City Council - Special Meeting

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all right good evening afternoon everyone welcome to the Alhambra City Council special meeting July 14th we're gonna go ahead and get started or waiting for one more to join us and I hope she'll be here soon let's start we have special meeting we have fewer ceremonial type stuff that we do here today so we'll get right into it so roll call please Lee Mazza here Wang here Andrade Stadler here Maloney Here. City Clerk, do you need to do a report, or is the notice on the agenda good?

This meeting has been duly noticed.

OK, great. Thank you so much. We're going to move into public comment period for non-agenda items. If you're here to speak on any of the agenda items, specifically 1, 2, 3, or any of the items on the consent calendar, please hold your comments till then. So in this portion, what we do may not be an issue since I only see two cards here but we do a three minute time limitation for this 30 minute period at the beginning of the meeting if anyone would like to speak for a full five minutes you can wait till after all the items are done and we'll resume non-agendized public comment. So first up is Melissa Michaelson.

Hi. Good evening. My name is Melissa Michaelson. I've been an active Alhambra community advocate and resident almost 20 years. And I'm a proud Union College professor who teaches English to immigrants, helping them improve their lives. On February 23rd, I urged the council during the public comment to adopt an immediate data center moratorium. A few months later, you did. Thank you for listening. For those who don't already know, I'm running for Alhambra City Council District 5 against Councilwoman Andrade Stadler on a platform of good government, transparency, and accountability. After 22 years in public office, it's time for new leadership and for others to have a chance to serve. Here are a few reasons why I say this. in 2024. She voted to expand the city's flock camera contract, bringing the total cost to $721,000 without asking whether the program was actually making Alhambra safer. In 2025, she voted to raise everyone's garbage rates without a meaningful increase in services. I spoke out about it. Instead of protecting families that are struggling with affordability, she asked the company to hand out refrigerator magnets and praised their arbitrary plan to raise rates, that they would send an automatic bulky pickup truck without residents having to call in for it. Earlier this year during heightened concerns about ice activity she approved spending a hundred and twenty four thousand dollars on an armored Bearcat vehicle essentially a tank for the police department During last month's meeting she dismissed my request that the city adopted ethical investment practices Meanwhile she voted for a week sustainability plan despite repeated written and oral warnings from community members and groups I about the very recent tenant eviction protections and workforce housing. Why did it take eight years in this seat before supporting that? And she's on the SGV Housing Trust all these years, but why hasn't Alhambra truly, why hasn't the truly affordable housing complex here in Alhambra, not even broken ground here in downtown? Today, she's put forward a term limit measure for the ballot that is misleading to the public this November. It would exempt current council members from the limits and restart the clock for them. If this measure passes, my opponent would be able to remain in her seat for 24 years. Changes needed in this country. Changes needed in Alhambra. And changes needed in District 5. My name is Melissa Michaelson and I'm running for City Council in District 5. There's no A in my last name. And you can find me on social media at Melissa Michaelson number 4 Alhambra. Thank you.

DIRECTOR DEWOLF.

Next is Lewis McCammon.

Thank you. Good evening. Lou McCammon, 105 North Cordova Street. And on a little bit different subject, I want to compliment the Council on the new ACT bus routes. My wife, her sister, and I all got to partake of the new route from the new Green Line route We were doing the counterclockwise direction, picked up the ACT bus in the early afternoon at Hidalgo and East Main Street, went around the entire circuit, and it's actually, it's the first time I've really been on an ACT bus other than one mobile city council meeting where an ACT bus was taking us around. And I have to say, I really recommend it. uh because when i'm driving i don't get to see i'm so busy paying attention to the traffic and everything else there's a lot of the stuff i don't get to see and i got to see it and uh was also very very helpful for my wife and her sister both of whom have a genetic condition called Stargardt's disease, where they have pretty well lost their central field of vision. And both of them are classified as legally blind. Her sister has a white cane issued by the VA center, but she doesn't use it that often and so forth. But when I'm gone, they're going to have to get around. They legally can't drive or anything anymore. So they enjoy going around and seeing many of the places. They like to shop and everything and realize that they can get around the city. And you get a real tour of the city on that green carpet. route. So I would, for a quarter, hey, man, you can't buy much of anything for a quarter anymore. When I was a kid, a quarter would buy five candy bars, but it doesn't anymore. But you can still get on that bus for a quarter. And we got to see and point out where I had been a student at Martha Baldwin School for a number of years, where we had had our 30th wedding anniversary reception a couple of years back. alhambra court after that and so forth after we had a renewal of vows which my life likes to do every five years so at any rate it's uh it's a one of the positive things that i've seen this council do and uh thank you for your work on that and uh leave it at that and give you a few seconds back thank you thank you lou appreciate that

So those were the only two in non-agendized public comment. So we'll move on to our presentations.

