penalty, that doesn't do anything. And it's not the symbolic nature that matters. It is the punitive nature that matters to discourage local jurisdictions from violating humans' free speech to criticize, of all things, genocide in the middle of a three-year genocide. I think we need to look back and 2023 forward and see how the press is

and the boards of supervisors throughout the country especially in california worked complicitly through the adl for the jews to commit genocide and um thank you and i have to remind people that the first amendment to the united states constitution is a fundamental right of our democracy as public officials we take a oath to uphold this right and all constitutional rights afforded our citizens Unfortunately, protecting First Amendment rights sometimes means we must allow people to speak, even when things people are saying are hateful and offensive to our common sensibilities of decency and respectful for all people. Thank you, do we have anybody else? City Clerk, any other public comment? Oh, Edward, go ahead, Edward.

Yeah, I just wanted to mention that I'll keep it short. When the gentleman was talking about genocide, he forgot to mention about how General Mike Flynn, he had a question about the military stand down during that first major attack against Israel. He wanted to know why there was a military stand down and why all those people were allowed to be murdered. I don't know if his question was ever answered, but that's something that should be looked into. We shouldn't be starting wars just because it's the thing to do, where maybe certain leaders that are out for lowering the population They're looking to look what the vaccines are doing now. It's just crazy. Blood clots and super cancer. And maybe it's all about lowering the population of the earth. I think that's the real genocide that's going on with some of these other issues, chemtrails and everything else, poisoning our food and water and our air. But yeah, that's all I wanted to say. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Edward. So that's the end of public presentations. Council Member Park, your light. Do you have your light on for a reason?

yes so i know that we have an o30 process at the end of the meetings and there's a section for that but we've already set a precedent for people making motions and referrals during public comment which i disagree with but i do agree that we've had a number of meetings that have gone late and we haven't had the opportunity for the o30 process to take place i think that if we are going to end the meetings early we should continue with the other items that are on the agenda really quickly just to make sure that they're not simply end the meeting and i I'm gonna request two different things. One is a report out on the status of the FIFA investigations, because we can't tell you what the reports say, but I think that we can. My request would be a report out on the FIFA investigation, and I would like to ask the Council to vote on this to make the report out for the FIFA investigation public.

A city attorney, is that appropriate at this time?

It's in order, Madam Mayor. To understand the 030 request, a report out on the status of the FIFA investigation, and what was the second part of that, Member Parks?

No, just the status in public. That's correct. I have another one as well, but I think we should take them in turn, one by one. Sure.

No, that would be in order, Madam Mayor.

Okay, so is that a 030, or is this just direct instructions?

It is a version, it's referenced in our 030 policy, Madam Mayor, it's in effect a referral based on a public comment, which is a form of 030.

So, no, no, no, my question is, so is this to put on a future agenda for? That's right. Yes, okay. I just wanna make sure it's a 030, it goes on a future agenda.

Yeah, that's right, it's a motion with a second to go on a future agenda.

So, was that a motion?

Yes. We'll second it.

Okay, so we have a motion by Council Member Park, second by Council Member Jane to put a 030 on a future agenda regarding the FIFA investigation. Is that it? Council? Okay. Please register your vote. And that passes six to one. All right, your second one?

So my second, hold on, let me finish my notes here.

Please go, we have a long meeting. We can't wait for you to finish your notes, okay?

otherwise i'm moving on so my second request is i would like to put on a future agenda discussion for what it would take to bring on an ethics advisor i know that this is a really late time to do it to talk about bringing on an ethics advisor during the nomination period is holy cow is that late but then again we're in a very special year we've had fifa super bowl and we even haven't even had our Priority setting meetings, we're going to go into summer break without having had a single priority setting session. So at this point, my request is to put on a future agenda the discussion for bringing on an ethics advisor for timing work required and I guess logistics of what kinds of things the ethics advisor should do. Even without an ethics advisor, we do have outline of what events such as the first word and last word forms the event that the city used to sponsor with or without an ethics advisor and i would like that to be part of the discussions as well that's my motion that's uh... all part of zero thirty on a future agenda that's correct okay i'll have a sec i'll second that but i have a amendment

And that is that we used to invite in the League of Women Voters to have a candidate debate. And we also used to have a session where someone would explain the FPPC rules for how to run, what to file. We haven't done any of that for candidates that are interested in running. So I would like to suggest that that be incorporated into that.

So now we're talking ethics advisor, campaign, FPPC rules, League of Women Voters. What else are we gonna put in here? Let's put it all together and here it is one item. I heard like three, four, maybe more different things in there.

I'd like to speak on the amendments. I think there were amendments to my motion. In reality, I think that the FPP session for new candidates has nothing to do with, that was a city process, that had nothing to do with the ethics advisor. Same thing with the League of Women Voters. League of Women Voters often have volunteered. We've asked the League of Women Voters to do moderation for forums, but that, I don't think, I think that making that part of the request would muddle things. But my bigger concern is, this is going to be the last meeting essentially before the summer break, and there is no way that we're gonna come back to discuss this in time for it to be useful at all. I would hope that the city would uphold its commitment to the FPPC session for new candidates, new candidate sessions, and for things like the first word and last word forums, because that is not about the ethics advisor. Those were programs that the city put on.

All right, I'm going to interrupt you there and go to the city clerk, who's the elections officer, to let us know, remind us about the sessions that take place.

Yes, thank you, Mayor. As far as the forum that has traditionally been put on by the city, Council Member Jane is correct. It many times has been put on by the League of Women Voters. In fact, there's an actual county policy that states there can be up to one forum. The city is not involved in the forum. It's put on by a neutral party such as the League of Women Voters. We do make our facility available. We put it on our broadcast channels and stuff like that. I am going to be speaking to the assistant city clerk about reaching out to the League of Women Voters. The last time that we were involved with it, they wanted to do it by video or by video. Zoom meeting only. They do have a lot of requests. I have already made an initial call to them to see if they're available. I have not heard back yet. But that is something that we can do as the elections officials for the city and would be happy to do that. As far as a last word forum, there was one in 2016. I have looked at that forum. If the council wants to do something, I believe that the 030 would be the way to do it. ethics and governance committee that I know has been talking about an ethics advisor, but nothing for the elections per se directed towards that. But would be more than happy to update the council about a neutral advisor such as the League of Women Voters for the upcoming election to host a forum that the city supports.

What about the forum about the FPPC? Assistant City Clerk, you're familiar with that. Yes, thank you Madam Mayor. It usually takes place there and many agencies attend.

Correct. We have had one of those workshops here in this council chambers due to recent budget constraints. The FPPC is doing remote workshops, and so that is what we did the last election. They also have provided us with dates, and we will be providing that to all the candidates because they have a lot of workshops that are being provided remotely. They're just not coming out to the cities to do this.

Thank you. All right, does that clarify the 0.30 now?

But again, my question of like, How useful is this? Because at some point, this could possibly be taken up in time for a last word forum, certainly not for a first word forum.

I think this is part of a discussion if we put this on the agenda.

Yeah, I'm wanting to rein that in a little bit. Madam, there has been a fair amount of discussion around this, and I appreciate clarifying the motion. That would be something that would be discussed when the item would be brought up.

Okay, but now my question is, what is the practicality of... of this motion, given that we will not look at this until a future agenda, and that future agenda will likely be in August, near the end of August.

I'll defer to the city manager on some of those practicalities. But if you decided to proceed to hire someone, there would need to be a scope of work developed and a hiring process. And so that obviously takes some time. Depends on what your objectives are as to what you want that person to do as to whether or not they could be hired and engaged in a timely way to be useful.

Understood, and to not prolong this discussion, I will move this to, I think that there's another Governance and Ethics Committee meeting coming up soon sometime, but I mean, this is something that has been talked about for a while and has not been brought up, but I will defer that discussion at this point. Let's just vote on this because that's what we can do, and if there's something else that needs to be done, that would be done outside of the scope of this action here.

Yeah, I mean, we have our 030 policy that says when someone brings it up and the council votes, it goes on a future agenda for discussion. That's what the motion is. Mayor, if I can.

Yes. Sure. Just to clarify timing, if you vote on a 030, Your next meeting is August 18th. We can certainly attempt to schedule the item for then with regard to the city undertaking a process for a elections consultant or elections ethics advisor. We would need to be formally directed of that. As the city attorney said, that can't happen tonight. That would be on August 18th. also our procurement process ensuring that we have a fair and transparent process typically that is a 60 to 90 day process so the likelihood to do that for this election may not be there have not done any research on if there are any election consultants that are part of cooperative government purchasing agreements

but potentially but again we have not been able to do that we have a month to figure that out so um yeah that's the reality thank you for the reality check uh city clerk i have a request to speak on the motion are you entertaining that comment on our motion 030 to put something on the agenda um we we don't usually mirror in response to an item that came up in public comment all right thank you all right city clerk when you're ready did we have we had a motion and a second Did it pass or is that the last one? Okay, please register your vote. And that passes unanimously, thank you. All right, we're gonna move on now to item. Just bypassed a lot. Item number seven, action on the agreement for the funding and operation of the Santa Clara Family Community Interim Housing Project between the city and county for the city to provide limited funding for the operation of a 30 unit home key interim housing development on Santa Clara County own land located on the southeast corner of Lawrence Expressway and Benton. City Manager.

Sure, good evening. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, City Council. The City Council last had a detailed discussion on the proposed Benton and Lawrence project that is now being called the Santa Clara Family Community Project in June of 2023. At that time, the city council directed, or you actually authorized the city manager to enter into negotiations and execute a three-party letter between the city, the county, and Life Moves, and you also allocated $6.5 million of operational funding for the project. You've extended that funding several times. However, at that time, the project was truly proposed and there was a significant funding gap in 2023. And I know the council is aware, but to remind the public, there was an application that was submitted in 2023 for funding to the state. That funding was eventually approved in June of 2025 for just under $26 million. Then negotiations started and we are here today to bring back to you the funding agreement between the city, the county, and Life Moves. As a reminder, this is a county project that they are doing in partnership with Life Moves. Your funding agreement is the city's participation in supporting operations. You provided significant direction to staff the last time you met on this item. and our Community Development Director Afshar Hamid will introduce the presentation as well as the project team and the various components of your discussion tonight.

Welcome. Thank you. Let me just get to my notes. So good evening, Mayor, Council, and residents of Santa Clara. Staff is bringing back an agreement tonight for the funding of a 30-unit project known as the Santa Clara Family Housing Project. It is an interim housing development located at Benton and Lawrence. Quickly, the purpose tonight is to provide an update on the need for interim family housing, provide an update on the design and operation of the Santa Clara Family Community Project, explain the roles of project partners, and just to reiterate what the city manager just said, the city of Santa Clara is not a co-sponsor, and we do not have any funding obligation beyond year seven of this agreement. This will also allow the city to implement its housing element action one for interim housing. And tonight, staff will request an action on authorizing the city manager to enter into an agreement for funding the operations of the Santa Clara family housing and memorialize key terms. Beyond the operations funding, there is a larger purpose for this project. to serve Santa Clara families who live, work, and go to school in Santa Clara, except that they are homeless. Interim housing is key to building the gap between living on the streets and permanent housing. I will briefly recap the last time we reviewed this project. That was on May 2, 2023, And at that time, council took a vote of 4-3. The vote directed staff to negotiate between life moves, the county, and the city for defined roles and responsibilities. One of the key directions from council was that the city was not a co-sponsor. It also authorized the county to update the PLHA plan to assist persons who are experiencing homelessness and allocate funds to the Benton Lawrence project. And then return to council for a budget amendment appropriating approximately 5.5 million from special revenue funds for operations of Benton Lawrence and an annual review in a letter of intent. There are many staff working on this project, and I will very quickly just go through everybody that's been participating, and you'll see the range of departments and skills and talents. Elizabeth Klotz, who's the Assistant City Manager, myself, Adam Marcus, Housing and Community Services Manager, Jennifer Byers, who's the Assistant City Attorney, From the police department, we have Captain Michael Crescini, who is the division commander, Sergeant Kyle Cardin, community services unit, Sergeant RJ Otiko, community response team, Greg Pensinger, the homeless management analyst, and I also want to give acknowledgments to both the city manager and the city attorney. This is a partnership, and I will introduce our partners, which is the county of... Office of Supportive Housing. Hilary Armstrong is here, and she will participate in the presentation, and she's the Deputy Director. KJ Kaminski, who is also the Director, is here tonight. Life Moves staff, Nick Hodges is the Interim CEO, Paul Simpton, Paul Simpson is the Chief Financial Officer. Elmer Martinez-Sabalos is the Director of Community Engagement and Public Affairs. And Anat Leonard Wookie is the VP of Programs and Services. These are our partners and they have truly worked with staff over many months and listened to collective concerns and we are revising the project and bringing it back tonight. Very quickly, the presentation tonight will include a background, the project design and operations, city and county agreement, the next steps, and then finally, a recommendation. In tonight's presentation, you will hear from the county as well as from Life Moves. So a little bit of background as the Homekey project has been underway since 2021. There were three council study sessions that provided feedback to apply for Homekey project and to identify a site. Those key dates took place in July 2021, August 24 of 2021, and November 9th of 2021. In April of 2022, council appointed a homeless task force, and that task force met six times, and the task force identified a need for interim housing as a recommendation. In the fall of 2022, the Benton-Lawrence site was identified, and this is a vacant county-owned land, and the county is the property owner. In January of 2023, council feedback was to conduct community outreach and explore interim housing at Benton and Lawrence site. And at this point, The project was a four story, 124 unit project for single adults. The community meetings were well attended and the community raised concerns. There were about three to 400 people at these community meetings. Based on the extensive community feedback, the project team listened and made significant revisions to the project. It became less dense, it became for families with minor children, and it also went from four stories to three stories. In May of 2023, council authorized, they committed funding for operations in support of a home key application for 30 unit project for families with minor children. The application was to HCD and the application was actually from the county and life moves. They are the co-sponsors. There was nearly a two year wait for HCD to award funds as it was not in the round one or round two, but it was round three funding. And in October of 2024, budget reappropriation occurred for the Benton Lawrence interim housing. The state awarded approximately 25.7 million in round three funds. And in October of 2025, a building permit was submitted, and that's when the NEPA process also began. This was around the time after we received the funding, the round three funds from the state, that we began to have negotiations with the county. The agreement is the best mechanism for the city interests. Otherwise, the county could develop a project as they see fit. So the benefit is that this project brings forward housing for families with minor children local preference for Santa Clara families, and also registry verification on the sex offender list. There's also other key features which will be described later in the PowerPoint presentation. I will now introduce Hilary Armstrong with the Office of Supportive Housing to walk you through the data from HMIS point and count. Here for you hotline and the need for interim housing in Santa Clara. Thank you.

Thank you. Good evening, mayor, vice mayor, and council members. I'm Hillary Armstrong with the Office of Supportive Housing, and I'm one of our deputy directors there. The county, as Asha mentioned, is serving as a co-applicant with Life Moves for this home key project. I'm getting used to the check point here. Oops.

I gotta go back, sorry about that.

So the first thing we wanted to do was give some grounding in the need for this interim housing project. The county, in addition to our role as the Office of Supportive Housing, serves as the system-wide lead for county-wide homelessness response through the continuum of care. So we are gonna present some data from a few different sources tonight that help ground us in the need for our unhoused families in our community. The data on this first slide are from the biannual point in time count, which is required by HUD on a single night in January every two years. Our county's last count was in January 2025 that included our unsheltered populations. While imperfect, This data, commonly known as the pit count data, allows us to see trends over time in our community, including trends by city. As you can see, over time, our county's unhoused population since 2019 has been relatively steady, hovering around the 10,000 mark, plus or minus. The 2025 point in time count showed 10,711 unhoused folks countywide, but it did show a notable increase for the City of Santa Clara from 461 unhoused folks in 2023 to 794 in 2025. There are a number of different factors here, including a change in methodology for the pick count, but in speaking with your staff, in speaking with you, in speaking with folks on the ground, we do see that there is not a huge surprise in these numbers. Unfortunately, we do see a lot of folks who are experiencing homelessness in Santa Clara. The next slide includes data from our Homeless Management Information System, which is our county-wide system for all providers serving folks who are touching our homelessness system. And it shows the number of households affiliated with the City of Santa Clara who are falling into homelessness each year, including single adult households and families with minor children. That's the blue bar on the left. And that is compared to the number of households that we're able to house through our system, which is the orange bar on the right. So in 2025, we had 226 Santa Clara affiliated households who experienced homelessness for the first time. This is what we refer to as inflow. And the way we measure it is by folks who are taking our assessment for housing services because they are unhoused and in need of housing for the first time. During that same year, our system permanently housed 148 Santa Clara affiliated households. The programs listed on the right hand of this slide represent a portion of our continuum of housing services. As you can see, we try to prevent homelessness before it begins through our robust homelessness prevention system. We provide rental assistance, the city provides its own tenant based rental assistance program. And general affordable housing development throughout the community is an important part of our addressing and preventing homelessness. This project will fall into an interim housing for families that provide services, support, and shelter while they seek to locate permanent housing with help from the provider. The next slide shows that families with children make up about 1 5th or about 21% of the unhoused population in the city of Santa Clara, and about 15% of our overall county unhoused population. We also see that single youth and young adults are about 7% of the Santa Clara affiliated unhoused population. And we track this data to really understand what type of interventions we need to focus on with the limited resources throughout our community and where we really need to build out our system to address the need. This is also data from our HMIS system. We also wanted to show you that over time, the city of Santa Clara is trending with around 100 unhoused families per year who are within our HMIS system. So this is not necessarily every single family, but these are those who have come into our system to request services. And we do see over time that the number has really remained relatively around that 100 mark. Finally, we wanted to show you the data from our Here For You hotline. The Here For You hotline is the centralized intake and management system for temporary beds in our county, which is where the Santa Clara family community would fall with an interim housing model. As you can see, over the past year, there have been anywhere between 168 to 397 families countywide who are waiting for temporary housing at any given time, with an average of almost 300 families. The chart on the right shows that the average wait time for a family to receive shelter is around 33 days or one month, and this is not ideal, and we're always trying to shorten that wait time. Obviously, we don't want to see any families experiencing homelessness and experiencing unsheltered homelessness, but it is a factor of the lack of availability of enough shelter beds for families. As of last Friday, the waitlist had 388 families. This is not on your slide. We just pulled this today with an average wait time of 39 days. Finally, I wanted to show you our housing continuum, and this project is a portion of that housing continuum. So to the left of this slide, you can see the Here For You hotline, which provides that centralized access point for interim and temporary housing resources. So that is where families would be screened, where it would be determined their Santa Clara affiliation, that they have minor children or children who are still in K through 12 school, and where they eventually would get offered a placement, which could include the Santa Clara family community. So the star here is where this community, where this project falls, which is to provide people experiencing homelessness with temporary housing and onsite supportive services until they can secure permanent housing. While folks are in that program, they would undergo a coordinated entry assessment to determine what level of intervention they need to permanently resolve their homelessness. So that's always our goal is to get folks connected with permanent housing. And in general, there are kind of three big categories where folks might fall. So we have permanent supportive housing programs, which provide permanent housing with ongoing subsidies and supportive services. And folks who qualify for this type of housing generally have some sort of disabling condition that prevents them from being able to work. They experience chronic homelessness, so homelessness of a duration and frequency over time. The next category is rapid rehousing, which is really a shorter term, generally around 24-month subsidy with supportive services. The goal is to help a household increase their income and stability so that they can then take over the lease at the end of the program. And finally, there's a minimal intervention category that includes financial assistance, flexible funding to help folks relocate, to help folks who are able to find housing on their own and just need a little bit of help, and helping folks locate other affordable or market rate housing. Thank you so much for your time this evening. We'll be around to answer questions. And with that, I'm going to hand it over to Patty Wong, the city librarian.

Thank you.

Okay.

Welcome.

Thank you. Good evening, Mayor, Vice Mayor, and City Council. What I'm going to share with you tonight are some information and experience and some data sets from my team and our related partners regarding homeless families in our community. I had a brief conversation with Aubrey Mastrangelo, who is the Behavioral Health Services Director at Bill Wilson Center. And of course, he said what we knew already, that libraries are one of the few remaining places where people are allowed to be without being expected or required to purchase something. This means that our unsheltered, unhoused families are able to access climate controlled spaces, bathrooms, and electricity at libraries when they aren't able to access these things anywhere else. Libraries are an invaluable resource for our entire community, but offer some of the only accessible respite to some of our unhoused population. So we realize that all families are all of our families. A youth or child and their families experiencing homelessness comes to our library often in silence. They often remain undetectable. They can be that youth that is seeking a bite to eat or maybe hints that they might have had no lunch that day. They want to remain anonymous. There's just too much stigma. There's too much questions and there is way too much vulnerability. It takes a village and we all need to provide support from all directions. So tonight what I'm going to do is share a little bit of data, maybe bringing it, oops, to home. Oop, am I doing that wrong? There we go, there we go. So the data that I'm sharing with you is formal data, which is what I don't want you to, I want you to get a context for it, but we have this from the school district. 136 students are currently experiencing homelessness. Seven from just right around here, Pomeroy Elementary, and 17 from Santa Clara High School. But these are formal numbers. These are numbers where kids and families are sharing this information. We know that the number is much larger than that. And how can we tell? We can tell because every day, on a given school day, we'll see five to seven teenagers. coming in at different points in time. They should be in school, they are not. We approach them, we try to make it as easy and comfortable to talk with them. Sometimes they divulge, oftentimes they do not. But they are just surviving, because there's nowhere else to go. I think you've heard and seen that 95 families, our Santa Clara families that are currently homeless, that's 2025. So it's a couple years, I mean it's gonna be a couple years pretty soon. This is from the library, our Read Santa Clara, which is our adult literacy program, and we also do families for literacy. So within the last six months, seven families actually asked for support to fill out affordable housing information. So they were on the brink. They needed that support right away. One family required additional housing support. We have some regular literacy programs at Abode. We had 255 inquiries in the last six months from individuals and families through our partnership with Salvation Army Outreach. Nationally, it is sometimes known that our youth who may or may not be in school are part of a growing statistic. One in seven youth who experience homelessness is likely to be part of the LGBTQ community. They are often individuals, or they may be part of families who experience the most trauma. As a result, the library continues to surround ourselves with resources like TRUST, which is Trusted Response Urgent Support Team. It's a mobile mental health crisis team. You can also dial 988 and get the same service. They actually table once a month at our three branches, and they're getting a lot of people coming up and asking for support. They provide information and resources to many of our community members. In some, families in transition, unsheltered families, are probably the least visible of our community. We need local, permanent, stable housing for our most vulnerable populations, including and especially families. Thank you, and I think, I'm not sure who to pass it on to now. There we go. Thank you.

Thank you. I will now introduce Paul Simpson, or Elmer Sabalos, who is the Director of Community and Public Engagement with Life Moves. Thank you.