Mr. Mayor, I'm sorry. We do have one raised hand on Zoom.

That's right. We are as accessible as possible. So go ahead and unzoom.

Jennifer Ng, go ahead and unmute yourself. Hello, council members.

Happy Tuesday. I wanted to ask about, you know, this council has always been about transparency and getting feedback from constituents as much as possible. You guys have absolutely shown that over the years. And usually special meetings are for urgent items to our city. You know, ICE is in our city. People are being evicted due to COVID. You know, I don't really see anything on this agenda that that brings us to the level of urgent. You know, maybe the Southern California Edison update, if there's limited availability of the percent of the presenters, you know, the ballot measure banning data centers that, you know, there's been a ton of community feedback on that. Clearly, the majority of the public does want that. But I don't know about anybody else, but it's five o'clock. I'm still technically on the clock at my work. I shouldn't even be on Zoom with you guys. And this is a special meeting that's scheduled one day after your regularly scheduled meetings. If you're this busy, then maybe we need to put aside the summer session for this year. I mean, there's some things on here that people just aren't gonna know about. I know you put it in the newspaper and such, but I didn't get a blast email about it that this was on the schedule. I've got the Southern California update, Chamber of Commerce update, that could be in just a regular council meeting. The data center, okay, moving that, but this ballot measure for amending our charter pertaining to term limits, that should be getting a lot of client feedback. I'm disappointed that this is on a special agenda and you're not welcoming more feedback from people who just frankly pay attention to your main agendas and pretty much nothing else. There's also a number of consent agenda items that again could be pushed to the next council meeting. It doesn't seem that anything is super special that got a time deadline on it. I'm not sure how close I am to three minutes, but that is my main concern. And I do thank you as council members, you've always invited transparency, but I think trying to get in a ballot measure at this stage of the game for term limits, the perception on that is not good at all. Thank you.

Thank you Jennifer. For the record you had a minute nine seconds left.

Thank you.

Okay. Any other comments on Zoom. Okay. Let's go ahead to our presentations. First up is Southern California Edison.

all right can everyone hear me all right perfect hello everyone my name is jonathan horton i'm the new government relations manager for southern california edison for the city of alhambra Today we have a presentation on reliability within the city. I know that at a previous meeting, I believe in March, there were a few issues and a few questions that were raised. And so this is our report from the year of 2025. We have quite a few slides. There are many of them that we can get through rapidly. A lot of them are in there just for your own information. But any questions you have after this or during the presentation, feel free to ask, feel free to interrupt.

Next slide, please. And one more.

OK, perfect. What is reliability? Simplest terms, it's having dependable energy when you need it. Potential interruptions, they can occur for a few reasons, one of them being maintenance outages, AKA planned outages. Another one being repair outages, which are unplanned outages. They can last for over five minutes, which the term for that is sustained outages. And if they're under five minutes, equal to five minutes that is a momentary outage we're gonna go over a few more terms a big one is public safety power shut off simplest terms it's when there's extreme weather conditions we implement this protocol in high fire risk areas to minimize the threat of wildfires the city of Alhambra in general is not considered a high wildfire risk area both by the state of California and by Edison. However, there is a small segment over three circuits in the northwest of the city that do fall under that category. And so if there were ever any PSPS activity in the city of Alhambra, it would be in that small, small area in the northwest. Next slide, please. How do we measure reliability? There are three terms that we're gonna use throughout today. The main one being SAIDI, that stands for, let me do it on this one, because I know the text is really small. SAIDI stands for System Average Interruption Duration Index, but we're just gonna call it SAIDI for the day. Basically, that's the minutes without power per customer over the amount of customers. And so if there were two customers and customer A had an outage for one hour, customer B had an outage for three hours, the SAIDI would be two hours. So that's the easiest way to put it. After that, the next term is SAIFI. That's the System Average Interruption Frequency Index. Similar, it's the number of sustained outages per customer over the number of customers. And then finally, it's the MAIFI, which is just the SAIFI for less than five minute outages. And so it's the amount of outages that were less than five minutes per customer over the amount of customers.

Next slide, please.

A couple other terms that you're going to see on the circuit charts are equipment failure, self-explanatory, it's in-surface failures of transformers, switches, or conductors. If there were any interruptions due to vegetation or animal, that being a tree branch, rodent, or bird causes a short circuit between conductors. We're going to clarify this a little bit later on, but these are all the cause descriptors for issues that we are aware of once our crews arrive to the situation. And so any of these might be the case when you get to the category that's labeled as other. But other is when it could be any issue, but once the crews arrive, they aren't sure the issue isn't there anymore. Finally, the last few operations means that we performed urgent work due to findings in the field that resulted in the need for an outage. Third party is caused by a balloon or a car hitting a pole. And PSPS is what we talked about a moment ago, which is the power safety public shutoff. Next slide, please. These are the charts in the last four years for the city of Alhambra. What you have on the red line is the SCE grid as a whole, and so that is all the Southern California Edison service area. Again, the SADIE, the SAFIE, the MAFIE, the amount of minutes that were spent with sustained interruptions, the frequency of sustained interruptions, and then the frequency of momentary interruptions. As you can see, in 2022 and 2023, Alhambra performed slightly worse than the rest of the grid. In 2024, it looks like we made a pretty substantial leap with Alhambra performing better than most of the grid. And then again in 2025, even though there's that large increase in the duration, and I'm sorry, I'm specifically talking about the Sadie right now, but even though you see that large increase in the duration of the sustained interruptions, Alhambra still outperformed the system as a whole, as well as some of the surrounding cities. Next slide, please.

And apologies, I'm gonna pull up a couple more notes that I had on the subject. All right.

Okay, safety outages causes for Alhambra, primarily in 2025, the cause was other. And that means that there was an outage when the crews arrived, it was not clear what the reason for the outage was. After that, it was equipment failure with 23% of the outages, with the outage time caused by equipment failure. After that was weather, fire, earthquake, about 13% of the time caused by those three. After that, 11% for operations, 5% for vegetation animal, 1.8% for third party, and zero PSPS. Again, Alhambra has very little area that would qualify for PSPS operations. Next slide, please. For safety, very similar. I think the only change might be that there's operations over weather and fire and vegetation and animal. But again, very similar numbers. Other was the primary concern with 45.9% of the outage frequency caused by unknown sources. Here is a quick overview, and I see a couple of looks on the council members' faces. We're going to answer why it was other in a minute. But here's a quick overview of the 42 circuits within the city of Alhambra. These are the amount of customers on the circuit as a whole, not just on the circuit in the city of Alhambra. And so some of the circuits, for example, the test circuit, which is towards the bottom. Sorry, next slide. I'm so sorry. I skipped it. On the bottom right there, you can see the Test Circuit and the Tri-City Circuit. Those are two of the ones in the northwest that are in a high-fire risk area that cross over into the city of Alhambra. And so when you see that there are about 3,500 people in 2025 on the Test Circuit, That does not mean that those 3,500 are all in the city of Alhambra. A small percentage of those people are in the city. Next slide, please. This is a map. This is going to be very important. Hopefully you all have the maps in front of you, either printed or on your laptops, because I know it's really difficult to see. But this shows all of the different circuits with more visual data within the city. And I know there were a few questions. If you look towards the bottom center of the map, you can see the guest circuit. And I know that that's where a few of the issues had arised in, I believe, Councilmember Wang's district. And so we can chat about those streets in a bit, but if you would please go to the next slide. For any questions about capital improvements, what plan projects that SCE has in the city of Alhambra, this is the link. It's publicly accessible, and so you can go to sce.com slash capital improvements and find all the things within the city that we have planned. Next slide, please. You say backup slides, we're not gonna go through all of them, but there are a couple that I want to highlight. If you can please tap to slide...

Okay, please go to slide number 15. One more, please.

Okay, if you look at the first quarter of 2025, and you look at both the Deerfield circuits and the Elgin circuits, you'll see a massive spike in the SADI numbers for those circuits. First quarter of 2025 were those historic windstorms that we experienced in the San Gabriel Valley. As you can also see, a lot of the explanation that we have here for some of these is going to say other. And so it's gonna say other for a lot of these circuits throughout all 11 of these slides. When I spoke to the representative from our service center, the explanation was basically this. Our assumption is that these outages were due to the weather, they were due to the wind. Other can mean that a tree branch blew onto the circuits, or blew onto the lines, knocked out power for a bit, and the continuing blew off the tree branch. By the time that our crews arrived, the branch was no longer there, so we couldn't identify exactly what it turned off the power. It can also mean that the wind blew two of the wires together, They bumped the power cutout for a while. When our crews got there, no equipment failure, no visible animals, no cars that hit any poles, lots of different situations that would have arised in that first quarter. But these numbers are consistent across most of the cities within the San Gabriel Valley and all of the cities that are surrounding the city of Alhambra. And so that's that big other that kept popping up. when you look at those Sadie numbers. As you can see, the rest of the quarters for 2025 were pretty standard. You can click through relatively quickly the next couple of slides to see it's gonna be consistent. Yeah, so you're gonna keep seeing spikes in that first quarter, and then it's gonna taper off for the remainders.