Good evening, Mayor Gilmore, Vice Mayor Gonzalez, and members of the council. Thank you for the opportunity to be here tonight and for your public service. My name is Elmer Martinez-Sabayos. I serve as the Director of Community Engagement and Public Affairs at Life Moves, the largest provider of interim housing and supportive services in the Silicon Valley. I'm joined by our interim CEO, Nick Hodges, our CFO, Paul Simpson, and virtually our VP of programs, Anat Leonard-Buki, who will be available to answer questions. Together, we're here to tell you about the Santa Clara family community, what it will be, who it'll serve, and what you can expect from Life Moves as your partner. And as I mentioned, we operate sites across San Mateo and Santa Clara counties from Daly City down to San Jose. And as you can see on the map, we're currently operating more than 25 sites and programs, serving over 6,300 clients in fiscal year 2025 alone. We believe homelessness is a systemic issue that impacts all of us and that solutions depend on us as a community to create. Life Moves provides that crucial first step, safe, dignified housing paired with the services and support people need to start rebuilding. And of course, we know anyone can fall into homelessness, and we see that in the diversity of the clients that we serve. One in five Life Moves clients is a child. More than one in five is 55 or older. Our programs serve a wide range of people from single adults, couples, families with children, veterans, and members of the LGBTQ community. Every person receives tailored support designed for their specific circumstances and their goals. The Santa Clara family community will focus specifically on families with children, a population that faces acute need, and for whom stable private housing makes a measurable difference in their outcomes. And the future site was designed with this community in mind. And to share more about the site's intentional design, I'd like to welcome our CFO, Paul Simpson.

Thank you. Welcome.

Good evening, honorable mayor, vice mayor, and council members. I want you to think about the last time you came through your front door and felt just your shoulders drop. And maybe it was after a long day, maybe it was after you were running a lot of errands with your family. That feeling, safe enough to exhale, most of us take for granted. For the families we serve, that feeling has been missing for months, sometimes years. Our ecosystem has long measured itself against the word dignity. Dignity is not our ambition. It's our floor. It's the minimum any provider within our space owes another human being. What we want to show today is what is possible. When we stopped asking how do we house people with dignity and started asking a bigger question, How do we design an entire experience for parents, teenagers, toddlers, from the moment they arrive to the day they achieve a permanent housing outcome that they can thrive in? What you'll hear about is not a shelter. It's a harbor, a first calm water after a long storm where a family can repair, refill, and chart a course. before they set sail into life of their own making. We didn't just start with a floor plan. That's not how we approached this project. We started with four questions, asked first from our clients that we serve, our partners at LPA, the architects, Jamboree Housing, the county, and city officials that you've heard from and will hear from today. All at the table from day one. We first started with experience. Does the building understand that trauma changes how people see and feel space? With community, does it spark creativity and joy? In wellness, does it calm a nervous system that's been in survival mode often for months? in survival modes, particularly for children who often go ignored in that process as we see the parents who are struggling with that. And then from a performance standpoint, can we sustain it? Is it energy efficient? Is it resilient? Is it built to last? Is it something that can be a staple within this community? But we want it more than a building that checks every box. We wanted something that this city, particularly the city of Santa Clara and this county, could point to with pride something innovative enough that our community embraces as theirs. Our architects at LPA even have a name for the design that you see. It's called The Hug because the building literally itself is shaped to wrap around the people inside of it. That's the whole philosophy built right into the site plan. So the building at a glance 53% of this project, nearly 35,000 square feet, is for private living arrangements. A door that locks, a place for even a family photo. There's 30% in care and supportive services because a roof without a plan forward is just a pause button. 17% is shared community space, because isolation has no place in healing, outside of just your family. But the numbers alone miss something. This isn't just housing plus healing, it's inspiration built into the blueprint. Space designed to be a catalyst where a person doesn't just get by, they rediscover what they're capable of achieving and what their goals are. Housing, healing, and the innovation to thrive under one roof by design. Picture a day a family arrives. They walk right into a welcome center. Right here. Sorry, got a little, uh-oh. It's your day, a family arrives. They walk into our warm welcome center, not a folding table and a clipboard, a genuine welcome for someone who is expecting them. Here's what's easy to overlook. Every member of the family is at a different stage in life. A newborn needs a quiet space, caregivers trained in infant care, a toddler needs room to explore safely, An elementary age child needs structure, perhaps, and support to stay on grade level. A middle schooler needs mentorship right when identity starts to form. A teenager needs real job training and getting ready for their university life. And parents need case management, therapy, workforce readiness, tools to rebuild. This building aspires to meet every one of them exactly where they are. And at day's end, this family has to sit down together either in their living space or in a shared community environment because healing happens over a meal just as much as it happens in a case file. Some of the shared amenities here. Where does the family go? A community room, there's a teen lounge here. Instead of just a flat lawn box in by four walls, picture an amphitheater-style green space with play filters built into the landscape. Hills to climb, nooks to discover, a community garden and walking paths that give people a real outdoor space. A computer room, laundry room, every bathroom within the project is a family bathroom. The small ordinary routines of stable life because our families told us that they will not leave even their pets behind, which is why you see two dog parts of the property. And we refuse to make them choose. So just walk with me for a few more seconds here as we just highlight a few portions of the project. So there's a welcome lobby, the first proof that someone's actually expecting you. You're not showing up surprised, you're not feeling invisible to society. Someone's there to actually welcome you. show you and talk to you about your experience here and what this journey is going to intake in an environment where you're not also stressed about what's happening with your children. We have something like a workshop in a teen lounge where teenagers can go to be teenagers and not just stuck in their room in a closet, like in their room by themselves. A community room where neighbors become community in a staff lounge matters just as much, because we cannot ask our staff to pour into families all day on an empty cup. We built in real rest and real respect for our own workforce. This gives you an idea of the living units. There's two types here. This is a space where every family, while they're here, is designed to be made their own. where different age children can have their own space. One child might be trying to do homework, another child might be relaxing, a parent might be following through on their case plan or just need a break, and you're actually able to have that room and space versus one common area where everyone's trying to do that at one time. Each of these units are about 680 square feet to 720 square feet. It's a bathroom with a door that locks, a window that is theirs for now, and space to call their own. So in closing for me, when every partner is at the table, this shows what gets beyond just building a compliant building, but instead we built a catalyst. Our unhoused neighbors are not a population to manage, They are teachers, machinists, nurtures, artists, entrepreneurs, parents raising the next generation of this community here. Brilliance that's simply lost its address. When we invest in the whole journey, arrival to permanent housing to thriving, we're not just closing a chapter of crisis. We're unlocking what that person was always capable of giving back to Santa Clara. Imagine that mother or father a year from now, back in a career they're brilliant at. Imagine that teenager feeling inspired at school with a new mentor, training for their future instead of just surviving childhood. That's what a society win looks like. That's what it looks like when we get it right. This building is proof we can be a catalytic force in the ecosystem, not just sheltering people through crisis, but launching them into contribution connection in life. When we do that, everyone wins.

Thank you.

thank you paul and we want to just build on what our county partners shared around how people get connected to the site and used the the case example of sarah a single mom of two daughters and how she finds her way to the site and so a family like sarah's begins by calling the here for you hotline Like everyone calling here for you, they'll speak with county staff and answer some questions on their situation, and then they're referred to Life Moves through the coordinated entry system. And at that point, Sarah will connect with Life Moves staff over the phone, and they'll confirm Sarah's program eligibility. Once referred, Sarah and her kids move into a furnished private unit with 24-7 staffing, meals, and an immediate connection to a dedicated case manager. From there, Sarah works with her case manager on an individualized plan, addressing her physical health, her behavioral health, enrollment and benefits, becoming ready for employment, and going through document recovery. Every piece of the puzzle gets addressed together. And the goal from day one is permanent housing. Sarah is supported by specialists who are actively pursuing placements, whether that be PSH, rapid rehousing, or a voucher, until her family has a new home. When that day comes, Life Moves is supporting the entire family's transition to the new community, providing cutlery and toiletries for their new home. So we've talked about our case management, and that is truly the engine of everything that we do. Our case managers work one-on-one with each client to set up personalized goals, connect them to appropriate services, and develop a plan tailored to their needs. This isn't a standard service package that's applied uniformly or through a blanketed approach. Every family situation is different, and our case managers treat it that way. And our services span three domains between housing, financial, and health and well-being. On the housing side, families receive that rapid rehousing support. They get help locating affordable units. They get assistance with their rental applications. They get education in their housing rights and even get support when moving. And financially, Life Moves is providing workshops, individual coaching, budgeting support, credit repair guidance, and saving strategies, because long-term housing stability can't happen without financial stability. And on the health and wellness side, clients have access to medical care, dental care, behavioral health services, and substance use support. And I mentioned One in five of our clients are children, and our children's programming is an ancillary. It's central to our work. And our children's services coordinators work directly with kids and their parents, providing stability, structure, and a sense of normalcy in a time that's very disruptive for our young clients. And programs include our summer adventure camp, which I think many of you who toured our sites got to see at Haven Family House. And we also have STEM-based educational workshops, teen wellness groups, and counselor trainings so that our young clients have some early job exposure too. And I mentioned Haven Family House. So we thought it'd be important to show what our program looks like in practice after it's been established. And Haven is our most comparable site. At Haven Family House, families are welcomed into a stable, peaceful environment, catering to families with children and teens. And each family apartment unit includes individual rooms, dining, kitchen, and living areas. And the site features manicured grounds, playground equipment, and a community garden. Haven provides a true sense of home for families on their journey to a fresh start, and it serves 91 total family members between 23 family units. Nine of those units are reserved for veteran clients. We do have on-site daycare through our partners at Peninsula Family Service, who are helping provide opportunities for our working clients, but also open their doors to children in the neighborhood as well. And we have, of course, the teen center and gardening area that I mentioned before. And in fiscal year 2025, Haven served 176 clients. 91% of those clients who exited moved to a permanent home. The median length of stay was about 167 days. And emergency services were contacted just five times last year, a measure of the structured, safe environment that our team maintains. And that's the track record that we're looking to bring to Santa Clara. And this next slide reflects the research that we've conducted internally to better understand what's driving positive outcomes for families. And the findings are clear. In-unit kitchens are increasing permanent housing exits. Across the last few years, families who had access to an in-unit kitchen had a exit to permanent housing at a rate of 62% compared to 54%. 54% of those without in-unit kitchens. Our on-site daycare significantly increases permanent housing exits with a rate of 82% of families exiting to a permanent next step compared to just about 40% for those who do not have access to on-site daycare. And with both of those tools combined, we're seeing that the median length of stay is six months or under. So it does support our families and make sure they're getting back on their feet. And the proposed project was designed with both. And that's not a coincidence. That is a evidence-based decision that we're making in partnership with the county to make sure that every family has the ability to move into permanent housing as quickly as possible. And wrapping up my slides here, wanted to share just what we're seeing system-wide. The average family length of stay was about 150 days. We have served 1,169 children. 68% of families and couples have exited to permanent housing. And 72% of the children that we serve transition to permanent housing. And I think our big sign of success is the fact that 96% of our clients are remaining housed one year later, so after they leave our program. And again, we're thankful for your time this evening and the city and county's confidence in Life Moves as your operating partner. We're committed to being a good neighbor, a transparent partner, and an organization that this community can be proud to have here at home. So with that, thank you for your time, and we're happy to answer questions at the end of the presentation. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you for your patience, I know this is a lot, but we're really excited about this project and we're almost done. I'm Adam Marcus, I'm the Housing and Community Services Manager for the city. And of course, we've heard about the need, we've heard about the vision, and now we get to talk about the really exciting stuff, which is how do you make it work? How do you make sure this works? This is a public-private partnership and it's complicated. So the details really matter. Tonight's action relates to the, and so there's several agreements that are gonna be needed to make this project work. Tonight's action relates to the operations agreement between the city and county. This agreement will set key terms for the city's funding commitment, and we'll go into that in greater detail in just a minute. As we move towards the middle of the slide, the county will also need to enter into a separate agreement with Life Moves, and both the county and Life Moves will also need to enter into an agreement with the state, because they are the home key sponsors. Let's dive into what we're really here tonight to talk about, which is the agreement between the city and the county. First we'll talk about roles. This agreement between the city and county really helps define the role of the city and the county. So what are they? High level. The county's role as a long-term partner in addressing homelessness, of course, locally and regionally. They're the landowner in this case. They're a co-sponsor with Life Moves for Homekey. They're a funder for both construction and operations. And they also are involved in quality assurance and oversight once the project begins operation. The city's role is focused on being a long-term partner, of course, but also on providing operational funding only. The city is not funding construction. So next we'll walk through some key terms of this agreement between the city and the county. First let's talk about the term. Funding will go towards operations for seven years with the option to extend beyond seven years if funding is available and future city council's approval is there in their sole discretion. Population to be served will be exclusively for homeless families with minor children so long as the building does not go vacant beyond the point allowed by state guidelines. And that this agreement does not prevent the county or Life Moves from fulfilling their obligations with Homekey and the Homekey Standard Agreement. This requirement is for 30 years. For families for 30 years. local preference. First priority will be given to families with children enrolled in the Santa Clara Unified School District or families with children that are affiliated with the city. This requirement will apply for 30 years. In general, the county tries to minimize disruption to families and children with their schooling, so they focus on providing interim housing as close as possible to where the family already is. So in practice, this is how it would work. First priority would go to Santa Clara families with minor children. If there aren't enough of those at that point in time, they would then look to North County families, Sunnyvale, other cities nearby. Again, trying to minimize any disruption to the family. And then if there's still a need to fill the building to its maximum capacity, families from other parts of the county. In the unlikely event that there are no families with minor children in need of shelter, other subpopulations would need to be considered. However, that's very unlikely, and at current, as we heard, there's over 300 families that are waiting for shelter at this time. Another element that we heard in response to the community, so there's been some changes in terms of design, but this is operations. Community meetings are important. Transparency is important once the project's built. So community meetings will be held to receive and respond feedback on issues and concerns if they arise. Meetings will be held quarterly for the first two years of operation and then annually as needed or as requested by the city. At least one meeting will be hosted during the construction period and the meetings will be open to all community members. The city has committed just over $6.5 million for the first seven years of operations. This includes city affordable housing funds and PLHA funds, which are state pass-through funds. The city is not responsible for construction costs, and the city is not required to make its first payment until after construction is completed and the certificate of occupancy is issued. With regard to reporting, the agreement will require quarterly reporting on a variety of indicators which are in the staff report. We also heard concern from the community about sex offenders, and so we did, because this is a project that will be housing children, Life Moves will check referred clients against the public sex offender registry prior to enrollment. Clients in the registry will not be allowed to access the facility, and this requirement will apply for 30 years. Beyond this, state law does not allow background checks under the Homekey program, which must follow Housing First guidelines. However, Life Moves makes safety its priority and mitigates risk through established protocols, 24-7 staffing, onsite, close coordination with law enforcement and emergency responders. City and county staff toured several Life Moves family shelters in San Jose, San Mateo, and Menlo Park. Staff also met with San Jose and San Mateo police departments and community development staff who partner with service providers, including Life Moves. And we heard some helpful lessons learned. And we also heard positive feedback about Life Moves and their site operations. Ongoing coordination between agencies was a key theme in those discussions. So as we look back to early 2023, we can see how this project has come a long way. The project team conducted outreach, they listened, and carefully refined the project in a number of important ways. The images we see here, And the ones that were shared earlier by Life Moves illustrate a reduction in height from four to three stories and a refinement in the design materials. But there's more. In addition to the physical design changes, the project has responded to stakeholder input in other ways. These are private suites with private restrooms. This is limited to families with minor children. There are kitchenettes in the units so people can cook their own food. 24-7 staffing, quarterly community meetings for transparency, single point of access, local preference for Santa Clara families, screening for sex offenders, and quarterly reporting. And with that, I'd like to hand it back to Afshar to wrap up our presentation.

Thank you.

So in conclusion, the project implements the adopted housing element which includes an action to increase interim housing. The county is a Homekey co-applicant and they own the land. The Homekey project entitlement is ministerial per state law. This project is actually an SB35 application. So there are no other public entitlements required. The only thing that's required is that it apply for a building permit. The project is exempt from CEQA. The building permit, as stated earlier, was applied back in October of 2025. It is under review and it's anticipated to be completed soon. And then tonight is an operating agreement to ensure the city has formal seat at the table and memorializes key terms for the operations. This is a benefit as it prioritizes Santa Clara families first with a local preference, families with minor children under 18 who are in the school district, And per state law, sex offender registry is verified. Those three items will survive a 30-year term beyond the seven-year agreement. The next step is tonight. to request an action for the county for the operations agreement. The NEPA review and the building permits are anticipated to be completed by summer 2026. Life Moves County and HCD will enter into an agreement. The groundbreaking is late summer 2026, and it's because this is HCD state funding, there is a timeline requirement so the occupancy is anticipated The recommendation tonight is to authorize the city manager or designee to execute the operations agreement with Santa Clara Office of Supportive Housing, committing up to $6,592,139 in PLHA, and affordable housing funds for the operations of Benton and Lawrence for an interim housing project subject to review and approval as to the form by the city attorney. I do want to call one minor amendment to the bill and that is in section two of exhibit B, which needs to be updated if you should vote on this tonight. And that is that the project shall serve up to 36 families through 90 bedrooms, However, please note that the project is still 30 units. And the reason we caught this clarification was because of the flex unit that was shared in the presentation by Life Moves. There's six units that will be proposed that could be shared between two families. So that would allow up to 36 families. And I have a backup slide that explains that just in case. Thank you, and I'm here to take any questions.

Thank you, Director, and thank you to everyone for that very thorough presentation. Very thorough. I'm moving in soon. Let me ask, could you just remind the council of what we're actually voting on this evening? I just want to make sure we're clear that we're voting on the funding agreement between the city and the county. We're not. disapproving or approving a project so i i just want to make it clear and then for the council if you get your questions in order i'm just going to go through one round of questions before we go to staff and and then the public i have quite a few public members that want to speak so ask all your questions during the first round if if you can please uh director

Correct, I am confirming that there is a building permit already submitted and that's because it's an SB 35 project and it's ministerial review. The action tonight is only to commit up to approximately $6.5 million and that's between the city and the county.

Thank you very much. All right, our round of questions. Council Member Cox.

Thank you, Director Hamid. So yeah, I have just a few questions that I want to frame in, I think, some of our community concerns. And just briefly want to say, I really think this project represents opportunity for our city, not just to provide something, but to show who we are as a community. And I think it really will become something we can be really proud of. You know, we were encouraged to visit the site and I'm so glad we did because I think it really distilled a bunch of my falsely made fears and I think it reminded me of the best parts of community and what community is supposed to be and it was a beautiful space. of happiness, of peace. So again, my questions are going to be framed a few to the city staff and then a few to you gentlemen, if you don't mind. I want to again just highlight the security of the site, including the staffing, controlled access, resident expectations, and coordination with police that has happened because that has been brought up. I want to ask again when we talk about this shelter ultimately being for families there is that clause that says if it's not populated to some level it could be used for other populations. I want to discuss the likelihood of that ever happening and what levels would have to be achieved before that took place because I think that that is a fear for our community. And then speaking of community, which is, I think, something we didn't talk about a lot, I would like to know if you can summarize the operational outcomes at Life Moves, specifically within these communities. Have you seen, for you gentlemen who've worked on site, a rising crime or a sufficient increase in criminal activity at these sites? Again, coming from, you know, concerns of our community. And then getting on the balcony, I loved talking to you so much, Paul. Tell me, and I think that people need to hear five years from now, what does success look like for projects like this, for what you believe should be happening with these communities? And finally, one of the things that really shifted in me was I saw what started, I think, in these housing projects that we went to, too. What was once based in community fear became a community supported activity and the communities are the ones that are working on the gardens and they are providing birthday gifts and they're providing the housing materials and it has become a site that people are expressing and devoting their love and time and attention and instead of something to be feared it is something to be embraced. So I would like to talk about data you've collected and really Tell me what's happened with the communities when these projects come in and what the response truly has been.

All associated with our operating agreement. Yes, our financial with the county. Thank you. Council Member Jane.

Yeah, thank you for the presentation. This project has gone a long way since White Oak Lane, now to, you know, we were gonna do those container-looking projects.

The architecture looks like a community center.

It looks, you know, something we'd be proud of. So I guess we started with the fears of the project in Milpitas, the Hill View, which was actually a permanent supportive housing project. So my first question is, What are the tenant rights differences between interim supportive housing and permanent supportive housing in terms of if you had a resident who was not acting in good faith or was disruptive? So there are differences in tenant rights. And so to compare this to Hillview I think is inappropriate, but It came up when we first talked about this. And then I think I heard that while they have their kitchens, they're actually being provided with three meals a day. So they don't have to be going to 7-Eleven or foraging for food. They will be provided for foods. They don't actually have to leave the facilities. Can you talk about... the need to leave the facility. Of course the kids have to go to school. And then finally, who is allowed in the rooms? Like I know you have a single point of entry and people have to go through the guard's desk to be able to get into the facility. But the issue that we had with Hillview was people would It was permanent supportive housing. They would invite their druggie friends in and they'd have parties and they'd be loud. And actually the calls for service were actually residents complaining about their neighbors partying and being loud and being violent. So my understanding is this is a different model. And can you talk about who's allowed into the rooms with the residents? Those are my questions. Thank you.

Thank you. Council Member Chauhal.

Thank you, Mayor. First of all, thank you, Director, and all the staff members for the report, detailed, much detailed report, and also thank the county for being here and Life Moves team over here. And thanks for arranging the tools to the Life Move facilities. That was very helpful. us knowing firsthand how these facilities are managed. A couple of questions. Some of them are directed to all three of the stakeholders over there. In the staff report, it did mention that the community meetings will be held for two years, although it did mention then it may be decided, community meetings. But I would like it to be very elaborate that unless until community wants to stop those meetings, we should not be stopping those meetings. They should be continued because it's a partnership between the community as well as between all the stakeholders we are talking about today. So I want to be very clear that it should be extended as required by the community. We are funding this project for seven years. And I know the county is basically taking responsibility going beyond seven years. And I think I read $65 million for the operational cost. And if I do the math, it is $65 million. $3.5 to $4 million of the operational cost per year. And if we are talking about 30 years, it will be around $120 million as of today's dollars. So I want to take a... Response from the county that they will be supporting this just in case all the you know the all the cities or some We all face finance crunches at a time. So I want to make sure that County is Taking full responsibility going beyond seven years of operational cost on this one The thing is cost escalation for the building. Most of the city projects and other projects as of today are going, construction costs have gone very high and I know the county mentioned they are responsible and Life Moves in partnership with others, they are responsible for all the cost and city is not participating in the building of the, this facility but I want to take answer from the County and all the partners that they are fully responsible for any cost escalation to build this thing and I'm glad our agreement starts after the taking possession of the facility then only we are starting the operational funding for this thing every year for seven years basically And I'm so glad that with the feedback from the community, like when we started from 124 units to now we are at 24 family units, where we did receive a lot of good feedback from the community and all the partners incorporated that. I'm so happy about that. So those are my questions for the timing. Thank you.

Thank you, Council Member Hardy.

Thank you. First off, thank you for the tour. And I will say I think it would be a lovely problem to have that we didn't have enough families to fill this down the road. That would, to me, be a success. I think it would be helpful for anyone watching, mostly our public and residents, to understand the funding. You mentioned it's PLHA. Not everyone knows what that is, and that they understand that these funds are encumbered for housing specifically. They can't be used for anything else. I think that would help. I will just tip my hand to say I was the one that made the motion the last time, and I'm more than happy to do so again.