Mayor, can I just ask a really quick question? What does the number mean? Like, when we're looking at these, there's a lot of numbers. Can you just quickly explain what the numbers mean?

Yes. So, Sadie, if you would make sure I get it exactly right, Sadie, again, is the minutes without power per customer over the numbers of customer. When you look at floral, which is the first circuit on there, and you go over to the first quarter of 2025, right under that Sadie, that's 100.9 minutes. Yeah, so 100.9 minutes of sustained outage per customer in that circuit in the city of Alhambra.

That's a good question, thank you for asking. And can you please move on to slide number 25?

maybe 24.

Okay, perfect. In the meeting in March, there was another concern, of course, about wildfire season. As I previously stated, the vast majority of Alhambra does not sit in very high fire risk zones, both for the state of California and for SoCal Edison, but there is a little bit in that northwest area. When fire conditions put communities at risk, we may need to temporarily shut off power. For public safety power shutoffs, that's gonna be in that northwest. There are other mitigation efforts that, of course, SoCal Edison puts in, and we can skip most of this slide. It's largely for your information, but there is an outage webpage that the link is on this slide, as well as another link for knowing what capital projects are being done in the community, not only for reliability's sake, but also to mitigate any wildfires. Next slide, please. Some of the ways that we are reducing wildfire risk is through grid hardening, wiring with protective covering for 7,110 plus circuit miles installed since 2018 to reduce the potential for a spark from contact with flying objects such as palm fronds, again, in the event of a large windstorm, for example. A lot of other things here. I'm not going to go through all of them, but some of them being vegetation management. We've done 2.8 million trims and removals in high fire risk areas, providing clearances between trees, power lines, and poles. We are utilizing artificial intelligence and machine learning detection, using advanced models to improve grid inspections and identify maintenance needs faster and more accurately. We have started using drones for some of the power lines, the transmission lines, I believe, for lines that are harder to see for people, whether it be it's nighttime or it's really high up or it puts our crews at risk, we're using as many technologies as we have access to to mitigate the risk for wildfire. Next slide, please. This one's more just informational for you all to keep, more PSPS information, some emergency preparedness, making sure that the residents and our businesses have an emergency plan, that they have supplies, medications, important contacts ready. Again, more information on our outage map, information on the portable generator and portable battery rebates, and then some other customer support program information on this slide, which is all publicly available. Next slide, please. This is a slide on business impact mitigation for both planned and unplanned outages. I know this was another question that was raised at the March meeting. For planned outages, customers are generally notified in advance through mail notices, door hangers, phone calls, emails, or text alerts, depending on circumstances and available contact information. Basically, whatever way we can reach out to residents to let them know that there's going to be a planned outage, we will take those steps. Notifications typically include the date, the anticipated duration, and reason for the outage. As everyone knows, anytime there's any maintenance anywhere, whether that be on your car, on your refrigerator, on your power lines, we try to give you as accurate as an estimate as possible. We can never be perfect with these estimations, but we're working towards when we say two to three hours, it means two to three hours. That's something that's a big priority for the company now. Let's see, for unplanned outages, customers are notified as information becomes available through outage maps, customer alerts and status updates, and then communication frequency depends on the nature of the outage. For business impact mitigation, there were a few questions about what if it's a restaurant or a bar, for example, how do you mitigate the impact there? We do try to schedule work during off-peak business hours whenever feasible. So if you have a line of preschools, we're gonna try not to schedule work in the daytime when the preschools are going to be active. We're gonna try and schedule it at night in that area. That's between our service centers and our engineers. They try their best to make sure that whatever businesses are being impacted, we reduce that as much as possible. However, next slide please. Things still do happen, and so when there are issues, when something does go wrong, there is a claims process. Our policy is to respond to claims promptly and fairly to make sure the process is easy for you. All the information for the claims process is here at the website below. Got a bit of a long URL, but if you look up SCE claims, it's pretty easy to find. You can scroll past the wildfire information and all the information you'll need to file a claim, their requirements, likelihood, et cetera, will be on that page. And this is the end of the slideshow. I will now open it up for any questions you may have.

Any council members? Go ahead. Yes, ma'am.

Well, welcome, Jonathan. Nice to see you. You know, I have to tell you, usually those of us who are on council, I don't know if all my fellow council members get texts in the morning or in the middle of the night, but we get texts and emails and phone calls from residents that are having power outages, right? And so thankfully you guys now have that great outage page that I can refer them to, but many of our residents are seniors and they're not, let's say they're not really involved in the digital world or technology is still something that they're trying to manage in their lives. And so it makes it a little different for them. And I mentioned this because we had an outage during the winter. And that's why I asked, can you please not do anything during winter in the event that there's an outage, right? We had seniors who they plug in sometimes their medical apparatus to help them breathe or just about anything that could be. So I'm asking you that because I went out to Big Five to buy the little... mitten warmers and delivered them in the middle of the night to some of my residents. Now, since then, I had a really good contact with Edison. She was so responsive. She would be on things really quickly, and she has since left the Edison. So it's been sort of like crickets. So we're glad you're there. You mentioned that there's a corner on the northwest end of Alhambra. That's my district and their district, I think. Where can I find the names of the streets? Yes. Are there any, I'm gonna ask the questions first, okay? Are there any other cities that have the same situation that we have? What are the mitigations or protections that those cities are doing? And what do you recommend? Now, I know we had FEMA here, and FEMA gave us a big discussion on this too, but I think it's better for us to be chatting with you about this rather than FEMA. And so, yeah, those are some of my questions.

Yes, if you can pull back up the slides to slide number 9 on page 10. That's going to show the map.

Is it 9 or 10?

It's page 9 on the actual image, but it's slide number 10. OK. And that's going to show the map. As you can see in the top left, there are three circuits that are red. It's the bronze circuit, the test circuit, and the Tri-City. And so if you zoom in really close, that'll show you what streets fall under those circuits. I can see if I can get you... We can't do that. Yeah, I'll see if I can get you a better map that you can refer to that'll show the exact streets. But as far as if there's any other cities that have the same situation, yes.

Oh, good.

Yeah, the circuits will cut through multiple cities at times. And again, Alhambra, like 99%. percent of the city doesn't fall into that high uh wildfire risk but technically these circuits do and so what would we do to mitigate it primarily psps which is the public safety power shut off or shut down um in the event of super high winds or something else that might lead to a wildfire we would show off the power temporarily working with our meteorologists to make sure that we're not doing it too early but also not too late And so that is the primary mitigation for when the actual event occurs. Prior to that is all of the other things that I listed, making sure that there's no vegetation around the lines, making sure that the lines are as reliable and have as much covering that is necessary for the area, using technology, AI, to try and find where the most at-risk lines are, et cetera. But for the times when an event actually happens, PSPS is the primary go-to.

Thank you for that. And you mentioned foliage. So I appreciate that a lot of the Alhambra has some beautiful trees. You know, we have magnolias, we have oaks, we have just beautifully lined trees that are just so beautiful. And then we have palm trees.

Yeah.

And I like them in Palm Springs. I don't necessarily like them here in Alhambra because I've seen them go up real quickly. So do you guys look at that as well? Like look at the trees and what type of tree is there? And if there needs to be something done, do you work with our public works or do you do that on your own?

Yes, and I've been at Edison for, I think, about two and a half months now. I know, I know. But I was going to say, one of the first things I learned is that there is an expert in every single subject at the company. We have arborists. I'm working with another city right now for something similar. It's tree removal around substations. But yes, they look at the type of trees, the size, the impact, any wildlife that might be impacted by a tree's removal, proximity to lines. Any and everything, they look at it before any action.

And can you name those cities that are similar to ours?

I'm blanking right now. I have 10 in total. So I'm trying to remember which one it is.

So you can get back to us with that. OK. That's really important for me to understand. And then I have one more question. When I mentioned about the seniors that don't have access to the computer and they just their stuff goes out. Right. And many of them live alone especially are out of our 12 percent who are poverty. who have a designation of poverty. They you know they they need they need some assistance and so do does Edison have a program where they give away generators. I know I have generators in my house because things go off and so we keep going especially if there's a soccer game. So I'm asking you, do you guys do this? Do you reach out to cities and their senior centers to actually provide information and resources to our seniors, right? Because we're getting another center, but we have one senior center. And so it's important.

Yeah, so for, let's see, first for contacting when there is scheduled or unscheduled power shutoffs. I know, like you said, some of the seniors might not have access to computers or be really tech savvy. We do partner with 211 to try and make sure we're getting the information to as many residents as possible when we're having those difficulties. The other thing about the portable generators and portable battery rebates, I haven't read into it too much, but there are Again, it's a link, so it's not super, super helpful for the seniors right now that don't have access to the internet. But there are programs for rebates. I'm not sure if we give away any generators or portable batteries, but I know for certain that there are some rebates that are available. And that's on slide, page 27, slide number 26, I think. We'll have more information on that.