Vice Mayor Gonzalez.

Thank you, Madam Mayor, and I want to thank staff and our partners for the great presentation. I wasn't here to vote on this a few years ago, but I'm glad I'm here today. As far as... Transportation it seems that this is close to some avenues of transportation. Do you see any issue with you know being? Not being as close. It's not on the Camino. It's not on homestead, but it's it's fairly close to those two streets and As far as the collaboration, I see that our partners should be working and will they be working with Santa Clara Unified and Second Harvest, some of these resources that are there to help our families in need. I know what was there before or what is there, but can you just let the public know what is that site typically used for, if anything? That's it.

Sorry, you mean the current site?

Yeah.

Okay.

Thank you. Council Member Park?

Yes, thank you very much. I'm not going to repeat a lot of the questions that I've heard. I think that the council members have had a lot of good things. I mean we've asked about the clarification from running plan after eight at you know between years eight to thirty We talked about sponsorships getting Commitments from funding from life moves and from the county but what about conversion of the facility is that under discussion? Is that something that would be considered? What happens if the building goes vacant beyond this to at the state allows that has been asked but I I mean, if that happens sooner, is there a way to reconsider the funding if the use of the facility changes? There were five calls to emergency assistance in 2025 for, I believe, Haven House. I just wanna know what kinds of calls there were. Why were there calls made? We talk about community meetings, and the community meetings are very different from the, what the city's November 2024 letter had contemplated in terms of community involvement. I would like to ask, what are the possibilities for community oversight or even a volunteer network? I think that as Council Member Cox suggested, having community involvement is important for adoption, not just of the site, but of the people in the site. I think that having community gardens that are open to residents to people, you know, again, having shelters for people in residential areas, not industrial areas where people would like to hide people away. I think that having shelters in residential areas is important, not just for the communities to accept Shelters to accept the unhoused peoples in their communities, but also for the people in those Shelters in that housing to be feel like they're part of the community. I know also that When we talked There would be no guests allowed. I think councilmember Jane asked the question, but my understanding there would be no guests allowed You can't even enter the facility if you are not there but will there be community areas will there be garden areas will there be discussion areas that are open to the public that people can talk about, can talk in and do things. the housing first rules uh state law 8255 you can legally ban screening on sobriety treatment participation criminal history or credit uh you know conviction histories and the sex offender registry check is the only one that's allowed and this will be done prior to clients being placed at the facility what happens if there's a change to a status at this time uh... will that will i mean it seems that there'll be an expulsion but i think that if the perpetrator is not a minor is it possible to expel members of the family and keep the miners or to keep the other parts of the family that uh... support the miners still within the housing i don't know if there's any any rules about that uh... councilmember hardy has asked about uh... students i think there's a provision that says there's a change made that says that if you are eighteen and attending high school you can stay but i do know that with families that have hardship often children are older than their their grade ages may may suggest and the question is will we how will we handle that will we allow non-minors who are attending school to be there. I think there was a change, a modification made for students that are 18, but I can envision, because I've met some, who are older than 18, and if they're not allowed to stay, if we know this in advance, is there a priority for permanent placement if that's the case? I know that participation in services or program or participation in services or program compliance is not a condition of housing tenancy. That's for permanent housing. What is the case for this shelter? meaning if there is supportive service, if there are supportive services, and there are, and people choose not to take those, if there are issues and the clients choose not to address them, what can be done in those cases? I think that touches a little bit on Councilmember Chain's question as well. How has hiring, How has hiring changed since 2023, including salary ranges? I believe that Brian Greenberg and Paul Simpson, when you gave the presentation in 23, talked about salaries are competitive in the 75th percentile for nonprofits. But I mean, we've seen so many problems with the Branham site, even with Leghorn, and all management related. And at this point, my suggestion back then in 2023 and today is maybe 75th percentile is not good enough. to get people with lived experience, to get great management for people not managing just a building, but now families, and not just any families, but families with people in distress, people who have been unhoused. I think that that kind of management requires you know, a better candidate than someone who's simply managing a property. And I think that with that, I'd like to know if you've made any changes to get better people in management, especially given the issues that other sites have seen. I mean, I'm confident in our ability to build a building. I'm confident in our ability get security if there's problems but by want to be confident that the people coming to our shelter are being taken care of not just physically but also mentally and uh... as uh... mister simpson suggested they need to go someplace where they could they can thrive from day one uh... have a lot of other questions, but I think they've largely been addressed. I think, again, I would like to have a community oversight committee. I believe that the community asked for an oversight committee, something where we can talk about things, not just a report out to us every quarter. As the council member for that district, I would be interested in being a liaison for something like that. I would love to talk to the residents about things like this. Having a more detailed procedure or timeline for the inspection records to ensure that nothing is delayed, I think that that's there. I also think that there was a, There was something about keeping records for a very short time, but I would like to have all records retained for placement, for issues, for the entire lifetime of at least the first seven years so we can see what trends there may be. But I believe that the record keeping was a much shorter duration, two years or something like that. But I would like to know if we can extend that for the lifetime so that we can see the trends. I think that's one of the reasons why I'd like there to be a community oversight committee, not just reports out, because if there are problems, if there are changes, if there are things that the community can do to help, I would love to get that as soon as possible, not as an afterthought or not as something that we discuss, you know, months after a community meeting. And again, what happens to Now, who's responsible for damages, injuries, and violence that occur on site? I know that it's Life Moves that I think would take full responsibility. But if there is an issue that overlaps into the community, I want to know what Life Moves coverage of liability is there as well. And I will keep the other ones for later. Thank you.

Thank you. My questions have to do with the funding agreement with the county. First of all, if the construction costs run over budget, I just want to make sure that our city's not responsible for any cost overruns for construction. I don't think we are, but I want to make sure and have it on the record. Also, is the agreement with the city of Santa Clara for a 30 unit, 30 some odd unit, or a 90 unit project? Because... I've been told the state application still describes 91 bedroom units. So is our agreement for family units and not the single room units with the county? And how do we make sure that that condition is enforceable? meaning that we can tell our community that yes, we did support this project primarily because it is offering family units that will service Santa Clara residents with priority. I know that it was talked about having a recorded covenant restricting the use to occupancy to families. So I'm wondering, is that contemplated as part of this? And if not, why not? And then I also understood that the county's commitment for operation ends at year five. So is that true? Does it end at year five? And our commitment is funding approximately seven years. So what happens if the county no longer has funding and then the city of Santa Clara no longer has funding after five to seven years? What happens to this project? One of my objections to the last time this came forward was I felt as if the county was telling the city after the seven year time period, the city was gonna take over full operations of this facility, which we are not equipped to do. So I wanna make sure what happens after this five to seven year funding period. And that We wanna make sure if people, families are in this project, they don't have to leave. So I think those are just my questions for now. So we've been through a whole, everyone had a question or a lot of questions. So I'm gonna give you time to go over those. I'm gonna go to the public because we have, I have a lot of public members. that wanna speak and some may wanna give their testimony and get home. So could you come back after for those? Yes, absolutely. Okay, will that give you enough time? I have a dozen speakers. Yes. Okay, thank you, thank you so much. All right, we're gonna talk, I'm gonna call up three speakers at a time and if you wouldn't mind queuing up. We have Alisa, followed by Brenda, followed by Jared. If you wait one second while we get this so we're not distracted by grabbing the papers.

Some of the staples didn't staple.

Oh, that's what's taking so long.

One Direction sings in their song, History, you and me have got a whole lot of history. We could be the greatest team that the world has ever seen. All of the rumors, all of the fights, but we always found a way to make it out alive. My name is Alisa Gurman and I am the founder and director of Santa Clara Housing Advocates. SCHA, this housing project, and the Santa Clara City Council have a lot of history. I'm hoping we can be the greatest team and finish what we started more than three years ago. SCHA began after a community meeting in March 2023 when five or six people wanted to attend the next meeting together. We were up against a lot of rumors and some neighbors who were trying to start fights, but we made it out alive and now we have an email list of close to 200. You can see in the packet in front of you that support for this project has grown since it started. Public support comes from a growing list of community members, along with 25 organizations and 10 elected officials. We started unsure of how many council members would support this project, but support has grown among the council. And in October 2024, the agenda item passed unanimously among the six council members in attendance. Meanwhile, opposition for the project seemed to have declined significantly. This might be due to the county and life moves adapting the project according to the primary requests of those who opposed it in 2023. This project started as a four story building for single adults and is now three stories for families with children. It started with a loose definition of low barrier and now the agreement specifies that potential residents will be checked against the sex offender registry. In the spirit of the song Ready Steady Go by the great philosopher of our time, Harry Styles, I will end by saying this. The proposal and agreement have been refined and are definitely ready. SKHA has been in steady support for three years, and now it's time for you to vote yes and finally let this project go forward. Let's finish what we started. Thank you.

Thank you. Brenda, followed by Jared, followed by Kathy. Welcome.

Good evening, Mayor and Council Members. My name is Brenda. I'm a Santa Clara resident. I attended all the prior meetings on this subject, and there's a lot of conflicts between what Life Smooth says and what I'm hearing from other places, which is a concern. I attended the prior, and they were packed. The residents were packed in here at all of our meetings. They were on the news. And what gets me is that the level of public participation shows how deeply our community is concerned. I asked the council I asked them listen carefully to the people who live work and raise their families here My concerns are public safety, which you've already addressed and question How it the nearby schools the and the potential impacts on our neighborhood if the shelter is not effectively managed and I've heard a lot of complaints about the other shelters and And so that is a big concern because it's easy to say something, but what's going to really happen in the process? Children should be able to walk to and from school in a safe environment. I'm also concerned that the Life Moves website states that documentation is not required for people staying at the shelter. And I would like the city to clarify what identification is. screening and verification procedures will be in place because I didn't really understand all of the ones they were talking about because there's conflict. I also want the city to clarify this. The location itself is a major concern. The site is near very busy streets. including Benton and Lawrence Expressway, with significant traffic and nearby school neighborhoods that could be impacted. I'm also concerned that there is no bus transportation directly serving this site, which may require shelter residents.

Thank you. Okay, well. Thank you. I'm sorry, we have a lot of speakers, so. Yeah, well. Thank you, we appreciate your comments. Jared, followed by Kathy, followed by Supervisor Ellenberg. Good evening. You're welcome.

Thank you. My name is Jared, and I live just up the road from this site. And I'm here because I want to see these families housed, and I want this site to stay housing for families. So tonight, I just have one ask. So back in November 2024, the city made the county a promise, and it's in the materials in front of all of you tonight. The city promised a covenant recorded on the property that would keep the site for families. A covenant will be recorded, but it only keeps the site for temporary housing. It does not keep it for families, the one thing the city promised. So right now the promise is just a line in the agreement. A recorded covenant stays with the property no matter who owns or runs it later. A requirement in a contract does not. So here's my ask. Before the city's money goes out, record the family covenant the city already promised. This doesn't hold anything up. The city's money doesn't go out until the building opens at least a year from now. That's plenty of time to get the family promise recorded first. The city attorney can ward it so it protects these families without putting the state's funding at risk. There would be just one exception, a bed that would otherwise sit empty, which has already been mentioned, I think, earlier. But with hundreds of families on the whitelist, that almost will never happen. This isn't a reason to vote no. It's a reason to hold the city to its own promise. I hope 1E will make that condition tonight. These families deserve a plan built to last. Thank you.

Thank you very much, Jared. Kathy?

Good evening, Mayor and Council. As a council member who supported this project back in 2023, and now as a school board trustee, I continue to support this project and the funding that goes along with it. At a time when school enrollment is down, this is an important time to be able to keep our school numbers up and to make sure that children have a place to be able to attend school and more importantly, have resources at the property as well as in school. I think it's a wonderful idea to have community meetings for two years, including during the construction period and possibly beyond. One last amenity that I didn't hear mentioned are visits by the city's great bookmobile. I've seen that bookmobile visit many affordable housing projects, and I think this is another place that that bookmobile would be well served, as well as the residents. So in closing, I just want to urge the council to support staff recommendation. Thank you very much.

Thank you. Supervisor Ellenberg, thank you for joining us this evening. Since our contract is with your organization, it's important that you're...

I have kind of an interest here.

You have kind of an interest here, so I'm holding the clock for you.

Oh, thank you. Good evening, Mayor and Vice Mayor and Councilmembers. I am Supervisor Susan Ellenberg, representing Santa Clara County's 4th District. which includes the beautiful city of Santa Clara. And I want to thank each of you for your partnership over the past several years, and of course encourage you to approve the agreement for the Santa Clara Family Interim Housing Project at Lawrence and Benton so we can continue moving forward and break ground. the county and the city, and I just have to call out Patty from the library. When the library people are excited about a project, I feel like that should be the end of the conversation. We should all just say yes. Agreed, agreed. Do whatever the library people want. But the county, the city, and Life Moves have already built a strong partnership around this project. Each one has committed significant funding and each has stepped up to support families and children who need stability and a path to permanent housing. Tonight's vote will strengthen that partnership and formalize commitments that have already been made. The project, as many have said, was redesigned at the community and this council's direction as families only interim housing, providing local children with safety, consistency, and the support they and their families need to move toward long-term housing. I want to be clear about what's at stake. If and when the city approves this agreement this evening, Santa Clara families will receive priority access to those 30 interim housing units. The city's contribution will protect Santa Clara families. It will keep the city at the table as a partner. It will ensure that families who already live here in this community attend Santa Clara schools and rely on your city services will have priority access to this valuable resource. I ask you again tonight to approve this agreement. The vote strengthens our partnership, honors our shared commitments, and ensures that Santa Clara families receive the support they deserve. As I have been enthusiastic about this for the last three and a half years, I continue to be and would invite any of you to reach out anytime at all with any questions you've got ample professional staff that can answer questions. But if I can be of help or of use to any of you in any way, I am so ready to do that. Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you for joining us tonight, Supervisor Ellenberg. And I'm going to follow that with Mayor Emily Ramos that I see in the back there. Mayor Ramos, if you'd like to come forward, please. Welcome.

Thank you, Mayor Gilmore, although I am here on my other hat. I know, but still. So my name is Emily Ann Ramos, and I'm speaking on behalf of SV at Home in support of the Santa Clara Family Community Project. First, I want to thank the council, city staff, the County of Santa Clara, Life Moves, Santa Clara Housing Advocates for the years of work that have brought this project to tonight's vote. Projects like this don't happen overnight, and I appreciate the collaboration and commitment it has taken to get here. The need has never been clearer. The 2025 point in time count had found 794 people experiencing homelessness in the city of Santa Clara. More than 700 of them were living in sheltered. Behind every one of those numbers is a person, and for many, a family simply looking for a safe place to regain stability. That is why the Santa Clara Family Community Project is so important. This project will provide families with private living spaces, private restrooms, and onsite supportive services. It creates the stability parents need to focus on finding permanent housing, keeping a job, making sure their children can attend school, and rebuilding their lives. This is exactly what interim housing is intended to do. Housing and homelessness are regional challenges and every city has an important role to play. I appreciate Santa Clara's willingness to be part of the solution and I believe tonight is an opportunity to demonstrate the compassion and leadership your community is known for. So on behalf of SB at Home, I respectfully ask you to approve the agreements. Thank you so much. Thank you, Madam Mayor.

Next we have Wes followed by Gabriel. Please come forward. Welcome.

Good evening. It's nice to see City Council together again. I want you to know that I was born in the first public housing project 84 years ago. It was called the Jane Addams Housing Project in Chicago. And I also, when I was a social work student, I worked with the boys' clubs and worked at Cabrini Green housing project. Do you remember that TV show? I forgot what he said. Dino Might. Do you remember that one? Well, that's the housing project that I was in When the elevators broke down and you had to climb up the stairs, you saw so much drugs going on and so much hostility up the stairways. So I hope that the security and the accessibility for people to come up and down in a good elevator works. Later on, I worked 30 years as an outreach social worker for the VA, and I worked with veterans. And I also was on the Behavioral Health Board for almost 30 years. So I... I fully support this project and I hope it has those supportive services that will rehabilitate families and they are the best clients. Family structure is so important and you don't wanna break up the family like our president has been doing. So let's consider this project and I fully support it.

Thank you, Wes. Gabriel, followed by Brian. Please come forward. Welcome.

All right. Good evening, mayor, vice mayor, and council members. My name is Gabriel Lomas, and I am a policy analyst here speaking on behalf of Santa Clara County Board Supervisor Otto Lee. I'm here to speak in strong support of the Santa Clara Family Community Project. Family homelessness continues to be one of the most urgent challenges in our region. While we made significant progress housing nearly 3,000 families since 2021, hundreds of families with children continue to experience homelessness every year. Today, many of these families are living in cars, shelters, or doubling up with others while they wait for help. This is why this project is so important. The Santa Clara Family Community Project will provide 30 family units. These are not just beds, they are private, dignified spaces where families can begin to have stability. Through on-site case management, childcare, and housing navigation, families will receive the support they need to transition out of homelessness and into permanent supportive housing. This is a proven model that shortens families' time in homelessness, makes the experience less traumatic, and makes it less likely to happen again. However, this project only works because of partnership. This is what it looks like when the county, the city, and community partners step up together and say, we're not going to leave families behind. The city's commitment tonight is what turned those dollars into real homes, real services, and real stability for families with children. Approving this agreement ensures that we make sure kids in our community have a safe place to sleep, learn, and grow. We respectfully encourage you to approve this agreement and continue this strong partnership to address family homelessness. Thank you for your time.

Thank you, Gabriel. Next, we have Brian followed by Betsy. Welcome.

Thank you again. What a great project. We're all one step away from being unhoused, really. all of us, we're all temporarily able-bodied, I always thought that was one event, something in your brain, something, a car accident, God forbid, but, so I can't imagine why anybody would oppose this. I do understand the concern people raised, and I think that's important. And also, I have some machines, I always offer these here, I have some machines that I put together, and I'm actually pretty good at that, if it would help this organization, some computers, and I'm willing to give time, I don't charge anything. Thank you, have a good day.

Thank you, that's a nice offer. Betsy followed by Linda. I don't know if Linda's here or online. Online, thank you. Welcome, Betsy.

Good evening, Betsy Magus speaking for myself. Several others have already said it better so I'll be quick. I'm here to support this project. There is concern but there is also a lot of need and a lot of support. The people who need this housing are already here or nearby. Please work out the details and let's keep life moves moving and give families a needed place to live, thank you.

Thank you, Betsy. Linda, go ahead, Linda, online, unmute yourself. There you go.

Thank you very much for doing this. I really appreciate it. I think that there are a lot of unhoused people who can't afford the rent now that are still working, still chugging along. It's just housing has gotten more expensive and harder to deal with. So I fully support having a place for people who are just underwater for right now and helping them, giving them a helping hand to get out of the underwater. Thank you.

Thank you. Diane, go ahead, Diane, unmute yourself. There you go.

Hi. I'm Diane Harrison, great comments by the way. I'm a senior living a few blocks from the proposed interim housing. I strongly support the project and the funding since we definitely need these homes in our community to help those whose financial situations have temporarily failed them. They deserve every chance to get back on their feet. I'm not a religious person, but I like the saying, there but for the grace of God go I, or you, or you, or you, or almost anyone in this meeting who has never been unhoused or facing that possibility. Were I unhoused, I would want the chance to get back on my feet. As would you. From prior meetings, I've noticed that a lot of speakers seem to think that poor people are dangerous, while the very opposite is true. Far more unhoused folks are victims of violent crime than commit them. The people I hear about in the news who commit violent crimes are not only housed, but often wealthy. Some even wear a uniform and badge, or not, in the case of ICE and CBP. As a volunteer with the Salvation Army and Second Harvest, I find that so many of our customers are the nicest, kindest people, some even greeting me with a hug. All of them deserve housing as well as food. Please approve this project. Thank you.

Thank you, Diane. Next, we have Ali. Go ahead, Ali, unmute yourself. Allie.

Hello, my name is Allie Saberman. I'm a registered lobbyist for the City of Santa Clara, and I'm speaking on behalf of the Housing Action Coalition, a nonprofit that supports housing at all income levels. Speaking tonight in support of the project, I'm very thankful for the dedication that the city, the city council, and city staff and Life Moves have had with this amazing project together. I've been to every hearing on this project, and it's been many years in the making. also want to remind folks that we're not relitigating issues of the project again tonight that's not why we're here um and want to remind folks to not listen to the discriminatory comments about unhoused votes and echoing the comments of previous speakers just very excited to speak tonight and hope to see the project move forward thank you thank you ali next we have gia go ahead gia

Hello, thank you for this opportunity to speak. My name is Gia. I'm the communications coordinator at Housing Choices and we support individuals with developmental disabilities find and retain housing and provide on-site support services as well as housing coordination. We support this project because we work with a lot of clients who are unfortunately homeless or facing extreme housing instability due to the nature of their disability or due to them um not be able to work full time at the um income that they need to reach these market rate rents and a lot of them are also um like living maybe they're living with their families who don't work because they have to be caregivers um so this project is going to be really beneficial for this population that you know they were um you know, born with a disability. And I think that we can come at this with compassion and help out our neighbors because When individuals are housed, even if it's just giving them that extra boost towards transitional housing, then hopefully, ideally, a permanent supportive housing later on. It's much better than having them living in their cars. So thank you so much for all the work that has gone into this. And yeah, I appreciate any recognition towards this population that needs help. Thank you.

Thank you, Gia. Next, we have Edward. Go ahead, Edward. Unmute yourself. There you go.

Yeah, just wanted to talk about how the police or the ICE agents are criminals. That's painting a broad brush across something that shouldn't be brought up. There's crime in other workforces. Of course, we have bad apples everywhere, but we shouldn't be painting a broad brush like that. These people in law enforcement, they risk their lives for our community. That's something that should have been mentioned. But also, all the billions of dollars in our California tax dollars have been misplaced. That was supposed to go to the homeless community. That should be looked into and we should be able to get a refund of our California tax dollars that was misplaced for the homeless. Palisades fire, nothing's happened there either, all that money that was supposed to fund for the people that lost their homes in the Palisades, that's gone. We truly need an investigation because we're the highest taxed state in the country and we should be not having homeless because of these people that are real crooks that are mismanaging our tax dollars that could be helping the homeless it's just you know common sense um i don't know how he's getting away with this i don't know why he's not in prison to tell you true but uh yeah that's all i wanted to say and i am 100 for this yeah we do have to help the homeless we've got people in rvs living in their cars and RVs in our neighborhood, and something's gotta be done. And the real crooks have to go to jail. This is something that shouldn't be political. People that are in higher levels of government that are getting away with this, we're supposed to have equal justice, and unfortunately, we currently do not have equal justice. Thank you for letting me speak.

Thank you, Edward. Next, we have Pilar. Unmute yourself.

Can you hear me? I have been a resident of Santa Clara for about 59 years. I always tell people how much I enjoy living in the city of Santa Clara. There are so many amenities I think that are offered to us here. There are so many civic activities to take advantage of. I wasn't going to speak tonight, but I guess I just wanted to chime in because listening to everybody give comment, it makes me really proud that the city is looking out for our neighbors who are unhoused. You know, I go to a lot of housing meetings in a lot of cities, and sometimes the feedback just makes me angry when I listen to it. But tonight, I guess I just feel heartened, and I feel really proud, and I hope that the city does enter into the agreement with the county, because I think this is a project that needs to move forward. And I just wanted to say how proud I am that we're doing this. Thank you.