Do you have a meeting with a lot of other people who that make decisions about Edison and what they do offer and what resources they do. And if you do, could you please let them know that we have a large senior population, and I'm sure every city in the San Gabriel Valley does, and that we should be able to offer them generators, especially in the wintertime. because that's when they utilize a lot more heat, but also in general because of the lack of maybe the technology skill, so.

Okay. Yeah, no, this is definitely something I can bring up with our department and then find out if there's any other information. If for some reason I'm incorrect and there are generators or batteries that are given out, I will find that out. And at the very least, I will make certain to bring it up for our cities with larger senior populations that this is a definite need.

Thank you, Jonathan.

So we expect to hear back from you. Thanks.

Anyone else?

Thank you, Mayor. Really glad you're here, Jonathan. Thank you for coming. I thank you here from the council that we've been getting a lot of communication from our residents. And we have all these questions, and we're eager to ask you. So thank you for bringing this presentation to us and giving us all the information. I do have some questions about the slides. Can we pull up slide number five, please? It's great to learn how we measure reliability, because I think that's one of the concerns that we have with reliability. And looking at slide five, let's wait a little bit. The historical reliability of circuits serving Alhambra.

Sorry, it's slide six on here. My apologies, I added a title page and didn't change the numbers.

Okay, so on my slide it says five, so it's slide six.

Yeah, it'll say six for whoever has the computer.

So can we have slide six pull up? That's not it.

Yeah.

It's the one with the historical reliability of circuit serving Alhambra with a comparison for Alhambra versus Edison Grid, the red and blue. Comparison. That one. Yes. Thank you. So just looking at the slide, first help me understand what is this Edison grid that we're comparing city of Alhambra to? So city of Alhambra is the blue strip and the Edison grid is the red one. And what are we comparing to? Is it the entire Edison territory? Is it LA County? Is it San Gabriel Valley?

Entire territory.

OK, so that's entire Edison territory. Yes. And then looking at this, I do see 2025 jumps out as a lot of outages for that one. So help me understand, is that driven by any special event in that year, or does it signal a declining trend?

Yes, so it doesn't look like it's a lasting trend. That is from quarter one of 2025. Again, the assumption, because a lot of these outages are marked as other, because when our crews arrived, there wasn't any clear reason for it. But the best assumption is that it's the windstorm in 2025, in January of 2025. That's when we saw a lot of outages. That's when you have these huge spikes. If you scroll down to any of the other slides, if you look, through slides one through 11, you'll see on the circuits, quarter one 2025 has insane numbers compared to a lot of the previous years, and then it tapers right back off to regular to regular outage expectancies.

Got it. Got it. And then looking at the next two columns. So again, looking at the blue for the city of Alhambra, I think Alhambra exceeds the entire Edison territory for every single every single year. And does it tell us that we, is there anything about our infrastructure that makes us vulnerable? Can you explain that difference?

So these are relatively close, at least for the SAFE, which are the number of outages per customer that are over five minutes divided by the numbers of customers. It looks larger because it's a small number, but it's relatively close. This means that there were, in 2025, about 1.8 outages per customer that lasted longer than five minutes. I don't have any information on whether this tells us something about the grid, but when I spoke to a team from our service center, it doesn't seem like there's any larger reliability issues. I mean, it's 1.8 outages in a year as opposed to 1.4. The numbers, I think the SADI is a better indicator. It tells you how long the outages are. And so, for example, there might have been these aren't real numbers. This is an example. But for one year, there might have been two outages per customer, but they were seven minute outages each. But other cities might have looked at one outage per customer with 20 minute outages. And so at the end of the day, that's why you'll see like for 2024, 2025, Alhambra had less overall time that customers experienced outages, but there were still slightly more actual outages.

Got it. Okay. And then is there, in general, is there a target for reliability for the city or for Edison Territory in general?

Yeah. So we don't have a particular number. I think Anyone everywhere, whether it be company, family, dating, is gonna tell you we always want to do better. The target is to have the power on 100% of the time. But largely, we just want to make sure that if there are any scheduled outages, that we make sure the customers have the information well beforehand, that we have crews out there as quickly as possible. And when there's unplanned outages, which there will always be because there are always emergencies or other things that are going to happen, we want to, one, reduce the number of those outages by hardening the system, and two, make sure that we're getting crews out there as quickly as possible to get things fixed. And so make sure that we're staffed up, make sure we have the equipment that's necessary, and the access to the actual outage locations.

Understood. And then looking at the next slide, I see the categories for outage causes for Alhambra. And other is pretty big, the largest contributor. And I understand that other means it's not clear what the cause is. And then looking at all these causes, are there anything that we could do, education to our community, things that people can do, or things the city can do to prevent some of these causes? just reduce the probability of some of these causes? Are there tips that you'll be able to share with us? Or if there's any educational material for us, that would be great to have.

Yes, and the one thing that I realize I might not have included on the slides, but it is the customer service number Same thing you'll see on a subway here and a subway in New York. If you see something, say something. If you see an issue that is or might cause a large problem to a power line, make sure that you're reporting it as quickly as possible. It's much better for us to be able to prevent an outage as opposed to one happening and then we have to send a crew out there. And so this was an oversight on my part where I didn't include the customer service number, but I will make sure to email it to you all afterwards. I don't have Wi-Fi on my computer right now, but let me see if I can find it.

No worries. You can send it to us. Thank you for that. That's a really good tip. And then going on to the next couple of slides, capital improvement map. Does Edison have any plans to do investment in upgrading infrastructure for the city of Alhambra? Is there any upcoming plans, anything in the plans?

I'm so sorry. Can you ask me the question one more time?

Oh, there's a slide about capital improvement map. I'm assuming that's a map to tell us where Edison is planning capital improvements. So I'm just wondering if there's any planned improvement that will happen in the city of Alhambra.

Gotcha, gotcha. I don't have the full list in front of me, but all the currently planned capital improvements will be on that map and on the website. Yeah, sorry, short answer, but... No worries.

And specifically, I'm interested in knowing if there's any plans for undergrounding, because I think undergrounding is a way to reduce some of the vegetation and animal, you know, causing damage to the wires, and it makes it just safer for everybody. I know undergrounding happens with a lot of infrastructure improvement projects. So I'm curious to see if Edison work with cities on undergrounding and what does that partnership look like?

Yes, and so there are two general ways that undergrounding happens. One is through our TUG program, which is targeted undergrounding. This is for the very high and high wildfire risk areas where undergrounding is the best solution. Undergrounding or circuit covering is the best solution to mitigate wildfires. Undergrounding isn't always the best solution. The way I would kind of describe it is similar to like surgery in that it is invasive, it is very costly, it can take a long time, and it isn't always the best thing you can do to mitigate injury or to mitigate outages or improve reliability. And so for the TUG program, nothing in the city of Alhambra right now that's largely for the mountainous areas where it's really necessary. That being said, the other main way that we would go about undergrounding is through Rule 20. I will have to say I'm not an expert on Rule 20, but the CPUC basically implements it where a city can apply for undergrounding, and then rate payers would pay for this. I don't know the full process. This is a conversation I would recommend you all first have with your public works director. And then if it seems like the best solution for a specific area in your city, bring up the plans and then bring those to us. And then we can figure out what the best course of action is. But that's the extent of my knowledge that there aren't any current plans for undergrounding within the city.

OK. That's understood. Thank you so much. And then one thing that I often hear from residents is that their frustration isn't with the outage itself. Sometimes it's with the communication and understanding of the outage. And I notice that Edison does try their best to provide information as accurately as possible. But sometimes if I understand operational needs also, dictate some of these things. And it's not always 100% accurate. So my ask would be, if there is uncertainty in the outage times, can that be communicated? Can the uncertainty be communicated as well? Because every time I receive a notification, it's always with 100% certainty. The outage is going to happen at this time, and it's going to be restored at this time. And later, I receive a change. So it's difficult to just kind of plan for that. And I think that just people will understand. I explain to folks that sometimes operational needs, things happen in the field, and you can't always predict when it's going to end. But I think if that uncertainty can be communicated, say, I think this is our best estimate, but there is a possibility that can change. I think that will help people just plan better for outages. You know, nowadays we rely so heavily on electricity. Our seniors and our vulnerable population, it's one way to really help them plan ahead for these outages. And then the other question I always get is, I hope you can share with us, is that usually we get the planned outages in the middle of the night, and that is really helpful. It starts like 10 p.m. and it ends at 3 a.m. So it doesn't really impact us. But there are times it happens at like 5 p.m. when people are just coming back from school and work and getting to the house and cooking dinner. And that's a very difficult time to have an outage. Can you share with us some of the reasons why, like what factors determine when those scheduled outages happen and how flexible is it to move around?

Yeah, and I had hoped to have a member from our service center able to answer this question here. Unfortunately, a car broke down, wasn't able to make it today. From my experience so far and from my experience at previous roles with Council of Governments, for example, typically comes down to capacity. When can you get a crew out here within the next couple weeks or the next month? and sometimes if you have all of your night crews out um in other cities for other jobs you will only have a 5 p.m crew that's available to do a job otherwise you'd have to wait weeks or months to get a um to get a project completed and so i can't guarantee you that that's the reason but from my experience working on different capital projects that's typically what it is um it's typically They just want to get it done when they can. And sometimes it is incredibly, unfortunately, inconvenient to both residents and businesses. Try and mitigate it, but... Yeah, thank you.