Thank you, Pilar. And I don't have any other comments. Does anybody else want to say something? Speak now or forever hold your peace. Okay. Director, ready with your answers to all those questions. Maybe you can summarize them too.

Okay, thank you so much. And I will be very honest. I'm going to try to address as many of these as possible, but I will call on either the county or Life Moves, as noted, to assist. So the first question came from Councilmember Cox. You requested the security, security in terms of staff, security in terms of police coordination. So I want to talk about that. So security is basically at many different levels and it's a multi-pronged approach. The first is the design of the building. And the building itself will have security cameras on the exterior all along the site and also on the interior. It is a single point of entry. And so when you come in at the front entry, Each client will be required to use a key card before they enter. The desk at the front entry is staffed 24-7. There are no guests permitted into the project. It's only for the clients that are there. So Life Moves, we did talk to Life Moves quite a bit about this as well, and incidents can occur. But Life Moves has established protocols, trained staff, and worked constructively with local law enforcement, emergency responders to respond quickly and appropriately. The site will be staffed 24 seven hours a day, seven days a week, and also clients agree to community standards as a condition of the participation. If there's behavior that threatens the safety of clients, staff, or neighbors, it is addressed immediately, which may include removal from the program when appropriate. Life Moves also works very closely with the city and the county. When we first did our tours of four neighborhoods, our PD came with us, our PD was there and they were interacting, they were asking questions of life moves. After they were done, they went back and they independently talked to the PDs from those cities and the key was that there is constant communication between PD and life moves, and that if there's an incident, that PD is notified quickly. And if PD would like to respond to any additional items that I haven't covered, I would be okay with that.

Good evening, Mayor, Vice Mayor, Council. I'm open for questions regarding any kind of clarification that you may need. I'm sorry, I'm Captain Mike Crescini. I'm the Division Commander for Administrative Services Division.

Are there any questions for our Police Department?

which you may be able to answer, maybe not at this site though, about increases in activity that had presented, but perhaps maybe you can just speak to some of the recommendations that you and the police department made with the other city.

Yeah, I can definitely speak to that. I mean, for us as a department, one of our recommendations was a strict no-guess policy. Limiting access to authorized occupants helps reduce unauthorized activity. With regard to the background screening process, obviously we heard some of the limitations on criminal history, but there is this sex registration database. We did recommend the installation of a comprehensive security camera system, not just covering entrances, but that was common areas, parking lots, exterior of the property, they also serve as a deterrent and also obviously provide us valuable evidence in the case of a criminal investigation if we need that evidence. We did recommend that the facility maintain controlled access to ensure that only authorized occupants and staff are permitted entry. With regard to the access card, I think the 24-7 staffing is a added layer to make sure that the people who are supposed to be in this facility are actually being granted access. And then for us, it was also just an understanding of the legal status when it came to occupancy, and that's more of a landlord-tenant, part of a housing program, or more of a motel-hotel rights. So our department and our officers are trained properly before this is implemented, so we know how to respond and properly resolve those situations for us.

No, we're not going to do that now.

He was asking for questions. I think it's regarding this. He was asking for questions.

I don't want to have questions like to interrupt you answering all the questions. Just save them. Thank you. Stay close. Thank you. We'll never get through this if we keep back and forth. So write down your questions.

Thank you all. Just to add on to the captain's comments, I wanted to add just a little bit of the distinction between the family sites versus the individual sites and what we see on the ground. And I did want to just mention, we really do see a difference, right, between the family and individual sites. They have different needs. And our family sites are... they stabilize quicker and are using different resources. So it does change what we see in terms of the EMS calls, but it really comes down to the partnership with the police department, with city staff, so making sure that we're meeting frequently, communicating openly about what maybe training needs to happen, and clarifying questions like the tenants versus client issue. I'm doing that proactively, and as sites come online, we're making that a practice to start meeting with the cities and the departments so that we can start doing that training early, and those questions aren't coming up once the site's live. I hope that helps. Thank you.

Okay. Thank you. I think your second question, Councilmember Cox, was if it's not populated by families. The agreement does include that it will be for families and that it will be prioritized for Santa Clara families. There is basically a tiering system that if it's not Santa Clara families, then it could go to North County families. if not North County families, then it goes to countywide before it opens up to a different demographic. And if it does go to a different demographic, the city and county will meet in good faith to reach a mutually agreeable solution to maintain the occupancy of the project. And as we can see from the numbers, uh in the city of santa clara alone when we did the pit count our numbers for homelessness went up by 50 percent between two years and then in santa clara we have over 95 families or approximately 100 families that are waiting to be to be housed so we think it will be very unlikely Your question about what is success and what does success look like? There is the continuum of care and quality assurance standards for interim and temporary housing, and that includes services and access to many facilities, internet access, mail services, case management, housing readiness, connection to benefits, resources, workshops, and other mental health counseling. which support residents transition to stability. Life Moves also delivers, has a delivery model which includes services such as child services coordination as well. I think there's success that can be on many different levels. And also the integration. They stay in an interim housing facility for six months or less before they transition to permanent supportive housing. The statistics show that they're in permanent supportive housing at least for one year after they leave the interim housing facility. So there's facts to support how interim housing supports families to get back to permanent supportive housing. You made, you did comment on initially there's fear and then there's support. You commented that there's community gardens and there will be community gardens here too. There's the birthday gift closet and that's true. We did see that at the Menlo Park facility. And I think this was just a general comment about what happens to a community when project like this comes in and how the community goes from fear to success and volunteering in this kind of project and engaging in this kind of project and that's what we saw when we toured the facilities as well those facilities were in residential areas single-family residential areas and there was a lot of I would say participation from many different organizations. In one case, we saw students from Stanford that had done the teen room with Stanford memorabilia, but then also books, couches, and lots of things. So I think there's many different levels where we see success. Council Member Jane, your question was on what are tenant rights between permanent supportive housing and interim housing. So I do want to clarify that in interim supportive housing, these are clients. They are not tenants. So they do not have tenant rights. The participants in these programs are classified as clients rather than as tenants, and this is according to state law. Clients sign participant agreements. They do not pay for rent in their units or utilities, and they are not subject to the same tenancy as traditional renters. Council Member Jayne, you also asked about the kitchens, three meals a day. Yes, three meals a day are provided on site. This facility on the first floor will also have a cafeteria, but then in each unit there will be a kitchenette which will support the families. I think the local food bank, just like the other facilities, does come by twice a week. Included in the project will be food pantries so that the clients can go to the food pantries and grab fresh food or other kinds of food to take care of themselves. Your next question was who enters and who is allowed. And the question was more about a strict guest policy. And correct, creating a safe and stable environment for the clients is one of the highest priorities at these sites. Like many families and interim housing projects, only approved visitors such as healthcare providers, social workers, educators, and other service professionals may visit through established protocols. In order to protect the safety and privacy and well-being of all families who are living in the community, Social visits by guests, including family members who are not enrolled in the program, are not permitted on the site. I think this also answers Council Member Park's question on the same. Council Member Chahal, the commitment to community meetings, and let me just turn to that. So there will be quarterly community meetings and this is actually in the agreement itself. Prior to the issuance of certificate of occupancy, the county shall organize a community meeting for anyone who wishes to attend. And the intent is really to open this up to the wider community so anyone in the community that has a concern doesn't have an additional barrier. They can just come to a community meeting. The county shall convene the community meeting at least four times per year for the first two years of operation. And the county may delegate these to the contractor, which is Life Moves. If the project is running smoothly for two years of operation, the county may reduce the community meetings to an annual or an as-needed basis with notice to the city. However, the city, at its sole discretion, may require the county to hold additional community meetings on an as-needed basis. Council member Shahal, and I believe some other council members also brought this up. Seven years of funding. Will the county continue to support? So the county is, as home key co-applicants, and that's what the county and Life Moves are, And they are responsible for securing any additional operational funding. As part of the agreement, the county is required to make good faith efforts to obtain additional funding from sources that do not conflict with home key requirements or the city requirements. And cost escalation and higher costs, that was also a question. Every effort will be made to contain the cost within the home key budget. The city commitment is for operational funding only, so the city would not be responsible for any capital funding or for construction costs. The city is not required to make its first payment for the operations until after issuance of certificate of occupancy.

Officer, can I jump in real quick and ask life moves in the county to address costs after year seven?

Yes. Thank you, city manager. I can start for the county. So as Director Hamid explained, the county has committed as part of the Homekey application both for the construction costs, the initial five years, Mayor, as you referenced, of operations funding, but also for funding through the entire first 15 years of the project. And so the agreement with the state for home key funding includes all of that. And then upon that 15 years, the intent is to continue providing these services. And so the county would be working with our board of supervisors. It's also a public-private partnership. So we'll bring Life Moves up to speak to the Life Moves portion of the commitment. But it is a part of our agreement with the state.

And just to echo that, our commitment is the same. So as co-grantees on the ACD project, we've made the same commitment to ACD as well for the same time period.

Okay, Councilmember Hardy, your question was about PLHA funding, and I will very quickly, briefly go through this. Permanent local housing allocation funding is awarded annually, and it's an entitlement, which is based on a formula. Every five years, HCD releases a NOFA, and it may update the program guidelines from time to time. The city of Santa Clara is estimated to receive about 2.1 million in the next five year PLH cycle, and after admin costs about two million would be available for projects and activities. Okay. uh council member gonzalez your question was about transportation so this is within a half mile of transportation in addition staff did check and as of july 1st the sv hopper it does go all over the city now and sv hopper operates every 15 minutes after you give a call it arrives It can take you anywhere, Santa Clara, Mountain View, Caltrain, Sunnyvale, Cupertino. So that's a very convenient option for residents. And it's also, yeah. Your next one I think was really a comment about collaboration. Yes, we will work with Santa Clara Unified School District as well as Second Harvest. And then your third comment was what is the current site being used for? It's a county owned property and currently it's vacant. Council Member Park, you asked a couple questions about the facility and conversion of the facility. I want to go back to the background slides when we started in 2021 and how there was consistent direction from council and from our partners as well as the Task Force on Homelessness and how we arrived to this site, which is a county-owned site. And because of certain criteria for this site, that's why this site was established and picked. So this has been occurring for a number of years, and that's why we got to where we got to. Council Member Park, you asked about Haven House and what calls were made. I would turn to life moves about that.

Thank you, and those five calls that Haven Family House received last year were medical related, so there are paramedic sort of responses.

Council Member Park, your next comment is about community meetings versus an oversight committee. The reason it went to a community meeting is, again, a community meeting is more direct where anybody from the community, if they have a concern or an issue, they can come and join the community meeting and it would be addressed because staff would be attending those meetings as well, whereas an oversight committee adds an additional layer. No guess. I think I've already addressed this previously because Council Member Shahal asked that. Housing first rules. And you asked specifically if there's a sex offender and they're allowed in, what happens if there is a change and they become a sex offender or something else is discovered. They would have to follow the housing first rule. guidelines and they would have to follow the state law. In the agreement, we do have in the agreement that sex offenders are not allowed. So the agreement does cover that. Council Member Park, if you're 18 and you can stay, yes, you can stay. And if you turn older or become 18 after you move in, what happens? The county, my understanding, continues to work. with those families even after you turn 18. And so one of the things that we did after speaking to Council Member Hardy is we included in the agreement that it would be children with minors who are 18 or that are in high school, so they would be allowed to continue. I'm sorry.

I don't know if that's what it says.

It's in the agreement, Council Member Park.

I think that was the amendment that it would be 18... It included 18. It was under 18 before, but it was changed to include 18. But my question is, what if it's over 18? The fact that we still have that number in there, is a bit of a concern, and if we know of people that are there, they're 17, they're going to be 18, they're 18, they're going to be 19.

You said that before, let her finish. Let her finish. I don't want to open it up until we're all done. Then just write down what you want to say.

Because there's a lot of things that we've asked that were not answered correctly, and this is one of the problems with asking all the questions at once and getting all the answers afterwards.

Council Member Park, please stop.

I would like to overrule the chair. The attorney, can you rule on this?

I'm trying to get through this presentation. Please write down your questions and then you can ask them when I call on you at the end.

There's not a ruling for me to make, as we discussed before.

I can overrule the chair.

That's what I was going to say, is that you could make a motion with a second to have things proceed in a manner that's different than the chair has proposed. Thank you. I'd like to make that motion. I will second that motion.

I would appeal to the council to let me finish this, let her finish the questions, and then you can all have your time to ask additional questions. But if we go back and forth, it's after 10 o'clock. We're on our first item. So I would appeal to the council to not support this and let's continue in a manner that is professional, that we're not going back and forth with each council member.

May I continue?

There's a motion on the floor.

There's a motion and a second to allow council members to continue discussions and questions and overruling the way I'm trying to run this meeting. All right, city clerk. Please register your vote. And that fails. All right, go ahead, please.

Okay, I do want to address Council Member Park's question about, so what the agreement does say, and you are correct, that they need to be 18 in high school. So if we want to change that and if the county agrees, we can make that minor amendment, but we can come back to that. So right now, it does say 18 and in high school. Your next question was about program compliance for supportive services, and if clients choose not to address that, I'm gonna turn to Life Moves to respond to that. And then the next question is for you two about how has hiring changed?

Seventy-five percent previously was not good enough.

So I'll take the first question about program compliance. Program compliance has not been an issue at any of our family sites. And part of the design in this project is to make sure that we, a lot of times when we hear about folks not wanting to participate in different programs, it's typically because as providers, we're not providing the programs that our clients need. And in this scenario, particularly at our family sites, we are providing those programs. And this project actually gives us the ability to actually expand that sandbox and be able to provide even more and respond to the dynamic needs of our clients. And so we meet our clients where they're at, as you'll constantly hear, and that has not been a problem at all. And so as folks are working towards their permanent housing outcomes and achieving that, our job is to help them get there. And we've been able to successfully do that as demonstrated by our outcomes. Thank you. Yeah, so we consistently, I think as we said last time, we consistently look at our compensation. Our compensation is evaluated, at least in the past three years, at least three times. This is done externally, so this is not just an internal looking in. It's also done by external consultants that are pulling data for not just here locally in the Bay Area, but statewide across nonprofits and across this local data. And we use that data to compensate our staff. And we are very competitive in that amongst our peers. I will also say that compared to when we were here last time as well, We've significantly added additional skill sets to our leadership team. We didn't have a COO before. We have a COO now. And there's other roles at director and VP levels that have been added as well. As I stated earlier, it's highly important to us that we're able to support our staff and be able to give them the support they need so that they can be their best selves with our clients that we serve. Thank you so much.

Council Member Park, I did want to go to your other question again. I just want to backtrack on if you're 18 or you're overage. So the county confirmed that if you are part of a family unit and enrolled in K-12 school, county would allow them to stay there. So there is flexibility. But also remember, most of these clients do stay for six months before they go on to permanent housing. Council Member Park, your next question was people being taken care of and thrive and confirm. I think that if that question is correct, if I understood that correctly, I think, again, it comes through the data that was provided by Life Moves on their facilities and how many children are served and how many clients move from interim housing to permanent supportive housing. I'm happy to bring up that slide again that Life Moves shared about the summary and the statistics, if you would like.

I'm okay.

Your next question about if records are being retained for the first seven years. So in the agreement, the records are retained for five years in the agreement. The next question was about if there's damages on the site or in the community. Do you mean like criminal activity or do you mean property damage? I'm just trying to understand here.

Anything.

Anything? If there's any criminal activity, again, the normal course of procedure with minor or major criminal activity would be for either the client or staff or even a resident to call 911, and then PD would respond.

There was also a question of liability.

The question of liability, let's see if I have that.

Is this life moves liability? You may want to answer that. I don't know what the...

I was going to say, I don't understand the question, liability with respect to what? Damage? I don't know. Like damage within the site?

I mean, it's inclusive. The damage caused on site, if clients cause damage outside the site to... you know, offsite, if something happens, if there's theft, if people are bringing things in, bringing things out. I mean, I just wanna know who takes, where do the claims go and who assumes liability?

Life moves can only speak to operations and liability.

Sounds like liability for behavior.

Is outlined for life moves. Life moves can't speak to liability that exists within a community or outside of the operating of the project.

The question is, if a client causes damage outside of the site, then how does that damage get ameliorated? How does that get?

I can't speak to that. Those are very specific.

Thank you. Yeah, I understand. City Manager?

In general, at a high level. The agreement before you does not make the city liable for anything on the site. If someone was to damage something outside of the site, that would be treated just like a normal individual causing damage to whether it's public property or private property, irrespective of where they live.

Thank you.

And I just want to add to that response that in our agreement with the county, they've agreed to include the city as a required indemnity in their agreement with LifeMove. So if there are any third-party claims, we would be indemnified by LifeMove.

Very good. Thank you.

This is Jennifer Byers, our assistant city attorney.

And I will add, Madam Mayor, I was named insured, too, under the insurance policies.

Oh, very good. Thank you.

Mayor, on to your questions. If there are cost overruns on the construction, who is liable? The city is not a co-sponsor. It is Life Moves and the county, so they would be liable for any increases in cost construction or capital improvements. Your next question, you wanted a clarification about the agreement and whether it's for 30 or 90 units and there are 91 bedroom units and what was on the HCD application. The agreement is for 30 family units and can you just go back to the slide that shows the plan and the layout

I understand the plan and the layout.

So each unit, so the clarification is that each family unit has three bedrooms. So 30 times three is 90 bedrooms. And as was explained, six of those units are flex units. In other words, two families could fit in there, let's say two single moms with kids. I understand that, yes. So it's a total of 30 units. You asked about is this enforceable and is it a recorded covenant? Are you talking about this agreement?

The understanding that it's for family units and because that's what you're promising our community that these are for family units, so how do we enforce that? And having a covenant restricting it enforces it. So is that, as far as we're going, are we not doing that? That was my question.

As we are- I might maybe jump in on that and then Jen Byers in the front line of this can add to it, Mayor, or correct me if I misspeak. There is not a recorded covenant for the benefit of the city in this arrangement with the county. there certainly would be value in that and i identified that as something valuable that we would be seeking but the county and maybe they could speak to this did not agree to that in in our negotiations as a matter of of policy and their desire not to create precedent for this level and type of funding for that purpose but there's a number of mitigating factors that make me comfortable we have good remedies um even without a recorded covenant Because a recorded covenant really is just something that we would need to sue on anyway, right, if it was violated. In the agreement, the county has agreed that the key obligations for that being a family project and local preference and a number of other things, are for a 30 year term and would survive the termination of our agreement with them. That was one of the reasons to seek a covenant is to have an agreement that survived the termination of any underlying agreement with them, in that case recorded against the property. So there is that commitment for that 30 year period. There also is underlying value in that it's the county. If this was a private party who could sell the property or who'd have motivation to sell the property to somebody else, a recorded covenant would be more valuable because it would run with the land. The county can speak to their strategy in holding property. We're assuming they're not gonna sell this property and that they would continue to own and operate it. And so that would continue to be the entity against which we would have our ability to enforce our covenant. And then finally, even if it's not recorded, a commitment of the county to cause the operation of the project in the way that we bargained for is a covenant. It's just a covenant to us. It's a promise to us. And there are provisions in the agreement that allow us to enforce that, either by a lawsuit against the county, which of course wouldn't happen and we wouldn't trigger unless there was notice and opportunity to cure because we don't want to be suing the county and they don't want to be sued by us. Or our right to terminate the agreement and stop funding of the agreement. But if we did do that, Mayor and Council, we would lose the benefit of the 30 year kind of term that we negotiated. There is also going to be, and the county may speak to this, a covenant with HCD that will have other provisions for operation that HCD is imposing that would need to align with our covenants and agreement. And so that's how I would summarize, Mayor, kind of the relationship and the enforcement mechanisms that we have. If I failed to describe that accurately or there's something to add, I'll defer to Jen Byers who worked on the front line of this.

Thank you. Everything that the city attorney said was absolutely accurate, and I just wanted to add part of the county's rationale and concern in recording a document against the property is there's a provision in the state standard home key requirement that prohibits them from recording additional covenants against the property without HCD approval, so it's additional hurdles that the county and Life Moves would have to jump through in order to get this agreement recorded.

one more clarification it was said but just put a fine point on it the negotiations actually started with the city requesting things in exchange for providing funds and in fact they started with uh... a essentially a structure that the city would Get some of the things that it was asking for only for the term in which we provided funding And so it's just important to note that the city is only providing seven years worth of funding But getting 30 years worth of commitments for the family Requirement and so just note that that is far far longer than the amount of funding that we're providing

All right, we're coming on 10.30. Is there more? I was the last person that asked questions, so.

And I think that covers all the questions. Happy to take any additional.

All right, so council comments, last question, and I'm looking for a motion. Council Member Cox.

Yeah, I think that we have spent a lot of time, and there's, Great support for this. Again, I really appreciate that our city is looking at what we can do and opportunities instead of deficits right now. I'm excited to partner with this. And again, I would be happy to make a motion for staff recommendation.

Thank you. So we have a motion by Council Member.

With the amendment. With the amendment for...

Which you spoke about earlier. Yeah, the one you put up on the screen. With the amendment. I don't know if Nora, do you know that?

Thank you, Nora.

Agreed. A way to capture that amendment.

Section 2, Exhibit E, which needs to be updated. Thank you.

Thank you. With the amendment. Council Member Cox, seconded by Vice Mayor Gonzalez. Council Member Park.

So I guess that question is what happens after the 30-year period, which is, I don't know what the county plans are, but 30 years seems like a long time, but not for residents who live here 40, 50, 60 years. The way we bargained, as the city attorney said, is like a covenant. But, I mean, our right to terminate the agreement is basically just stopping funding, and that funding is only for, the only committed funding with the agreement letter would be for seven years. So if we terminated our funding within the first seven years, that's fine, but I don't think there would be any benefit for us to do anything past that seven years if we have not committed additional funding. I wanna understand that a little bit more. Which is, you've said, we are paying seven, we are funding operations for seven years and getting 30 years of benefits. But after the first seven years are up, there is no leverage that we have. There is nothing that we can stop unless we've committed more funding. So that's the question. If records are being retained for only five years, I mean, the agreement that we have is seven years. So my request would be that we retain records for the full seven years and even longer beyond that so that we can get data and see how not just this project is run, but future projects as well. I heard from Mr. Simpson about the very competitive. You significantly added skill sets to your leadership team. I'm not worried about the leadership team. I'm worried about the management team at these sites. The question that I asked was in particular about how are we ensuring that the managers of the sites that we are putting in place are the right people. That was my question. The community meetings, I was told that they're more direct. Anyone can come to those meetings, but from my estimation, anyone can come to community oversight committee meetings as well. I think the difference would be that anyone can come to those meetings, those meetings would be held, but if there is an oversight committee that recommendations or even actions could be taken by committee, or they could be suggested by the committee, which would be very different from simply having a community report or community outreach meeting, and that's something I think is very important. to me. We talked about no-guess policy, but And we talked about community gardens. How will community gardens be managed with a no-guest policy? My question was, will there be common areas where people can come to visit? And I don't know if that was the case. I mean, you talk about, and I asked this question when we took the tour, but even family members, extended family members who are not clients would not be allowed. And I kind of feel that there needs to be an area where extended family can meet with family members who are there, grandparents, or even parents, if the people who are there are grandparents or uncles and aunts and things like that. I think that's kind of an important thing. I just want to know if there's a way that that's addressed. I mean, the city at sole discretion may require more meetings, but I want to make sure that we've got community, not just talk about and hear what the issues are. I would like the community to be able to make recommendations or even take actions if they can. I know that the numbers for homelessness went up 50% in two years. I believe that one of the reasons that that happened is because a voucher system went away. And it's possible, and that's the reason why previously the unhoused numbers were lower because there was a voucher system which kept families off the street. But that could change at any time as well. We could reinstitute a voucher program, in which case the number of families hopefully the number of families that need assistance would hopefully decrease. And what's going to happen if that's the case? That's one of the reasons why I believe having a covenant, having an agreement that says this will be not just prioritized for families, but I think that there is some language in there that says that if we cannot put families in there, if there's a change in demographic, as we sterilely put it, there would be a discussion between the county and the city. But I think it's very important that we retain this aspect. That is one of the most important pieces of this. And you know, when we talk about I mean, I think that this project was actually a big success. When I look in 2023 and I look at the nos on council and the people who said no on council are still on council. And I think that the important thing that I want people to realize is this is the power of public input. which is when we look at what this project is today, it is very different from a project that was proposed in 2023. I think a lot of the objections that I had in 2023 have largely been addressed. And I think that county staff, city staff, even LIFEMU staff has acknowledged that it was the public input, it was questions, it was input from people on this council who made those changes. I know a lot of people out there don't really understand how housing advocates can say no to housing projects. And I'm gonna tell you why. And I think people should listen to this because the things, the problems that we had, even 2023, I feel like the people making claims, making suggestions and making attacks have not actually looked at, have not reviewed what happened in 2023. in 2023 this was a very different project and the county was disingenuous in their commitments to the to the city and for everyone that's shaking their heads you need to look at the meetings and you need to hear and at some point you need to acknowledge that changes were made based on the inputs so county staff there is no such thing as a perfect project and likewise there is no such thing as perfect housing project And as a result, our responsibility, especially as housing advocates, because people are looking to housing advocates on the projects that they are accepting, it is our responsibility to find the problems with the unperfect projects that come before us and fix them. Not just to approve every housing project the way they are, because it's a housing project and we are housing advocates. And if it's not possible to fix the problems in the projects, or we will not, there is no commitment to fix the projects, the problems in the project, then it is our responsibility to say no. When this project came in front of us, it was aggregating children in a low barrier facility that also allowed singles and individuals. This was a problem for me. This problem has gone away because of families. And now there are small cracks that basically say, well, we can change it if we can't get families. And there are lots of ways that the number of families that need help could decrease. Again, the voucher system that was in place, whose removal, dramatically increase the number of families that need help.

You're repeating Council Member Park, so is there a point to all this?

Yes, this is the point. Please get to the point. Having that covenant, having a promise that if it changes, not just within the first 30 years, but after 30 years, there needs to be something where the city can take some agency, has some agency in what gets put into the city. So I would like to ask that as well. But again, the residents that came in, we reduced it from 124 units, single units, down to 30 family units. It's not just prioritized for families. It was designed for families. This is a very important point. The population shifted. That population shift was one of the biggest issues that we asked for that the county did not commit to in 2023. And the fact that the city's financial risk was capped, that's what we did in 2023. We capped the financial risk. We said we wouldn't be a sponsor, we capped our liability, but I would like the other issues addressed. I'd like the issues of community oversight committee, something more than just a report out to the community. I would like to know what happens after seven, after 30 years.

I'm gonna have the city manager quickly answer those. We have other council members that wanna speak and we need to move ahead. So city manager, if there's questions in there, I think there was some, I think most of them have already been answered, but I hope you got them down.

absolutely mayor i have a number a number of statements but okay highlight on a few community gardens i know they were referred to as community gardens just want to clarify they are community gardens but it's for the community in the project right the the 30 families similar question around community involvement And I think Council Member Park, you mentioned your desire and your belief that members from the community should be allowed in and individuals extended family members should be allowed in. I'll tell you, staff certainly had some of the same thoughts, but we toured sites, we met with the service providers We were convinced that they are actually the experts in this and did not want to make a recommendation to drastically change their service model. And in fact, we saw several examples that I think council members had the opportunity to tour where their operational model is working. And so totally understand your sentiment. And we initially had some of the same thoughts. With regard to what happens after seven years, I think we've articulated that. The only thing that I think we haven't really addressed, which is what happens after 30 years, and I'll turn that over to the county and or life moves.

Hi, KJ Kaminski, Director for the County Office of Supportive Housing. Our agreement with HCD will include a 30-year restriction to serve unhoused folks, but the county and Life Moves will be investing tens of millions of dollars in this project over 30 years. We intend to continue to serve people with that investment for as long as we possibly can. can't commit the County Board of Supervisors personally, but I can say that our intent is to use the site to continue to support families for as long as there is a need. Thank you.

I think the last thing, Council Member Park, in a number of your statements, you said we, and I think you were referring to how Life Moves Handle hire staff, and you said we want to make sure we're hiring staff. I just want to clarify for the record, the city is not hiring staff. We are not actually a owner in this project. We are simply providing operational funding, and as the city attorney mentioned earlier, that there are indemnifications and liabilities. But I know oftentimes we, certainly with other projects, we talk about we, but it's important to understand the distinction for the public.

I'll make it clear. I want to make sure that a facility in our city is being managed, is well managed. And there's also the question about retention. I mean, records retention. We have five years, seven years of a commitment, but it's a 30-year project.

If I may.

Are you a member of the public?

Annette is with Life Moves.

Do you want her to speak?

Yes.

All right, go ahead quickly, please.

Thank you. My name is Annette Leonard-Wickey. I'm the Vice President of Programs and Services for Life Moves, and just wanted to try and directly answer several of the current questions.

Very quickly, please.

So in terms of our hiring, we have a thorough vetting process. And since I've been on board for the last two years and have stood up several brand new sites, we have created a process to ensure that new staff and new sites have the wraparound support of our more seasoned staff as we move through the process. In terms of family guests, while we're not able to offer guests who are not service providers at the site due to broader safety concerns, including folks who are survivors of intimate partner violence, we are able to support our clients in reconnecting with family and finding safe spaces offsite to do that. I'm available for any other questions, but I appreciate.

the time thank you thank you are there any other city manager all right counts uh vice mayor gonzalez thank you madam mayor um i'll just say

What we're paying, what we're contributing to this effort is very, very minimal. We should probably be doing more. It's about 23%. If we take the $4.1 million at the top level for the resources that it takes for the programs at that site every year, we're paying about 23%. And we're asking quite a lot from Homekey and the county as far as the things we're asking for. I think that the quarterly input that there are information that they'll be giving us is important. We had 150 students in Santa Clara Unified that were homeless this last year. My children live half a mile away from here. I'm 100% secure that this is gonna be a great site, and they're not gonna be harmed in any way. The fire department's about .1 distance from that site. Errol Conmaker Park, a great park for them to use, is right next to that. If they need a farm, the 4-H farm is .3 miles away. Casa del Maestro, which they can collaborate. Some teachers might be able to go and volunteer there, about .4 miles away. There's no perfect site. This is probably as perfect a site other than you put it on a school site or something like that as possible. I think the contribution that we're making to help have some stake in this is important. Either we support families that are here in the city or we don't. And I think this is a great contribution for us to put our money where our mouth is and help those families that are in need.

Thank you, Vice Mayor. And I'm going to go ahead and support the project as well. I'm cautiously optimistic that everything that everyone said will happen for this site will actually happen. We'll actually have families there for 30 plus years. people will be they'll be involved in the community the community will help out there we won't have any public safety issues and life moves will be very successful there so i'm going to call for the question councilmember park if you have a quick comment yeah you've spoken a lot on this issue but i've asked for a couple things i'll formally add to ask to amend

I would like to request that we do records retention for the full 30 years or for the lifetime of the site. And I would request that we look into and we put in place a community oversight committee made up of residents of the community that can do more than just have open meetings. Again, I hear what you say, but those are the two requests that I would like to make.

Are you making a request to the makers of the motion?

To the makers of the motion, that's correct. Is it my friendly amendment? Otherwise, I'll make a substitute motion.

I do not agree. I don't know the inter-workings of their staff and their program well enough to know if that's a wise request, so no.

And I would like to make a substitute motion, which is the recommendation on the floor with the addition of records retention for a full 30 years and a community oversight committee.

Is there a second to that substitute motion? The ayes for a lack of a second. City Clerk, when you're ready. with staff recommendation with the amendment. Please register your vote. And that passes unanimously. Thank you staff, thank you Life Moves, thank you county, thank you our city staff, everyone that's involved with this. Thank you, a lot of hard work went into this and we appreciate all the help. We're gonna take a five minute comfort break before we go on to our item number two on the agenda. Thank you all and for those leaving, get home safely. Seats please How many slides does I'm calling the meeting back to order We're now moving on to item number six, action on a resolution. Excuse me, could everyone take their seats please? Action on a resolution calling and giving notice of a special municipal election to be held on November 3rd, 2026 in conjunction with the city's general municipal election for a vote on two ballot measures that, if passed, would amend the city charter as follows. Implement a comprehensive update of the city charter and update the city's public works procurement, requesting the consolidation of such election with the statewide general election to be held in Santa Clara County on November 3, 2026, directing the Office of the City Attorney to prepare the impartial analysis for the two measures and setting the priorities and schedule for ballot arguments and authorizing other necessary and appropriate actions, City Manager.

Thank you, Mayor, for reading that long title. Just a very, very quick introduction. This project, as you know, began over a year ago. It is a comprehensive review of the city charter. You have had a number of meetings on that. While the city attorney has presented primarily at the prior meetings, I just want to note once again that this project has been supported by the city manager's office. as well as generally or nearly every city department. You have representatives here from Silicon Valley Power. You have representatives here from the Public Works Department. You have representatives here from your Finance Department. A number of those departments are in particular interested in the alternative procurement method item that you're going to discuss here. And the City Attorney is also supported by members of your Charter Review Committee that you appointed. With that, I'll turn it over to Glenn Guggins, who has led this project.

Thank you, City Manager Grogan, Madam Mayor, Council Members, Glenn Guggins, City Attorney, and for the last year, lead staff liaison to the CRC and for the charter project. Very much appreciate the opportunity to present to you tonight. much more briefly than usual, I hope, we hope, and on the one last step needed in order for the council, if you so choose, to place measures on the November 2026 ballot that would update the city's charter, which has not happened in any comprehensive way for many, many years. Agenda, recap, briefer than usual of how we got here, summary of the requested and required actions before you tonight, and then I think an important addition, some testimony from the CRC members. I'm gonna introduce them later on in the presentation. They've been so important to this process. I wanted them to be able to speak to you themselves about their experience and their recommendation and why they've supported it. Then council questions, public comment, deliberations and action, which I'll outline for you in a little bit more detail when we get there. Charter project, how we got here. As you'll remember, the concept of a comprehensive charter review and update was first presented to the Governance and Ethics Committee back in May in 2025. The project, after some iterations and repackaging and thought process, was formally initiated by the City Council with their appointment of the Charter Review Committee and the adoption of the Charter Project Bylaws. Those bylaws contained, I think, a very well stated and clear purpose of the Charter Project, which was to identify provisions that needed to be corrected, clarified, or updated, to be consistent with applicable law, aligned with current best practices for city operations. That's what a lot of the various departments of the city are excited about. And in general, easier to access, understand, and apply. That's what we hope the public will be excited about and my office in its need to interpret and assist everyone with understanding how the charter works. The bylaws also said that this project was not intended to make a significant change to the structuring of city government. So you're not gonna see dramatic changes here. You're seeing the kind that were described in that other sentence of the purpose of the project. Of course, the project then, after initiated, was implemented by the CRC. This bullet doesn't do that effort justice. It did happen over a nine plus month period, very much consistent with that stated purpose. 11 public meetings now, 31 now ad hoc subcommittees with training, benchmarking, stakeholder and public input. section by section review, you know, of the charter in the ad hoc subcommittees with report outs to the CRC. and really a very high integrity and productive exercise. City Council, consideration and direction, as you know, has happened over this last month, and here we are finally tonight. The recommendation in summary here on this next slide that was a product of this effort included a recommendation by the CRC to proceed with a comprehensive update for consideration by the voters at the November 2026 election to include in that proposal all level one and level two changes and such level three changes that the council felt comfortable would be supported by the community. And this bullet, again, not doing justice to really what's all included in here, included the addition of charter-wide conventions, reorganizations to improve accessibility, and again, section by section updates to align city operations and practices with current best practices. The other important element of that recommendation, because this was such a substantial effort and it was understood that having the public understand it would be key to having them support it, was a recommendation to provide for a public information program to include on the city's website annotated and clean versions of the updated charter. FAQs, information mailers to be distributed to voters, similar to what was done with Measure I, also a substantial measure, and public forums, which the CRC very much was supportive of and was prepared to participate in to share information and respond to any voter questions or concerns they might have about the measure. The presentations to council and the direction that you gave, as was mentioned, occurred over these three key meetings leading up to this meeting. You'll recall your January 9th, really, study session had the charter update drafts presented to you in advance, had the CRC's final report and recommendation that detailed a lot of the process and the rationale for where they came out on their recommendation. It had a detailed report presented by me on the project origins process and the results and recommendation. You remember this was organized by ad hoc subcommittee groups and the annotated and underlined strikeout and clean versions were intended to facilitate, because it is a substantial project, your ability to absorb and understand all that went into this. on your june fifteenth meeting uh... this report continued it wasn't completed on june ninth and again you took public testimony you asked questions uh... there are deliberations and an initial direction at that time to bring back A comprehensive update for action, including level one and level two changes. The decision was made not to go with the level three changes at that time for concern that they touched on sensitive areas and there could be an issue with that. And to have the public works update brought back for further discussion as a possible standalone measure. So that's the action that you took kind of as an interim measure on June 15th. Then on July 17th, at a regular meeting, there was a presentation of supplemental information memo, if you remember, with some further discussions about, excuse me, the levels and drafts of the charter updates that expanded on the annotations, and in fact now, applied on a section by section basis the assignment of the level of proposed change. That was above and beyond what had been presented already. You again took, and there was a few additional changes that were made based on review of the document and a recommendation from Bond Council, and we talked about those as well. The action taken there was to bring back with those updates again that measure for final action at this meeting and the Public Works item. Next slide, the actions that are before you tonight. Consistent with the purposes of the project, consistent with your previous directions, you now have before you a proposal for a comprehensive charter amendment. And the question, do you want to proceed with the ballot measure on the November 2026 ballot to amend the city charter with a comprehensive charter update on the terms presented or on other terms? Item two, public works charter amendment. Do you wanna proceed with the ballot measure on the November 2026 ballot that amends the charter with an update to the city's public works procurement provisions on the terms presented or other terms? There are a lot of things that go into that and we're gonna list those here so you really understand the elements to what's required and a number of you are familiar with this to put a measure on the ballot. First of all, you need a ballot question. legal standard and that's really the key thing that the voter sees on the ballot itself right when you get a ballot you've got the ballot question it has a list of who's written arguments in favor of the measure it includes a list of of folks who have just if any who have written to oppose the measure and then the ballot pamphlet right that larger you know document includes in that the ballot question, the city attorney's impartial analysis, and the detail of the arguments for and against. It can also include the actual text of the measure, but it need not, and that's one of the decisions we'll talk about later with respect to both of these measures. But the ballot question is the first kind of important thing. How is this going to be described to the public? And here's what's proposed for you. I have to tweak it the littlest bit because the city clerk's count counted 77 words and it can only be 75. I've got a couple of words I can admit. There's always words you can admit. so the title would be comprehensive charter amendment that count against the the word limit uh... and uh... it would read as follows shell the measure and it's got clumsy grammar if you remember that's required also by the measure i wish they didn't require you to do this but this is what you need to do in order to comply with their technical requirements shall the measure proposing a comprehensive update to the city charter to eliminate outdated provisions clarify ambiguous terms reorganize we're going to delete that and there and put a slash reformat to improve usability and update provisions to align with current best practices including new and updated provisions for defining and filling vacancies in elected appointed positions, modernizing elected and appointed official roles and duties, requirements for approval of laws, budget implementation, financing options, legal notice, and other, we're going to delete the word similar, enhancements to city operations and procedures be adopted. It is a challenge to describe in a 75-word ballot question something comprehensive as this. And so really other resources will be necessary in order for folks to understand it. But that's the proposed question for your consideration. When we come back through and it's time for you to act, you can look at that and make comments on it. as long as we stay within 75 words, and it's accurate, and it doesn't have too much language that encourages people to vote for it. It's supposed to describe it. It can talk about favorable aspects of it, but you're not supposed to use it as a campaign statement. item uh... is the public works update measure consistent with your desire for two measures this language was seventy three words thank you i've got a couple words to spare if anyone want to suggest some added words to it uh... but this would read as follows public works charter amendment would be the title and then the question would be shell the measure proposing to amend the city charter update rules for the construction of public works to allow for competitive best value contracting to improve project quality, expedited needed project completion and minimize risks. Retaining city council authority to approve major contracts, require formal bidding and award contracts to the lowest responsive and responsible bidder. You'll remember that's gonna continue to be the vast majority of contracts that are done and so retaining that authority is important element of this. all as set forth in a city ordinance presented and approved at a public meeting be adopted. Terrible grammar again, required, but this one meets those requirements as well. So ballot question is one important thing you do that a number of you are familiar with to put a measure on the ballot. Related actions, and we'll talk about this again further when you get to the action itself. What to include in the ballot. For the comprehensive measure, it's been recommended that that the actual charter language be referenced but not attached to the ballot. And instead, an underlined strikeout version and clean versions of the proposed updates, including the annotations and FAQs and a matrix of charter history And city code references be provided on the city's website. You don't have to do this. You can do this It's done where there are extensive Ballot, you know measures that might either be confusing or too much, you know on the ballot pamphlet itself But you could include a version of the proposal if you wanted in that in the draft language and for the public works measure in terms of what to include in the ballot. It is recommended that you actually show the language because it's a discrete section where you can show the provision that it's replacing and the provision that's being proposed. You can put them side by side. Here's what it used to say, here's what it's going to say. So that is something that in the view of the CRC and your professional staff is gonna be more easily digestible by a person viewing that measure. The other action is, are there any changes proposed to charter amendment content? Obviously, there's been a substantial work put into this. It's intended to be a comprehensive measure. A lot of tinkering with it now would be challenging. But there is, but it's in your discretion to do that. And there is a provision that was specifically held out for further discussion in your previous action. And that was the kind of late breaking, although it was in a different form actually in the charter all along, but a more refined version of an update to the revenue bond financing language that would expand the language to allow for city council resolution, not a public vote, to approve revenue bond financing for utility infrastructure other than electric utility infrastructure. If you'll remember, the charter already allows in an exemption that people clearly thought was important as part of our municipal utility financing mechanism, it already allows revenue bond financing for utility infrastructure. You do it all the time. But it does not allow you to do that for a non-electric utility infrastructure. And if you want to have a discussion about that, I've got a pocket slide to present so we can dive deeper into that. But that's a decision that you deferred for further discussion at this meeting, and we're prepared to engage on that. I want to note that the comprehensive amendment that's proposed is proposed to be approved in substantial form. with any corrections brought back for council ratification. If there's something found between now and the actual presentation of the item that needs to be corrected, you're giving us authority to do that. But only subject to it being brought back to you for you to see what was being changed and to ratify that change. The draft that's in front of you has all the level three changes removed that you asked be removed and not part of this measure. And the public works section, because we're pulling out that proposal as a separate measure, remains largely as is, but with a couple of modifications to integrate it within the overall recommendation that we'll talk about when we get to the actual measures themselves. So those are some related actions that are necessary. You also have the city attorney to prepare the impartial analyses. There would be two of them. As would be my standard, I would solicit input from the various departments, including the city clerk's office and any of them that proposed measures and elements to this in order to get their input on it. You also have to decide who you want to draft and sign your ballot arguments. In the resolution, and this is just a recommendation, you can do it as you see fit, it's proposed through a fairly standard practice that two, but no more than three of you, right? If it's four of you, that's a quorum, and so it can't operate as a committee for this purposes. Two, but no more than three of you be designated to draft and sign the in favor argument and any required rebuttals if in fact there's a draft opposition to the proposal along with two or more CRC members that those designated people might select Under the Elections Code, you can have no more than five signatories. You can have more than that preparing the draft, but only five folks can sign it. So that's what's proposed for you to control who would be preparing the argument in favor of the measure. There's also schedule filing deadlines for these arguments. Those are outlined in the staff report. The city clerk can discuss that in greater detail if you're interested. But that's a pretty tight schedule from when you call the election in order to meet those standards. Then there is a request that you direct staff to prepare a voter communications program consistent with the CRC's recommendation. You don't need to approve that program tonight. I think it's worth some additional thought to be put into that, looking at current best practices for that. what was done with Measure I, what would be appropriate for this, but that already was outlined in general, at least of what the CRC had in mind for that, but ultimately that would be a future action by the City Council. I don't think the pamphlets are printed until, what's the date for that, Assistant City Clerk, for when the ROV said the pamphlets get prepared? Is it late August, early September when those get sent out? are you asking when the arguments and rebuttals and all those are no no no when the actual the actual ballot pamphlet is prepared the sample ballot that's mailed out to folks i'll get that for you okay and and so we clearly want that in place right before that in order to start gearing up for you know public information being put out you know for that to um help include information for people so that they can understand even better what they're getting and then um uh... finally direct staff to prepare the matrix that we've been talking about of charter history section by section uh... with references to implementing city code sections that will be useful both to communicate to voters as to what was changed in what the history of those various sections are and how those things are implemented already in substantial form in the city code and of course as a historical document uh... to be useful for people how when they are looking at the charter and wanting to understand the context and wanting to understand where things are implemented. As both a way for, giving me a break to giving you a break from me and to introduce an important voice in this process. I want to now invite up to the podium any number of the CRC members that are here that want to speak to their recommendation. You'll recall the CRC is comprised of 13 members that were chosen by lottery six And by year appointments, seven, all six city council districts were represented with some people that were very experienced with government on boards and commissions and other people that this is their first experience with city government. So a nice mixture of people from across the community with various levels of experience. Collectively, hundreds of volunteer hours were contributed, reviewing materials, providing ideas and input, and actively attending the various meetings that I've described to you All of their recommendations on these measures have been unanimous because they built it, right, and they were immersed in it, even though it was a staff-driven process by its very nature, because it talks about wonky things and the operation of city government. They were very involved and very supportive. and again with their willingness to contribute to a robust voter information program. That's the level of their enthusiasm and gluttons for punishment. Again, a number of them are here tonight to speak to the recommendation and so I will just introduce them as a group and they can come up individually as they see fit. We have Lauren Diamond, Holly Roberts, Eric Crutchlow, Mark Beckman, and Susan Peters here today. We might have had one or two others.

City Attorney, you need to speak in the microphone, please. I'm sorry, Madam Mayor, of course I do.

Thank you. I'll let them introduce themselves when they come up and we'll seed the podium during that.

Is there a presentation by the group? They're going to come up individually. City Attorney, I'm talking to them. Thank you. Thank you very much. Eric, please come forward.

Thank you, Madam Mayor, Council, staff, especially staff. I see staff has always been really, really helpful in getting a lot of things done. So I had the privilege of serving on the Charter Review Committee, and I want to address something directly. I've said publicly that I wish we had received more public participation during this process, and I still believe that. Transparency matters and reasonable people can disagree about aspects of the process and about individual recommendations. But I was here for the work. And I can tell you what I personally saw. I saw 13 residents from across Santa Clara spend nine months reviewing a charter that in many places is outdated, ambiguous, or simply no longer reflects on how our city operates. I saw people ask hard questions, disagree with each other, changed their minds, worked towards a final recommendation that the committee ultimately approved unanimously. I did not see an ulterior motive. I did not see an effort to take power from the public. I saw citizens doing a job the city council asked us to do. Is the proposal perfect? What legislation is? That's why you're here. But perfection should not be the enemy of meaningful improvement. And most importantly, a yes vote tonight does not change the charter. It gives the people of Santa Clara the opportunity to study the proposals, debate them, and make the final decision themselves in November. I believe the voters deserve that opportunity, and I respectfully ask you to move the measures forward. Thank you.

Thank you, Eric. Anyone else want to speak?

welcome hello um so this was my first experience with city government of any form um it was a very interesting experience i learned a lot and i will say that the members that i was on the committee with and the subcommittees with all had pure intentions and we did argue We did disagree, but we all thought that we were doing the best thing for our city and what we were tasked to do. So I would also be really grateful if you approved it. It is our baby. If you call the baby ugly, we won't be offended. But yeah, thank you so much.

Oh my gosh, thank you. Anyone else wanna talk about the ugly baby? You're welcome.

Hi, thanks, my name's Susan Peters and I wanted to just, a few words about my experience on the committee. It's my first involvement in city government as well and when I made the decision to volunteer, I did so because I have a little bit more time than I have had in the past and that I wanted a way to get involved and give back to the community. I've lived in this community for 40 years. I love Santa Clara and I want what's best for the city. Throughout this process, I've been continually impressed by my other committee members. Really, the dedication, the seriousness with which we took this assignment. And we come from a wide range of backgrounds. And we have different perspectives. And we really are true representatives of this community. And I think that's what this is intended to be. We explored the issues always in context of the bylaws and the purpose that we were given. That came up a lot. We tried to stay within that and how it was outlined for us. We did have disagreements, but we listened to perspectives from city staff, from stakeholders, from the public, from each other, talked about them, asked questions, debated them, and had deliberations in public before we came up with these final recommendations. So I have confidence both in the process and in the recommendations that you have before you. I do believe these updates will strengthen our charter and, importantly, will better position our city for the future. So I ask that you do move these measures forward to the public. I also do think it is very important to have some public education. As you've all seen, this is a large project and comprehensive. And so public education will be important. The public does need to be informed to make a conscious decision on whether these changes should be incorporated into our charter. So I would be happy to offer any help that I can in that as well.

Thank you, Susan. Anyone else? All right. Oh, OK. My name's Mark Beckman.

I also was new when I was on the Civil Service and the Council Election Powers and Conduct subcommittees. And I can tell you from the subcommittee standpoint that we were very diligent in what we did. I read the charter the first time, being new to city government, and I thought, well, it's Not a bad thing. But then as we sat down and started looking at it line by line, I said, yeah, there are issues. And the things that jumped out at me originally were the $1,000 threshold to buy things.

And I thought, that's ridiculous.

Why is that there? That wasn't in our area, but clearly we addressed it. My other role, I would say, is probably as a devil's advocate. There were lots of things that we considered and debated about. I don't think we let things go unnoticed. Let things go easily and agreed easily to things. We really did debate them. Things such as only the mayor having to provide financial back substance to anything presented to the council. I think I was the one who said, well, shouldn't all council members have a financial plan? And I was voted down by my group that said, well, in reality, the practice is it's the staff who ends up having to take an idea and say what works. And that's the reality. That's what we looked at and the way we worked. There's what we would have liked to have seen, and then there's the reality of it. So I, too, support it. It doesn't reflect, again, What I would say is the changes that would really make us move forward, but I think it does address what you asked, which was something that improves government and would be acceptable to the general voter, and I can fully support that. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you, CRC members. Thank you, Madam Mayor. So next steps, what do we do with this ugly baby? I first want to say it was an extraordinary effort. Patty Wong from the library supports it, so I probably shouldn't have to say anything more than that.

No, really there was a lot of people- Is she going to write the unbiased opinion?

Yeah, she'll write that if you'd like, Mayor. I think I'm legally obligated to, but I certainly can consult with Patty on aspects of that. You should. now she really was involved and again but part of it was if you remember that updating of the boards and commissions right and and board of library trustees and how out of alignment that was you know with how they actually worked and so patty was very engaged in that aspect and she is supported uh... but the as city manager pointed out really was a group effort with the input from professional staff responsible for you know applying all these terms uh... and and so uh... proud proud of that to assist with that with a lot of value adds that i'm not going to go into that you've heard it ad nauseum uh... before so next steps matter mayor the council questions uh... public testimony and of course deliberation action the recommendation is this very detailed thank you for reading it uh... uh... resolution uh... but there's some different components to that it might make sense when you get down to it to look at the breakdown for each measure if you're going to proceed first of all do you want to put the measure on yes no on what terms uh... what's the ballot question language going to be how do you want to have the ballot you know look are you going to include full text or uh... a link you know to information on the website which you can have any way and then who drafts and signs the ballot arguments those are all aspects for each madam mayor I'll turn it back over to you and council for questions and then maybe public testimony while I assemble whatever answers I can for that. Thank you, Mayor.

Thank you. All right, council questions. Council Member Hardy.

These are somewhat comments but mostly questions. Revenue bond financing. I was really happy to see this because our water treatment plant, I found out our cost that we will be allocated as the owners for the update that the state is now requiring will be close to $125 million. we are going to have to finance that. So having this option is going to help us in how we would manage this because the state is only giving us 10 years to take care of this, which is something that has kept me up at night. So seeing this revenue bond financing, so I want to make certain from the city attorney that yes, I am correct that this would cover this. I was going to suggest that we say something about making this in line with current state law, but knowing that we are up to our number of words, that may be something for the argument. And another fact that if I'm remembering right, we have not had a comprehensive updated charter since 1961, if I'm remembering right. So making certain we're clear on that, I like that there was consensus. So I would ask the city attorney also, just because of the wording, is he still suggesting that we keep these two measures separate? It will cost us more. But if we keep it separate, if... If there was a consensus on the council to put it all together, is there any way to add just a few words and take some out? I mean, is it possible? I don't know. I'd love to watch the cost, but I'm going to say this. I trust our residents. We did a good job with Measure I. We explained it to them. We told them we made promises and we were very clear and they trusted us. And I think if we can, the committee came together and came up with a consensus and a unanimity, I hope that's a word. I'm hoping that the council can do that too so that we can show a, united force that this is needed and necessary and I would be more than willing to Be on the ballot argument as I did for measure I I'm more than willing to do that Thank You councilmember Cox

I will follow that up I think councilmember Hardy made a good point and it was echoed by councilmember Gonzales last week that If we are as a group polarized on this the likelihood of success at the ballot is reduced and so I looked at The the level ones and twos this week through almost the lens of skepticism what's going to go on the ballot? That's going to cause people to second-guess and so there I think are four level two items that I think that are What I would call almost poison pills to this that if the people aren't educated enough and this is not an issue of trust I should say this upfront. I Commend the work your group has done I think that when you're really close to the scenario, you're going to understand and know things at a level we never will and that our public certainly isn't going to. So what hot topics are left out there that the public who is hearing on one end of the spectrum, this reduces transparency, this is this, what are they going to say this takes it? And so I'd like to frame it from that as suggestions for what I think will make this likely to go through and hopefully that we can agree upon in a uniform front. Easy low-hanging fruit section 4035 public notice is listed as a level one two I think but general law in the note says a five-day Notification advanced notification is typically what's given we're moving ours to 15 days later while I understand Administratively that might be easy. I think those are the issues the public will quickly see as okay You've took away advance notice on this now. We know after the ordinance is placed. What is this really about? our section 304, which is the redistricting. Redistricting is such a hot topic right now, gerrymandering and these things going on. We are required by law to do the redistricting, but I think that even adding the word independent in what the policy must be going forward is another way to strengthen that. So I want to know if that's something that we could add to that language so people know this isn't going to be a politicized policy going forward. While it still opens the policy, it says this will be an independent, not an advisory commission, so that, again, for public viewing, potentially could strengthen their confidence in this. One of the things that I think is gonna be a tricky issue that I need to get more information on, the budget authority in 801 is listed as a high governance issue because there's no threshold. Now, in certain circumstances, as I understand, the policy doesn't exist right now. I'll use 602 as an example. We've seen people removed from boards and commissions with no requirement given or address given on that i agree that a policy should be in place to protect people from those things going forward however 8015 states that immediately the city manager will be able to allocate funds without this threshold identified of how much And that because there is not any policy in place happens immediately as far as I understand. So I wanna know if that's the way that that would work. If we put this on the charter and it was approved immediately, there would be the opportunity without that threshold developed because one doesn't exist in policy now to move no limit funding between us. So I think that that probably needs a budget or a threshold if I'm understanding it correctly. And then the mayor brought up a good point last week about the JPA. Now, because the stadium authority relationship is such a politicized issue in the city. I think that any mention of what would include the stadium authority through a JPA in this language is going to be something that turns voters skin really quickly. And while I understand that that is just putting in a necessity of your job, I think what it does is in the public's mind that potentially erodes that arm's length distance between what is an independent governance board and then what is embedded in charter. And so I would like to make the recommendation that the JPA is not listed in the city charter at all so that cannot become a political issue. 805 and 103 that are removing voter Rights as much sense as they make to the people who have touched it I again worry are going to be really political issues are looked at as taking transparency away I think if we want this thing to live we really have to consider if they live on this ballot because anytime Somebody's not going to do their homework, but they see hey now I'm not allowed to vote on you know utility public sale land or I'm sorry the other one I think that's a risk for us and then again i don't know if we want to discuss the procurement part independently mayor do you have a suggestion that they put it all together okay so one of the things that i'm really wrestling with in section 802 and 502 that i need to understand better is um the way that it exists now the responsibility for public works procurement is pretty much divided between administrative staff and the city council and the threshold is low and we know that that's ridiculous One of the things that I'm wrestling with is the new charter would propose that public works procurement now resides uniquely within the public utilities director. And we haven't identified minor and major definitions for what will constitute what would go to design bid. Here's where I see a conflict in that. That's a two-man show right now. So what is going to be characterized as minor is going to be written and vetted by our public works staff and then determined by our city manager if it's minor, if I'm understanding. It would now be the director of public works who positions the arguments, if I'm understanding. Let me read this because it'll probably make sense. 802 and 502 move authority internally to the public works director and city manager, removing the requirement for a public council vote on projects they later decide to define as minor. As drafted, are we moving towards a procurement process where one administrative branch has the ability to oversee procurement, define the thresholds for its own approval authority through future ordinance, evaluate the proposals using subjective scoring, and then approve those same contracts. all within a single reporting line so i i i feel like this is one where we're kind of grading our own homework and that could be perceived as should there be another level of independent oversight that says this two-man show doesn't get to determine everything minor and and and it goes through i know that we assume best intentions but what a perfect way to set up a a deal where and there's a power imbalance there too where you know if you had a crooked city manager which i'm not suggesting at all john but um but that pressure put on people to score things in a way that could influence how the city manager then made that decision it really is a two-man show and so i think there's a problem inherent in that thank you councilmember jane um yeah in terms of

The revenue bonds, we just approved a $300 million revenue bond for the utility, the electric utility, to expand the facilities. Those revenue bonds are far larger than what we would do for other Public Works projects, so we're already giving that authority for revenue bonds, I wanted to understand the difference between a certificate of participation and a revenue bond because I sort of sense that, well, you could do a certificate of participation rather than a revenue bond. So if you could clarify that. for the public. And then it seems like a number of our neighbors are doing charter refreshes. Can you talk about which cities around us are doing charter refreshes? And then I know we had a number of committee members come up and speak, talking about there were disagreements, but ultimately the votes or the agreements were unanimous, but I've been hearing from a number of people that this is a rushed process. So I don't know if any of you have an opportunity to say whether you had enough time to sort of vet the ideas. I know Mark Beckman talked about how it improves government but doesn't really move us forward. So, at the level one and level two improvements that we made, did it feel like a rushed process? Do you feel like it wasn't vetted enough with members of the public or amongst yourselves? Those are my questions, thank you.

Any other council members? Council Member Park.

I've been hearing a lot about the rush process as well. I mean, we talk about nine month process where we had 11 public meetings and 31 ad hoc meetings. I've heard people asking about transparency, wishing that more of the public were involved. And my question is, I know that it's allowed by the Brown Act, you can have ad hoc meetings behind closed doors, but why was that decided? for the ad hoc subcommittees. Meaning at some point when I talk to people about what you do behind closed doors, the answer is always given to me as the reason that you have closed session meetings, the reason that you have discussions behind closed doors is because the topics cannot be discussed in public. But in this case, we are literally looking at the charter that affects all of the public. We have had media asked to attend these meetings, to look at this meeting so that we could look at, so that the public could see, and we had three quarters of the meetings that the committees for the charter amendments behind closed doors. I've heard the city manager, city attorney actually, say that, well, the reports were out in public meetings. There was a report out to public meetings, but that's not the same thing. To be able to go to a public discussion and perhaps give input on the topics that are being discussed is very different from hearing a report out from a closed session. And my question is why was this done if the concerns, even from the committee members themselves, were about public involvement and about transparency? I mean, I heard another question. This was my question as well from Mr. Beckman, which is only the mayor having to provide financial substance to anything presented to council if it's a special meeting and the meeting is being put together by the mayor. I think they were very specific uh requirements around that my question was why would you remove that i think that if you're going to have one person bringing something to a committee then that one person should have some backing for what they're bringing to the committee if you've got a number of people bringing in like i i agree with you i think that everyone should have to provide um you know, financial substance whenever this comes up. I think that if there's two or three people, if there's three people, if there's a majority of council members asking to discuss something, then they should also be on the hook to provide financial substance. But why would you simply remove that? That doesn't make any sense to me. Even if it were that one person, I think that the consideration of what powers does that give one person versus what responsibilities are given to a three, four person team, that is very important. I don't think that that was actually considered. My other question is for the city attorney and the city attorney's office. I mean, we've heard about this. It's now called the project. And I have concerns. How will the city attorney's office provide an impartial analysis on this when it comes right off the heels of Measure K in 2022 in Chula Vista, the charter amendment there, when the city attorney has spent probably more time on this project than any other project that wasn't a capital project or wasn't FIFA? I mean, at some point, I do have some concerns there. When we talk about the time and being rushed, we are here on the last meeting that we can have before it has to go to the ROV. And we're discussing this. I think at some point, the fact that we didn't have, after this was formalized, and we had changes last week, but after it was formalized and all the changes were gelled and not necessarily set, we didn't have any outreach meetings. I think that if we had done this in a good way, we would have had outreach meetings with the public to get them on board even before it was considered by council. And we had again in June 9th meeting, we had council members falling over themselves to put this on the ballot, even before the ballot statements were written, even before the amendments themselves were fixed. Like I don't understand that my questions are, how do we address all these things? I mean, it's one meeting, it was more than, count them, more than one meeting per week, even over during a time where we had seasonal breaks. where staff was not available. So it's really concerning to me that this is the process that we use to change the city charter. Again, I know understand the importance of some of these things to some people. I mean, we've got people looking at design build because well, they're their poster child for design build and other committees. But at the same time, to say that we want to, you know, it's throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but to keep the crocodile in with so we can keep the bathwater. There are so many analogies where we're trying to make a lot of changes. We're trying to approve everything because we have our own, you know, pet projects that we'd like to approve. But again, this entire process feels like it was closed. This entire process feels like we didn't give the public enough time. We didn't socialize this enough before it came to council, before we have to vote on it tonight to get this on the ballot. So those are my questions. Those are my comments. Thank you.

Anybody else from the council? I just have comments that I'll say after I don't have any questions at this point. So I'm going to go to the public. Yvonne, followed by Steve, followed by Brian. Please come forward. And thank you all for hanging in there this late. Appreciate your patience. Welcome.

Hi. I almost fell asleep back there. 202.2, city council powers and duties. A, in general, all powers of the city shall be vested in the city council subject to the provisions of this charter. And if you go back, if you go to AA, or AA, such other powers as much as may be reasonably necessary to advance city interest, provide for the efficient and effective delivery of city services, and to maintain the overall public health, safety, and welfare of the city, its residents, businesses, and visitors. You go to 202.2 city. city council powers, and you go to C. There's a part here that says, except for the purposes of inquiry, or as may be expressly approved by the city manager, the city council and its members shall deal with administrative service under the city manager solely through the city manager and neither the city council nor any member shall give orders to any subordinates of the city manager, either publicly or privately. Any city council ordinance or resolution that permits or takes any of the actions prohibited in this section shall be void. Now, the reason why I read that is because if you vote for this, this is basically narrowing the authority of city council, and it's expanding the power of the city manager. And it's not to say that we have a bad city manager, but the way this seems is like a corporation, when you have management and they're in position in good faith, you can have a great corporation, but when you have a different management that moves in, it can go either way. So the reason why I'm saying This is something that needs to be looked at. It's undermining the democratic process. We elected you, not the other positions. And I just want to point out that it's really important not to rush an unfinished product than to put on the ballot.

Thank you so much. Steve, is he online?

Yes, the following are all online.

Oh, the rest are. Okay, Steve, go ahead, please.

All right. Mayor Goodmore, council members, I want to let you know that we spent a lot of time. I know it seems rushed for the council, but for those who were on the charter review, we spent a large amount of time. We had extensive discussions and we reached a consensus. So I urge you to support it in its current form I think it's a very good improvement it will address some of the issues that the city has and we've listened to the council and took out the most controversial parts of it so again I urge you I ask you to support it and I want to thank my fellow charter members for the time they've served as well as city staff and especially Glenn, because he put a lot of long hours into this. Thank you.

Thank you, Steve. Brian, go ahead, Brian.

Hi, I'm sorry I couldn't stay. I had to get home. First of all, thank you for having online. It's really good, and I appreciate the way you let those people speak. I was not supporting it until after I watched all of the I read the whole charter review or the charter. I read the transcripts, not only watch the videos, but I read through the transcripts, the YouTube transcripts to try to better understand, you know, make sure I got it. I'm Cautiously optimistic, as you said, Mayor. There's been some really good points to talk about. And I think city attorney and the city manager, but especially the committee, put a lot of time into this and the staff as well and the council. And I would urge you to authorize, you know, to at least put on the ballot and then go and make a vigorous outreach to the public. Thank you.

Thank you. Edward, go ahead, Edward.

Is this something that has to be done for the November election or can it wait for another two and a half years in order to make sure that the public understands what's going on with this and are more educated and there are people going in and having meetings with the public and explaining it to give us more time, because, yeah, you're going to be spending a lot of money to put it on the ballot, and you want to make sure that the citizens understand it completely, because if they don't, they're probably going to vote it down. That's all I want to say. Thank you.

Thank you. Do we have any other member of the public that would like to speak? All right. Counsel? Oh, did we have questions? We had some questions. City Attorney, questions?

Thank you, Madam Mayor. I'll go through these, and then at least one was for CRC members, so I'll ask maybe Member Beckman to come up and speak to that, or any of the others regarding their experience with the process per the question. Member Hardy, you had expressed support for the revenue bond. expansion of the revenue bond financing mechanism to non-utility infrastructure and gave an example of a project. Yes, that would be the kind of project that could be financed with that. and potentially if it makes sense for that to be done via design build and it's something that we've done discreetly, that could also be something that might lend itself to that type of project. And so both that financing mechanism and the procurement mechanism will facilitate both the financing and potentially more efficient implementation of those projects. I feel you on add alignment with state law. Alignment with state law was in there. Would love to build that in. I thought it was expendable compared to the others, even though that's a valuable thing that it does. I almost didn't want to highlight that it wasn't currently aligned with state law in some respects. And so that was a casualty of the desire to compress that into an allowable form. If the council collectively thinks that's really important and can task me with that, I might be able to solve it, but that was why. And it was in there until it wasn't. measures separate versus all together. I can argue that both ways, right? Like a lawyer can argue things both ways. I think counsel's down the path on that. It could be done either way. There's pulling something out that's substantial can allow, particularly since it's one of the more substantial measures, could give the public a better opportunity to get their mitts around that as opposed to being part of the comprehensive measure. On the one hand. On the other hand, it does align with the overall approach, which is to update things. And you can view it as a dramatic thing, or you could view it as something that clearly is necessary, requires the alignment. So I think the decision's been made to go down the path to have them be separate. And that... We stand by to professionally support whatever the council decides to do with that. Certainly, unanimity would be beneficial. I think that was important in the Measure I project. And yes, as much council support and ideally unanimous support for what's brought forward, I think from a political standpoint, would be valuable. member Cox to your point didn't want to be polarized yeah that reinforces what member Hardy pointed out I mean you had a number of items that you had listed as possible you know modifications right that could you know, tamp down maybe a few of the, what it sounds like you think are potentially being perceived as more provocative, you know, level two proposals out in the community. I can spin through those to give at least some preliminary feedback on that. The one that you identified in section 403.5, the public notice provision, I get that, right? If you're deleting a public notice, right, that existed there already, that's gonna maybe look like a lack of transparency. And in fact, I think more jurisdictions than not, if you were to benchmark this, actually have that type of provision, you know, in it. The thought was that since the actions that the city council take on, because this related to, I think, the publication of a notice regarding an ordinance adoption, right? Already require, and this is maintained, two council meetings in order to take that action, and already require noticing, is a public notice in a legal newspaper, at the back of a legal newspaper, really adding value to that process? Or, would some of the newer proposals not specifically incorporated in the charter but contemplated as something that the city council is supposed to develop a policy for for more modern forms of noticing you know would that offset right the loss of that you know provision for notice And that notice was, as you pointed out yourself, replaced with one, right, that came after the fact. So the thought was there's noticing going on for that action already. The newspaper publication notice is kind of clunky and might even hit the newspaper before the initial actions even or need to be provided to the newspaper before the initial action is even taken. And so... a notice after the fact where if anyone missed that action in the newspaper or otherwise, probably adds more value. But I get the point. If you're taking something away that exists already, would that be the worst thing to include that back? I don't think so, right? So that certainly is something you could preserve and instruct us to preserve if on balance you thought that made sense. Redistricting, I think the proposal was you like the concept of calling for it, but you wanted to add the word independent. I understand that as well. The proposal, purposely left it for the city council to decide, right, just what role that redistricting commission would play, whether it would be independent or whether it would be a recommendation to the city council. and uh... that was done on purpose so as not to be overly restrictive but if this council thought that it was important and you thought the public would value creating a redistricting commission that was independent that is a common mechanism to have the redistricting commission do that work part of the thought process behind the project generally was not to be to call for things and outline them but not be so restrictive right in the charter that if that wasn't the desire of a city council because there's different levels of independence what do you even mean by independence right sometimes it's you make a recommendation and the council can veto it but they can't decide for themselves and so it has to go back to that redistricting commission is that an independent commission

City Attorney, can you tighten things up? Yeah, I guess I would argue that it was. We're heading on to 12 o'clock right now, and I'm going to have to ask the council how long we want to continue.

I appreciate that, Mayor. I'm trying to do the comments justice, but I appreciate what you said. So could you do that 100%? And if that would add value to you, yes. The 801.5 budget authority create a threshold. I may want the city manager to speak to that. Already, there is a provision that exists for the city manager to move funds below the fund line from one place to the other. And this doesn't really change that. It just gives some expression to it. So I maybe ask the city manager to say if you wanted to add a limit on the city manager's ability to do that with council approval, you could. But this measure wasn't intended to change what the city manager can do already. so i'll let the city manager maybe think about that and look at that language and i mean come back to that point um the stadium authority i think you're referring to a reference in the that was added to the city managers and the city attorney's roles and function that we would also you know serve those functions with respect to authorities we do by the very nature of you creating those authorities and by our function, if the charter doesn't say that we do that, would we do that anyway? Yes, we would, and the council would decide, right, and have it work that way. If you think deleting that, because it might be a provocative expression that looks like you're giving more authority to us, that's, unrestricted, then that could be deleted as well. I just wanted to, it was done because we're trying to align the charter with how things work, and that's how things work. It wasn't anything trying to power grab. You talked about the couple measures regarding taking away people's votes. I think we've talked about that generally. The procurement, public works, I don't understand your point on that actually. And I don't think it would work that way. The way it's proposed is the city council would define what a major and minor contract is. So you would make that policy, and you would factor in things that you thought were important. The dollar value threshold would certainly be one of them, but other unique projects could be characterized as a major project as well. For example, any design-build project could be viewed as a major project, and so that no matter what, the city council would have to approve any design-build project. I think given the nature of design-build projects and where that threshold's set, it would operate that way anyway. But it's not the city manager who would decide that or the public works director. It would be you and how you made that policy. So I'm not sure I understand what the proposed change might be. City manager, are you wanting to comment on that?

Before we go to that, I'm going to ask the council, it's 12 o'clock, we want to finish this item, set a time period. Remember, it's 12 o'clock. People have jobs. Council Member Hardy.

Thank you. We also have a few other items that need to be handled. So I would say I'd make a motion that we need to finish by one o'clock.

Is there a second? All right, motion second for one o'clock. City Manager?

Just to clarify, there are a number of items that do need action tonight. And so if one o'clock comes up, I would like there to be another council discussion before the meeting automatically ends.

I'm gonna say that one o'clock is reasonable. If you're intending that we're staying till two, three, four, that's not gonna happen.

Not my intention, but there are a number of important business items.

No, I'm just saying, because your reports have gone on very long tonight, okay? So you knew that there are some things that may not go tonight, just letting you know. All right, motion second for one o'clock. Please register your vote. And that passes six to one. Thank you. Go ahead, city attorney.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. I'll try to speed things up.

We have 17 things to do in the next hour.

Yeah, if I can. I think I'm on to Member Jayne's questions with respect to revenue bonds. There is a workaround. You identified it from our report. If you don't have revenue bond finance capacity with respect to bonds, non-electric utility infrastructure, and we have worked around that before with issuance of certificates of participation. I'm not an expert on that, but in effect, you're creating a saleable security based on an artificial income stream you create uh through either the lease of property or an infrastructure or a sale of city property from one city related entity to another so it's really a a kind of a a a fiction you know legal fiction that you create for financing purposes that allows you not to violate the debt limit because the payments are annual as opposed to you know commitment over a long period of time and the problem with those is they're they're They take longer to put together. We're told they may not be as saleable because they're not as easy to align with what the revenue streams are. And they can be more costly. So is it workable and can it be solved? Yeah, we've done it. That's how we've had to finance those types of things. And that's essentially what they are. Ken, did I do that enough rough justice? And sorry, we have, outside bond council wasn't available tonight to give you more detail on that. Quickly, Sunnyvale, as you know.

We can already do it. Yes. But revenue bond would be just more efficient. We'd get a better price. It's more efficient.

It's more straightforward. Instead of creating an artificial income stream, you're actually looking at the very income stream that that enterprise generates in fees. So it's a lot more aligned with the nature of the thing you're financing. And we already do really big ones for the... And we already do big ones with the electric utility. Yeah, so it is taking a voting right away, potentially, but really in an area where it's already happening in large dollar amounts. Sunnyvale, Mountain View are going through charter process. I think Sunnyvale identified three measures that they're putting on the ballot, including one to do alternative public works procurement. And so that's going on. And Mountain View is really just starting their process, I think, and getting information about what other folks are doing, including ours. I'm sure they're watching ours very closely in order to think about what they do.

Theirs wouldn't go in November then, it's too late.

I don't think Mountain View is gonna go in November, yeah. I don't know exactly where they're at, but I know Sunnyvale is. Rushed process, I know that was talked about a lot, and maybe this was part of the question to the CRC member, if anyone wants to talk about the rushed process or how you felt about the process, I think that was a question for you.

And it might be how we feel about it as well.

Agreed, and I'll rush this for you. Thank you. I don't think it was rushed. I think there was a lot of meetings, and we definitely did our best to meet with everyone. Part of the subcommittee purpose was to be more efficient, effective, because rather than staff coming to us and saying, this is what we think you should do, this is the problem that we have. What do you think we should do about it? Because that was the whole purpose. So it was a very different type of process than normally what you see here or what I see on Planning Commission. So we had to, we wanted to be as quick as possible because hey, we all have lives, we have jobs. So is it rushed? Well, we did it in nine months and I still think that that was not rushed. I think we had a lot of meetings, but at the same time, Everybody knew we were having those meetings, and if somebody thought, okay, we're being late, can I participate in this? The committee meetings were open to the public, to anybody to come in and say something. So I didn't feel that way. If any of my other fellow members do, they're welcome to say so, but no, I did not.

Thank you. All right, city attorney.

Yeah, I'm going quickly through rushed process. It really was the process that was laid out in the beginning in the bylaws. And so it was a tight time frame. There's no doubt about it for a project of this size. But I do think there was a lot of deliberation and a very solid high quality effort that went into it. The transparency, Member Park, I've answered this question a few times already about the ad hoc subcommittees. I don't know that I can answer it. any differently than i have before the ad hoc subcommittees were also contemplated in i believe in the original bylaws are described they were created in order to frankly facilitate as much as anything scheduling on kind of an impromptu basis. We knew there was going to be a lot of meetings to align that with the member schedules, with staff schedules, with the location, the locations that were limited, although we ended up using only two, and the amount of additional work that goes into having public coming to meetings, including support for remote participation that we would want and need to have. that's different when a public member is participating. That was the thought behind it. There was a thought about making sure that there was an environment created where it could just be an easy back and forth with no dumb questions and a free flow of ideas. That's not nefarious. It's just an environment where that is facilitated without public observation of every comment. And so I think that the meetings that went on and how they were reported out to the public made all that ultimately public. And the thought process, as you'll see with the annotations, as to what the ad hoc committee wrestled with and what they thought about has been made public. And so I don't think I can answer that any better than I have already. Why remove the mayor's obligation to have that be any kind of recommendation she made to council require that it have financial underpinnings? It just honestly didn't make any sense. It's not how it works now for any of you. If you wanted to add it back in, you should add it back in for both the mayor and the council members in making those recommendations. You come up with ideas and staff's job is to figure out how to finance them. You don't know the budget, you don't know where money is. You'll certainly ask that as part of the exercise, but the fact that you would need to before you proposed any recommendation on a policy matter, come up with the financing sources yourself would have you digging down into the staff information probably more than than is appropriate and so that's the thought it was an arcane provision any of you could make a recommendation it didn't make sense frankly to have it in there at all and certainly not just to apply to the mayor that was the thought process City attorney impartial analysis. I was lead person on the project down in Chula Vista. I wrote the impartial analysis. I'm comfortable writing it again here. I will get input from other people, as is a good best practice that you're not just writing it on your own. I'll talk to the city clerk about it. I'll talk to the extent I'm describing things in public works or finance. I'll make sure those are being described accurately. It is the city attorney's responsibility Duty to write the impartial analysis under the elections code unless there are provisions that are being proposed that change my salary or the organization of my department. If that in fact is the case, then you can assign that job to the city clerk. But that's not, those aren't changes that are proposed in that. I'm confident I can prepare the impartial analysis appropriately. I have my own legal and ethical standards I need to apply to that. And that's what's called for under the state law. We talked about being rushed. And again, I think this information has been out in the public since the middle of May in preparation for final discussions with the CRC. More than that since the middle of May, but the actual full drafts of the documents, including the underlying strikeout, has been out in the public since the middle of May. You've had it and you've had the report since May you know, early June, this is your fourth meeting. It's a big project. I don't think it's rushed, I think it's a big project. And the work is good, and I think the CRC and professional staff stands behind it. Mayor, I think he reserved for comments. There was a comment that was made by a member of the public that I wanted to respond to, saying how this measure would restrict your authority with a reference to the councilmanic interference provision. I don't think that's a fair characterization of that. The member of the public was reading language that already exists in the charter. It's inherent in our structure of government, which is a council manager form of government. Council's not supposed to be involved except through the city manager in the actual administration of the city operations. You are policy makers, you can hire and fire the city manager, you can hire and fire me, but that's really just inherent in the structure of government that we chose. I think those are all the questions, Madam Mayor.

Thank you. City manager, your light's on.

Sure, I was going to address three things, one of them being the councilmatic interference question, but I think the city attorney has taken that one and answered it sufficiently. The second item is in regard to a question from Councilmember Cox, section 801.5, budget implementation, and I think the councilmember referenced the section that provides authority for the city manager to move funds in between various line items and funds. At a high level, this is intended to align with the common principle that the City Council rests authority or charges the City Manager with administering the budget at the fund level. The City Manager puts department heads in charge and they're responsible for their department level or any funds beneath that. It's also important to note that This is the budgeting threshold. It is not our procurement thresholds. And so, for example, any contracts over $250,000 would still have to come to the city council. And it is not allowing the city manager to move money among funds, really just money between funds. Common occurrence is if a department has Money in their supply line item and their professional services and they may need additional money in professional services But they have a surplus and supplies this allows the city manager to authorize that adjustment Also, there was a question about the section of the Charter that places responsibility or adjust the responsibility from the city council to the city manager and the public works director to define minor versus major. Couple clarifications there. The definition of minor and major would actually be done through a ordinance that the city council adopts. Those thresholds and any criteria will be defined in that ordinance. Also, it's important to note that all of our procurement rules will still apply, similar to budgeting versus procurement, so we will still need to follow the city's procurement process. The public contracting code also align with competitive bidding, which would be the standard in general principle, and all Public Works contracts would generally still go to the lowest bidder. Their bid periods, their advertisements, their sealed bids, and all those various requirements Also important to note, because there was a reference that potentially the city manager and the director of public works could collude, there are multiple people involved in a procurement at frankly all levels, but staff from the public works department, finance department, as well as their procurement division, the city attorney's office, staff in the city manager's office. Oftentimes it's actually the assistant city manager that's assigned to a department that would have that direct decision-making authority as delegated by the city manager, as well as if it's involving engineering or technical staff, they have a role in the review.

And the city's independent auditor could have a role too, depending upon the contract and the process as part of their review of city finances.

And in the interest of time, I'll just stop there, but there are also various additional checks and balances and safeguards with regarding to how the bids are advertised, rejecting any contracts and various technical oversight that happens at the department level.

Council Member Hardy.

Thank you. I was just thinking about the comment about leaving something open and needing an ordinance. If I remember right, you have an election, you have to wait for the certification, and then I think it's 30 days unless specifically called out as to when something goes into effect. I think it's 30 days after the certification of the If I'm right. Actually, a little different than that.

Yeah, the charter doesn't go into effect, actually, the update until the election is certified and then it's filed with the Secretary of State. We would endeavor to do that right away. We would also endeavor, if in fact the measure is approved, frankly, to start working on the public works ordinance at a minimum right away, even in advance of that, potentially, you know, with expectations so that that could go in front of the council and be acted on as soon as possible.

I just wanted to understand because option A was to leave out the number because it's not a good idea to put a specific number in the charter like we have the $1,000. And so that ordinance, because basically we think a quarter of a million is a good number right now, it may not be five, 10 years from now. So that ordinance could be done right after the election it would be done probably pretty soon after that it would require you're right first first reading second reading adoption and then it would go into effect 30 days later if someone wanted to challenge and i will make the point i double checked it it was 1951 was the last time we did an up the the charter was put into place, so this would be 75 years exactly. I think that's a good number to show our residents that our charter is 75 years out of date.

Not quite true, but okay. Council Member Park.

Yeah, so again, I heard your answers, the city attorney's answers on the rush, but we have the CRC members here, and again, I'm hearing that the subcommittee was done to facilitate scheduling, scheduling of staff, scheduling of members, scheduling of locations, and that it was for, so people can speak openly about ideas without being, I don't know, people, making fun of, having disparaging remarks, maybe even supportive remarks of things that were said. But I think these are exactly the types of transparent discussions that the public deserves about on their charter. And when you say, well, this wasn't a rush project, it was a big project, I think those are the same thing. I think what you're saying is the same thing, that the bigger projects require more time. And again, when we look at, well, we had a lot of meetings, that's true. And I'm looking at the scheduling of those meetings. Those meetings were more than once a week in the nine months, because when I took a look at the times, it's not even the full nine months. It was across nine months, but it was not nine months exactly. And to have the discussions, the types of discussions that require transparency when we had media, when we had people asking to be part of those discussions, at that point to have them closed doesn't make any sense. Like I agree, in the bylaws we said this is going to take some time. But if we are cutting corners, if we are excluding the public from discussions, so you know to to fit our schedules i think i see that as a problem like when we look at good engineering when we looked at good process we do not fit the process for the time we fit the time for the process we make sure that we have the time for a good process so again i'm asking you know when you tell me that it wasn't rushed it was just a big project those are the same those are exactly the same comments to me There were a number of things that were removed. When we're discussing changes right here on this meeting that we could be making, I'm telling you, I think this is rushed. When we're looking at what Mountain View is doing, I think Mountain View is probably doing the right thing. If they're considering these things, they still have questions, to put it on to another ballot makes a lot of sense. We wouldn't lose the work that the CRC put in place, we'd still have those discussions. And at some point, some of these are big enough, like if council members don't understand, if council members have questions, at some point, I think the public is going to as well. I think that rushing a ballot measure, and if the people say no, then it's going to take a lot of time to undo that thought. I'd rather that we spend time and had something that we could confidently put on there, put on a ballot, and have the public coming to us saying why they want to support this. The public is telling us that we need these changes. But we have a number of changes where we've removed things. And again, my policy has always been, and anyone in software knows this, you don't remove things unless you know what they were put there in the first place. But we're removing things because, well, that's not how things work. Well, at some point, my question is, where we see that there are rules, where we see that the charter specifies procedures that are not being done today, why isn't one of the first things we looked at, well, we should change how we do things to match what is required, instead of, well, let's just remove the requirement? Like, we have this idea of, well, We can take shortcuts, but we take shortcuts for everything, for a charter change, that doesn't make any sense. You take shortcuts when you don't have time, when you don't have money, when you don't have something. But for something as important as a charter change, you don't take shortcuts for that. And the shortcuts aren't better, otherwise they wouldn't be called shortcuts, they would be called the process. And this is what I have, these are the problems I have. And... When the city manager was describing, well, we can't, does not allow the manager to move monies between funds, it authorized moving from one department to another. I mean, I want you to restate that again, because I don't see how that's different. And at some point, I mean, there is a difference. I think that I understood it, the previous one, but when I heard it again this time, I didn't understand that. you know when we talk about well we're going to do revenue bond because we want to do we want to spend a little bit more and we're going to pay overtime but there are drawbacks to that like you said it could cost more there are other drawbacks have we done this drawback analysis are we just saying well we want to see what's allowed but we would never allow something that has potential drawbacks that we don't know about. We would never allow that. But in this case, even without a drawback analysis, even without the critical analysis, we're saying we would like this to go into a charter amendment. This is why I think it's rushed. And at some point, I would like to hear why the CRC thinks that having a big project is any different from being rushed and why, for any reason, having the discussions away from, you know, you're worried about what people think about the discussions you're having about the charter, that doesn't make any sense. The reason that you have discussions behind closed doors is not because you can't have open discussions, it's because the topics that you are discussing cannot be discussed in public. And for any other reason, whether it's for efficiency, whether it's because we feel bad, we don't feel as we can be ourselves, those things all go against transparency. Those go against the public. And against the public for things like, I don't know, restrooms at the, actually even that, I would like there to be more transparency. But for the charter, does not make any sense to me, and I'd like to give you a chance to make it make sense to me, and I'd like the city manager to talk to me about moving monies again, thank you.

Thank you, Council Member, yeah, Council Member Jain.

I work for a number of engineering companies, and when we had a deadline, we would just drop features. you didn't have to put that feature in in this version. So it doesn't have to be rushed. And I think the Charter Review Committee, they looked at things and they decided not to discuss those, not to put those in because it would take more time. And in terms of the meetings, I believe that if you have a public meeting that's an official meeting then you have to allow for public comment in that meeting takes a lot longer if you just want to have an open discussion and invite the public in to be a fly on the wall that's different and you can have those meetings much more efficiently and without a lot of advanced planning where you have to schedule in the Zoom meeting and all of that. But I do wanna make a motion if I can. I would like to make a motion independently for each of the ballot measures. So for the comprehensive charter review, I would like to put that on the ballot, make a motion to put that on the ballot and to approve the ballot question language. And for that one, I would like to have the links to the various versions on a website. rather than put the full text with the annotated version into the ballot. And then in terms of who's drafting and signing the ballot measure, I'm gonna leave that open for further discussion amongst the, well, I'll just make a recommendation. So to draft and sign the ballot argument, I would like to put Councilmember Hardy and Councilmember Chahal to draft the ballot arguments and also Susan Peters on that committee. So the last one, I'd like to make a separate motion because I don't know where that's gonna go. Let's finish with that one first. No, for the first three, I wanna keep that as a separate measure altogether.

Excuse me, Council Member Jane, stop. You made a motion. Is there a second on that first motion? I'll second that. Okay, thank you. So we have a motion and a second. I don't know if you got all that, City Clerk.

I didn't get all of it, Mayor. I'm sorry, we're trying to strategize around how to get this managed.

The motion was to put the comprehensive measure on the ballot, and I forgot one feature of it, and that is to add the other utilities to the revenue bond, and that the ballot question language is fine, as written, that the links should be put on the website rather than the full text into the ballot. And then the motion that I originally made, and the Mayor's holding me to that, I wanted to separate it out, was that Council Members Hardy and Chahal sign the ballot arguments with Susan Peters as the representative from the CRC.

May I ask that last part after you say draft and sign ballot arguments, Council Member Hardy and Shahal? And then what did you say?

CRC Member Susan Peters. Thank you.

I don't know if she agrees to that. So I don't think you can have a member of the public. We can't vote to have a member of the public sign unless they actually agree. And yeah.

Madam Mayor, if I could, the recommendation was for the two council people that were designated to designate who they wanted. You can do it the way you described, Member Jane, but to Madam Mayor's point, that puts them in a little bit of an awkward position to designate them now.

I'll just put Council Members Hardy and Chahal.

with their ability to designate up to some number of CRC members?

If someone's writing the pro argument, they would be able to select who they want to sign.

Up to three members would be the maximum to have it be five.

And adding the other utilities to the revenue bond.

I have a lot of lights, so. Okay, on the motion, Council Member Cox.

Again, I really wanna be supportive of the work of the committee, but I think that you can tell this is a very diverged, or we're not gonna be on the same page about this. And again, what I would hope we are doing is setting this up for success. Again, I think if this goes wholesale, We are not going to see support. We are certainly going to have letters written against it, and it wastes our community's money. I think that it is the right call to have the education piece, but unless we show that we heard the transparency issues and we made some adjustments to say we recognize that, I think that this is very likely going to fail, and then that just wastes the time of this committee.

Thank you. Council Member Chihal.

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Councilmember Jane, for proposing my name. Because of the family emergencies, I might have to travel, so I may not be available to sign that. Yeah, you can pick some other Councilmember. I'm not sure about my travel plans.

Thank you, Vice Mayor Gonzales.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. In as far as councilmember Cox mentioned hopefully if there's other questions you have I would say that I know that From what I've heard is maybe I was already comfortable with it with the sections that you've outlined But there's something that you want to see change one of those sections that let's get that addressed as far as on the signing of this, I would say that we have folks who are not gonna appear on the ballot sign this, and I'd like to see the mayor be one of those signators.

I'm gonna give my comments on this now, and that will inform where I'm standing on this. First of all, any charter amendment that goes out there, I want to be successful. And any ballot measure that the city puts forward, I have to believe in it, and I want it to be successful, and I want it to win. When we put Measure I out, I thought it was fantastic. I got behind it. I campaigned. I wrote the ballot arguments. I did a lot to make sure that that passed because I truly believed in it. When the measure was put on the ballot to take away the elected police chief, I completely opposed that. I wrote the opposing argument, went out and campaigned, hoping that it would lose. And it lost by a lot because, first of all, you have to understand our community sentiment on these things. I appreciate what the charter review committee did. I think your job was so difficult because I have spent the last several weeks trying to go through the charter, of which I'm very familiar with. I've sat on charter review committees. I've helped in panel charter review committees. We did a charter review update in 2016. I don't know why anybody doesn't talk about that. We put out four very clear charter changes. and they were clear and the community, we all got behind it and the community supported it and they won like in the 70, 80% to change the charter. So I look at this and I mean, you were handed something that was, I'm finding to be almost impossible because every decision, except for the real level one things, every decision has an unintended consequence. That's how I see it after all my years in public service that if you change this part of the charter, this could practically happen somewhere else. I'm going to tell you how I look at this comprehensive charter change because I look at it through the lens of how does this benefit the public? That's how I'm looking at it. not how does it benefit the structure this or that what is the public how are they going to read this how does it benefit the public so i want to say that a large share of these changes reduce our staff workload and increase the city staff and city manager discretion fewer council approvals are are required broader city manager and city authority city attorney authority removal of of pre-adoption publications removal of council board investigatory power organizational detail moved out of the charter into an administrative code changeable from time to time But efficiency for staff and streamlined administration is a direct primary benefit of most of these provisions. I see that. And that is a benefit to the city, but the public benefit of that is indirect at best. And for provisions like removing voter approval rights or oversight tools are arguably negative for our public. The final report explicitly states there's no legal requirement to place the underlying strikeout text on the ballot itself, and I think it was just in the motion to not put it in, to put a link, and recommends against doing so, reasoning that a very messy and complicated document placed before voters could turn off the voting public. The decision was made deliberately to present voters with a 75-word summary and a website link rather than the actual text. and whether the intent you know is genuine the documented effect is that almost no voter will see all of these provisions before voting practical purposes you're going to see something on the ballot are you going to go to a link and then try to figure out something that i've had a difficult time figuring out for weeks and you're going to put that before the voters um I'm going to say this charter project originated as staff recommendation to the Governance and Ethics Committee, and it was staff driven the entire way through. And I see that. But again, I ask, how does this benefit the public? But here's the biggest issue I have with the big overall group. Section after section, it replaces a fixed charter requirement with as provided by ordinance or per city council policy or as determined by the city manager. Individually, each of these things looks very reasonable, but collectively, The pattern moves the substance of governance out of one document that requires a public vote to change into instruments for a council majority or in some cases the staff alone. They can alter it unilaterally, indefinitely with no further voter input. So residents would be ratifying a shell that says there shall be rules without knowing what those rules will actually say and with no further say once the framework is approved. And a charter is supposed to be a durable constitutional layer precisely because it is hard to change. A charter whose substance is deferred to ordinance and policy is no longer performing that function. So in this particular one, I'll talk about the other when we get to that, but in this particular one, I'm okay with the level one changes and some of the level two that doesn't take away from the public and that benefits the public and makes it easier to look at. And I think I thought mistakenly that that was the purpose of an overall charter redo. But now it's taken, you know, a huge chunk of things that make sense, but buried deep inside are things that don't make sense, that take away transparency, that take away the city council rights, that take away voter approvals. That's hidden inside. So I think as Councilmember Cox said, taken together, I think this will have a very difficult time passing, very difficult. So I think in order to make it attractive for our public, we're going to have to show that it is understandable, that it's going to benefit them, and that there are all of these changes. And then I think, you know, it should continue on to the next election if there's more things. But I certainly don't know how this, your Charter Review Committee, could have Taken all these things and made them, you know Understandable and perfect and I appreciate the fact that you have a lot of faith in the City Council that by ordinance later that we're gonna come up that they will come up with you know, some really great great great policy But at the same time, the residents, I wouldn't be able to support this. I would say I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know where the thresholds are. I just don't know because depending on who's getting elected, and you're going to have three new members up here, and they're going to immediately come in and do 15 ordinances, or I think there was 18 or 20, or the city attorney says five. It's, using the city attorney's language, it's very clunky. And so that's why I can't support this motion. I'd like to see something that's really clear, level one items, some levels twos that make sense, and then I would support that. Council Member Chauhal.

Thank you, Mayor. First of all, thank you, the committee members who put in so much time and efforts into this thing. And it looks like the council is really divided, and we did decide when we were going for Measure I, anything which is citywide importance, the council at least should be able to support it in totality. And if we have a divided council, not to undermine all the work you all did, it will not serve the purpose of the city, and it will boomerang. because if three or four or whatever the numbers are, it will not do justice to the city as such. And if we put it, the ballot measure, and we don't pass it and create more confusion for the residents, it will have really bad repercussions for even going second time, let's say we go in the second time in the next election cycle. Residents will be more apprehensive what happened what's going on basically so I Can propose an option like if level 1 level 2 Need some refining we can bring it back but if the council is Okay, we can have a public works charter amendment in on the ballot, only if the council decide that it make financial sense to put one ballot measure right now and then the comprehensive one later on. So I think there are issues with the measure one we are trying to go forward between the different council members. So if there are no more, not all very fine differences between the council and it can be unanimous, we can do the public works charter amendment measure two and leave aside measure one for after doing due diligence on that. That's my frank opinion because if it is divided, the chances of getting it passed by the resident will be very less, because there will be multiple voices going for and going against this one. And as you know, you mentioned that very few residents came forward, but elections are political. At that time, if you think of their two sides are butting each other, will not have a good result on that. So that's my... Frank opinion that if you want we can put a measure of Public Works Charter amendment on to the ballot and if it is important to the city it saves some money For the city and expedite the Public Works projects I can Try to make that motion I withdraw my motion.

I Withdraw my motion so you can make a motion I

So I can make a motion that we approve measure two only. That is a public works charter amendment motion for putting it to the public for charter amendment on that one. I will second that.

Council, I have a lot of comments on that. Council Member Park.

Yeah, I mean, I hear what the mayor is saying as well. And again, when I look at the CRC, I don't think that we should lose the work that the CRC has done. But I do believe that trying to push the changes in this election cycle may do exactly that. I think the mayor is correct. I think that Council Member Chihal is correct, that if we have a failure here, if there's a problem here, then it will make further changes. changes clean up changes very very very difficult i was in the governance and ethics meeting when it was brought up to us and my understanding at that time was very different it's true a comprehensive charter amendments charter view was contemplated from the very beginning but doing it in nine months all for one one uh... election year that that was not my understanding i brought this up uh... at the time i brought that up when it came to council i voted against it when it came to council because even then i could see this is going to be a lot of work hearing the complaints from the residents not me i i try to stay out of it as much as possible but hearing complaints from the residents from other people on the process that people are doing that the uh... seriously was doing again The purpose of a closed session is not for expediency, It's for the purpose of discussing things that cannot be discussed in public. But when we say we do not want the public to be part of these discussions, when we say we do not want the public to be given a chance to give input, as Council Member Jayne said, that is exactly why you have public meetings. That is exactly how you get buy-in even before the final recommendations are made. These are all kind of big issues. I understand some of you, it's the first time that you've dealt with policy, but every single policy, as the mayor said, has downstream effects. And the fact that we're making a lot of changes without understanding fully why they were in there in the first place makes me very nervous. I have looked at this chart. In fact, on this... On my devices, I have every copy of the Charter since 2002, all the changes, because I've looked at the Charter changes. I remember 2016, the Charter changes. I had several questions to the city attorney on this because I know some of the Charter changes. to not have the background to try to make change. It's very easy to make changes when you don't care about why they were there in the first place. But I thought it was going to be a couple of years. I thought it was going to be a couple of election cycles where we talk about level one changes, things that were just clean up. And then we talk about level two changes. Well, we are changing things just a little bit, but they're not really, they're for efficiency, they're for making things more consistent, they're making things better. And then level three would be considered completely different years, completely different times. But that's not what happened. And that's not what came out of what I voted for in governance and ethics, which is why I voted against it when it came here. And now all of the concerns that we are hearing make me very worried that if we have a problem with the ballot amendments that we put, the charter amendments that we put on the ballot, that it will make future charter amendments difficult as well. So I'm supportive of the procurement the public works update measure because I understand that. I understand what it is. I've actually followed it on VTA as well. I think that Council Member Jayne is one of the people that knows what the effects could be. It's funny to me that we can't just do this, that we have to put this, we have to explicitly put it out. But here we are, we can put this explicitly on there and I understand it and I think that we could all support this. Thank you.

Council Member Hardy.

I will just say that I appreciate 17 out of 19 cities that are comparative allow for a design build or other options and Sunnyvale has proposed this and is putting their measure on the ballot. We have measure I and our funds will go further if we allow for this procurement options. I feel very strongly that we should be able to do this.

Thank you, Councilmember Jane.

Oh, I fully support this. I've been on VTA. We've looked at different, when you have a very complicated project, you can't 100% design the project before you want to bid it out. It just doesn't work. There's too many uncertainties. So design, build, and some of the other mechanisms are the right way to go, so I'm fully supportive of this.

Vice Mayor Gonzales.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. I want to talk or appreciate the CRC for the work that they've done and staff as well. I'm supportive of this other option that'll give us just another tool in our tool bag to go out to get the funding for our public works and our procurement. And if we can just kind of stick to whatever the motion is, we'll run through these 10 minutes a lot sooner.

Council Member Cox.

I just want to understand, with adoption or the approval, the motion right now, we are suggesting putting this on again without a threshold. Just reminding that you know with a $50,000 threshold it failed and so I don't know if the right thing again looking at this the likelihood of this passing is to put no limit or to really consider what a palatable limit for the public would be. Again, I would hate to waste the time of the CRC, and I do think that design-build is the way that cities need to go, but I think our public are prone right now to ask, where is the transparency, what am I going to lose, and what does this do? And so I think there's a risk either way. There's not going to be a good number for this with the size and the diversity of projects we do, but I think we run the risk without having a threshold of it looking like it's a cash grab.

Thank you. I agree with that as well. I'm okay with design-build, but I think there has to be a threshold. I looked up what San Jose does. Their charter allows for major public works contracts thresholds. directly tied to a defined published formula. And their numbers are different, they'd be different than ours, but they have microcontract thresholds at 75,000. Below this, no competitive process is required at all. Then they have major public works contract threshold at 730,000. Above this, formal competitive bidding to the lowest responsible bidder is required per the charter itself. Then they have design-build eligibility, and those are contracts over a million dollars, and only after the city council makes a specific finding that the design-build would save money or speed completion. It's not a staff-level best overall interest determination. So everything between $75,000 and $730,000 falls into a minor bracket with lighter competitive costs. procedures still bounded by ordinance provisions that implement lot and replace the charter level formula. So I think that San Jose proves that a Bay Area charter city can build exactly that flexibility that the staff wants while still anchoring the actual dollar thresholds in the charter publicly posted because I think if we don't put a number in there, we would have a problem. I would recommend putting 250,000 in there. I think that's defensible and consistent with today's values, and I think I certainly could support that. But without a threshold, we need to be clear with our public. If we're not clear with the public, I'm not supporting it. City Manager.

I have a comment on what you just said, but Mayor, also just want to remind you that in seven minutes the meeting will close and there are a couple items that you really should hear tonight. One is the labor agreement with 9B. The other is the county weed abatement item that will authorize staff.

I got that. Thank you for that. One other thing. I want to talk about the ballot language that was proposed by the city attorney because the way the ballot language reads, there are two clauses that the voters are most likely to rely on. One of those clauses is require formal bidding. The second was award contracts to the lowest responsive and responsible bidder Well, those are only true for standard procurement tracks They do not apply to best value and sole source alternatives. In fact, they don't even doesn't even mention sole source alternatives alternatives that are the actual substance and purpose of the measure so I think that if a voter were relying on that ballot question alone they would reasonably think but incorrectly believe that formal competitive bidding remains the rule rather than the exception so that's my question on that because that's first of all it's the way i read it when i read it i thought oh okay no sole source and then but that's not what that says it does remain the rule mayor that's why it's drafted that way that is the the general rule so there's no sole source no there could be sole source it's the city council retains the authority to require formal bidding remember this is has an implementing ordinance in it yeah again not clear so yeah i i Would you look at that and think that there would be anything but competitive lowest bidding, best value, competitive low bidding?

The lowest responsive.

I'm open to suggestions to revise it, Madam Mayor. It's hard to do on the fly.

No, I'm saying that best value is not awarding to the lowest responsible bidder. It's not, but that says, I would read that to think that's it.

It allows for it, but the City Council retains the authority to approve major contracts and to require formal bidding. So I get what you're saying, but I think it accurately reflects what the measure does.

You know, I look at it, and I'm, you know, just a reasonable Santa Clara person. To look at that, I would not think that. And I do think there needs to be a threshold in there for major and minor projects.

I hear that. That would need to be revised.

That's a revision. Yeah. Council Member Jane.

So, Madam Mayor, if I might even just try to channel what you're saying. if that last sentence was revised to say, and I'm not, I don't wanna get out front of the council, but if in fact there's support for a dollar amount. Retaining city council authority to approve major contracts, to approve contracts of 200, City Council authority for contracts of $250,000 or greater to approve them require for bidding and award contracts to the lowest responsible, would that get at what you're talking about?

So would that then define what a major contract would be above $250,000?

That's how that would build into the question, the $250,000 limit.

Would it be clear that the under $250,000 could be approved without the bidding?

with not without added more language, but I think that with the limited words that we have, that's how you would build in the limit into that, is to add, instead of saying city council authority to approve major contracts, city council authority to approve contracts valued at 250,000 or more.

And above. Yeah. I think that would be a lot more clear to the voter than this. I think I could support that. Anybody else councilmember Chauhal?

Yeah, I I'm okay with that But I wonder because this thing is just put on the table if the other council members have some thoughts about the amount I Can revise my motion accordingly? If you really want to make it happen I And I would like to take opinion from the city manager as well. The public works director is here. Is that?

Sure. My opinion is you have two minutes before your vote to extend the meeting.

City manager, you're worried I'm going to say meetings adjourned?

Well, actually, if you don't take an action, you can't take another item.

Yes, okay. We will take an action. It's 1258, so let's, Council Member Hardy.

I'll make a motion to go for another half hour at this meeting.

Second. Motion and a second to extend to 1.30. Please register your vote. Passes unanimously, thank you. Who was on? I was talking.

I was asking like 250K threshold we were talking about. I'm asking city managers and public works director. Is that a good limit or you have any suggestion for council to discuss?

believe we're okay with that but i'm i'm going to restate what it means and ask for concurrence both from the city attorney and the council members essentially adding the language that the city attorney recommends would still allow for a design build on a contract above 250 000 however it would just require city council approval i think that that's fine that's my understanding i i through the nod design build with city council With city council approval, right. That is fine. I think that accomplishes the major goal of having alternative procurement options allowed via the charter, and it sets the threshold of they need to at least be $250,000 before we consider them.

And in the other details, we can put it like whatever index, inflation index you want to put, we can put that index in the other details.

No? No. That would need to be in the ballot language and the city attorney will likely say you don't have the words for that.

Okay. Okay. That's fine. If you want to put a hard number, that's fine. So I amend my motion to include the wording of, instead of major contract, it should be approved contracts above 250K. If the rest of it is good. I hope, I know City Attorney mentioned you have two words.

Council Member Park has his light on.

I will accept. If council members have anything to say, you should say it now, but I will accept the changing of major contracts to contracts above 250,000.

Council Member Jane.

Yeah, I wasn't clear. People were talking about design build, but we were talking about competitive best value, which leaves the door open for other methods. So we're not putting in design build in there.

Right, right, it's other alternative.

Okay, I just wanted to make sure that that was the case, and I just feel like I'm being put in the same position I was for Measure I. It's like approve this, or you don't get anything approved. I really feel like I'm put in a corner. That's what happened with Measure I. I had to approve the $400 million. Thank you.

Council Member Jayne, you have free will. Nobody's making you vote for this. Nobody says you have to vote for this. That's your free will. Council Member Park.

Yeah, I mean, I think Council Member Jayne, rather than say that you're being pushed and you're being put in a corner, tell us what corner that you're being put into and tell us what you'd rather see. I just want to make a comment.

I'm done.

Are you okay with this, City Attorney, so we can go to a vote?

To the maker of the motion, will you be designating who will be drafting arguments?

Council Member Hardy is the one, and Council Member Chain, you're okay? Draft.

I'll do the argument for it. Okay.

Okay, Council Member Hardy and Jane.

Madam Mayor, if I might.

Yes, if you could, would you like to read it?

Yeah, I'd like to get to the, it's not working anymore. Michael, is it frozen for you? Did you put it up there or?

Can you swipe the screen? I want to get to...

this just to be clear so the motion is to approve um placing a standalone measure for public works right on the november 2026 ballot the ballot question language um with with a um a 250 000 um threshold threshold with the rest of it you know remaining the same you know as as proposed um with the ballot um question language to be revised to reflect that. I'd like a little bit of council discretion to wordsmith that a little bit in order to make sure it meets the dollar limits and reflects it.

Can you send it to us when you wordsmith it so we can just send it to all of us?

I'll send it to all you, make sure you're comfortable with it.

Our eyeballs are on it.

Yep. Thank you. But I do need your authority to make the modifications to reflect that. And then this will include the full text because it's a relatively straightforward measure. I may need to modify things because it references a different section heading. And then who drafts and signs the ballot arguments? I didn't hear that.

Council Member Hardy.

Council Member Hardy and Council Member Chang. With the ability to choose to engage with CRC members to add up to three CRC members to assist you. Agreed.

Or anybody else. It's up to them to choose.

Let them choose. It's up to you to choose who you could add, certainly. Okay? I do understand that measure, that action. Thank you, Madam Mayor.

Thank you, Council Member Jane, your light's back on.

Yes, and that both versions, the old and the new text, will be in the ballot, is that correct? That is correct. That was the original, yeah.

Very clear.

City Clerk? And of course, you've authorized me to revise the resolution calling for the election and all of that consistent with this action.

This action, right. The whole resolution will change.

And I'd like to just note for the record, as the city attorney had asked me, the Registrar of Voters Office final printing deadline is August 28th. Which brings me to letting you know, as the report states, after calling the election today, you will have 14 days to submit the argument, following 10 days for rebuttals and the city attorney to submit impartial analysis. All these dates are in alignment with election codes. I just wanted to note that for the record.

Thank you. Thank you for that, City Clerk. 14 days from tonight.

From tonight, which brings you to July 28th. And then the 10 days following would be August 7th.

Thank you. All right.

And Madam Mayor, just to be clear too, the $250,000 limit, as I'm hearing you, would also apply as the threshold for staff to use city resources in order to do public works? Is that the intent of that threshold? So in other words, if staff's proposing to use... city employees or something for a public works project that costs less than two hundred and fifty thousand dollars that can be done in a staff level but it's going to cost if it's going to cost more than two hundred fifty thousand it comes back to you i'm trying to make sure i understand how the threshold applies how does that apply now with the thousand dollars thousand is the number that applies now too Yeah, so if you're saying, I wanna change this threshold to 250K, my question for you is that, do you want 250K for city council approval, formal bidding, and for use of, city council approval of use of resources?

Correct.

Yep.

All right. Very good. Please register your vote. Passes unanimously. Thank you. Thank you everybody. Thank you a lot of hard work on that All right, we have we're gonna move through quickly now We have item number eight public hearing adoption of a resolution confirming the weed abatement Report and ordering the cost of abatement to be special assessment on the respective properties described therein This is a public hearing hearings open city manager

I'll direct this item directly to Mike Tomlin, our fire marshal.

Good evening, mayor, council, city staff. Jake Tomlin, fire marshal with your fire department. For the agenda, whoops, let me get it up here real quick. Oh. The agenda will quickly review the previous council actions on this item, program fee increases implemented by the county, and the final recommended actions for council's consideration. For background, on February 10th, 2026, the council was given an overview of the weed abatement program with an update of programmatic improvements made for 2026 by Deputy Chief Jen Pankow. At the February 10th meeting, the city council passed a resolution declaring weeds a nuisance in alignment with Chapter 8.15 of the city code, and a public hearing was scheduled for March 24th, 2026 to allow citizens to express their concerns or objections over being placed on the commencement report. For 2026, the county has identified 196 parcels that are noncompliant in the city, not 192, that's an error in the PowerPoint. At the March 2024 meeting, the council heard one appeal from one residence. The city council accepted that recommendation to remove the property from the list, adopted a resolution ordering abatement of a nuisance consisting of growing weeds in the city of Santa Clara on the identified parcels. On June 16th, 2026, the county weed abatement program sent the city the 2026 Santa Clara assessment report showing the fees that will be added to the taxes of the properties that remained on the county commencement list in 2026. It's important to note that abatement work still is ongoing by the county within the city. We did want to note that the county fees for abatement services have increased as referenced in the table above. The service fees are intended to support both program improvements and the county's cost recovery mandate. The recommendation this evening is to adopt a resolution confirming the 2026 weed abatement program assessment report and assessment list pursuant to Santa Clara City Code 8.15.90. That's the end of the report. I'm available if there's any questions.

Seeing no questions, it's a public hearing, so I'm going to go to the public. Do we have any member of the public that would like to give comments on weed abatement? Thank you, seeing none. Council Member Chauhan. Madam Mayor. Oh, I'm sorry. Online. Oh, Chris, go ahead, Chris.

Cool, thank you, and by the way, good work on the final decision for what to put on and not to put on. My comment about the weeds is just that, you know, it's funny, you know, we just went ahead and talked about these huge policy issues all night long, but, you know, hey, a lot of residents, they want to see things tidy. So, of course, you have to approve this. But I think it would be very beneficial to ask staff to bring back regular updates when this abatement is actually completed. Because there's a lot of the addresses on that list that the work hasn't yet been done. So having that update is important. And then also I would like council to consider asking staff as part of the approval to have an agenda item sometime soon to specifically deal with the rail route. because there are numerous items. And we all know, I mean, it's not just years, it's decades where we've had these problems with Southern Pacific owning. But you look at the list, it's really out of control. I think there needs to be a discussion at some point, bring somebody in so that we're not constantly chasing this from the backside, but can try to work out in a collegial way to have this dealt with proactively. So thanks very much, guys.

Thank you, Chris. Council Member Chauhan, oh, Garrick. Garrick, go ahead, Garrick.

Yes, hello, this is Garrick Yoselepski with the Santa Clara County Weed Abatement Program. I'm not here to make a comment, but I'm here to answer questions if needed.

Oh, thank you so much, and thank you for being up at the wee hours of the morning with us, Garrick. All right, thank you. Council Member Chihal, do you have a motion?

I have a question, Mayor, before I make a motion. I see the enhanced fees, current fees. Can I know what was the previous?

Can we close the public hearing first before your question?

Motion to close public hearing.

Thank you. Second. We have a motion to close public hearing and a second by Councilmember Hardy. Close public hearing.

Could you repeat the question, Councilmember?

Just a second. Sorry. Please register your vote. And that passes 6-0, those on the dais. Go ahead, Council Member Chauhal.

So there's a revised fee schedule right now. I would just want to compare what was the last year schedule was, how much increase it has been. Just the inspection is 296. What was the previous number?

I'll refer to Garrick, who's online, that can give you that exact number. I would just be guessing. Thank you.

Garrick? Yeah, hi.

Thanks. Glad you're here. No problem. The inspection fee last year was $105. And this year? It's 296.

And what about the other ones, work order processing and other ones, please? All the five of those?

Okay. Keep in mind, Council, we have 15 minutes, so okay. Oh, there they are. They're up there. Is that them?

This is the current one, Mayor.

So last year's inspection fee was 105, the work order fee was 597, the administrative fee was 961, and the warrant fee was 1,323. Thank you.

Do you have a motion?

This is a huge, I don't know how I can justify this fee hike basically, like more than almost, 300 percent for the inspection almost double for not double at least 40 40 percent for the work order processing and 40 percent for administrative fee and More than double on the world free more than 100 percent. I don't know how I can justify that party the justification of these fees I

Yeah, it's my same question, which is when I look at the comparison, I don't recall that the fees have gone up this much ever, and now we're more than doubling down the line. What is the reason for this?

And these aren't our fees. No, these are fees adopted by the county.

Understood, and there's a lot of things, but when you say 100% cost recovery, we've learned that occasionally you will send notices and there's no recovery for some of the fees that you're, for some of the costs that you are incurring. And I think that this is another thing, which is we seem to be passing on these fees to other people, and that's a concern to me, but seeing the Amounts, again, more than double in many cases, in fact.

Do we have control over these fees?

No, they're adopted by the county based on their actual costs. If the county does not recover their costs, those costs are shared by the jurisdictions that participate in the program.