That's helpful. That's helpful for people to understand. And I would just ask that if feasible, that try to avoid those times as much as possible. It also affects our businesses. And so, yeah, if there's a way to coordinate that better and be more considerate, and I and be more accurate in the schedules, that would be great. And then lastly, I just want to echo Councilmember Andrade-Staller's point with the outreach programs for seniors and medically vulnerable residents. If there are, because we do have a lot of those seniors and medically vulnerable population in our community, and they are not digital savvy, they don't get online, they just, if there's any, physical education material programs that we can pass out I would love to have them. Thank you. And then this is very helpful and I would like to ask that if you can provide this update to us maybe on an annual basis and it happens on a regularly scheduled meeting that would be wonderful.

Yes, sorry, I'm making sure I take notes.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're multitasking.

Yeah, no, once a year wouldn't be an issue at all. We have this reliability report prepared for us, I think, in the first or second quarter of each year. And so I'd be happy to come to the city council meetings, present the report, answer any other questions. Also, all of you should have my phone number and email. Any urgent issues that might pop up please feel free to call, text, email me. I am your representative now and so no more interim person. I'm here to help and so please let me know if anything comes up.

Wonderful to have you. Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Any other comments?

Jonathan, thank you for coming to Alhambra. Welcome and I'm glad to have a representative back with Edison first of all. Thank you for the presentation. So a lot of the questions that I had were actually asked by my my colleagues just a second ago. It's my only real ask and maybe follow up with you. I know some years back we had some constant issues with circuits in the southwest part of the city. They were you know continuously breaking down. I know council member Andrade Stadler was always an advocate for getting those repaired and making sure that they were always, at least the updates were up to date. So just to follow up on that, just, you know, I know we have a capital improvement map, specifically the follow-up would be, you know, what are the plans for the capital improvements within Alhambra and specifically these circuits that we're breaking down in the southwest part of the city. You know, they could have been replaced already for all we know, but we'd love to hear back on that. And yeah, thank you for being here again. Looking forward to staying in touch with you for any issues we may have.

And I apologize I'm such a slow rider. But yes I wrote that down. I'm going to see if I can get some more information on if there are fixes done in the last few years if there's any that are scheduled. But no I appreciate that. I know a couple of the streets that were listed were kind of in the I think you said Southwest or. OK. Yeah. So I will I'll check in on that. And then with the update that I'm going to bring to council members Andrade Stradler and Wong I'll try and get you those updates as well.

Thank you, Mayor. I think the last time we had, or at least I had a conversation with your representative was probably about four or five years ago. So I welcome back to the council. And I think all five of us, according to the agenda, have requested for you to come today. And so we all have issues. And I want to go back to the historical reliability chart again that was pulled out before. I'm not too convinced with the others that you had attributed to windstorms. So can you pull back that chart?

I'll wait for you. It's page five of our agenda packet.

It's not that page.

It's the one that I think Council Member Wong was, there we go, thank you. I think we're gonna spend a little bit of time on this chart. I think you said that when the crew members arrive after a report was made that they just attribute to the other. And you did mention windstorms, the increase in 2025. But I don't see that myself as really truly just windstorms. Because if you look at the middle column and the last column, both have to do a frequency, not minutes. The entire circuit, when you have a windstorm, not Alhambra, Alhambra cannot be the only city to experience windstorms. It's not isolated. So I would expect that if there's a general windstorms in terms of the weather pattern, that the circuit itself will see an increase in frequency but it's not so when you look at the middle column especially in the year 2023 i think let's take that for example middle column year 2023 and the alhambra the blue bar has 1.8 average frequency of sustained interruptions whereas um the red bar which represent the entire grid as 1.0 and i cannot see and if you look if you go to the future years it remained the same until 2025 but alhambra in 2023 if you attribute that to windstorm that that contributes the power i i don't really believe so because the grid itself did not see an increase in that year so Based on that logic, I believe that there are other issues with Alhambra circuits. So Windstorm itself alone cannot be the only contributor of increasing frequency for Alhambra. Because you look at the red bars, the entire grid did not increase. So I mean, there's no way you would have Windstorm only over Alhambra, right? So I'm just going to leave it at that. That's just how I think about when you see the other as the causes for power outages, unplanned power outages. I believe there are other issues. And I'd like Edison to be able to give us a little bit more details because, I mean, if the crew arrive at the scene, if there's really a windstorm that just occurred or they're in the middle of a windstorm, I'd like you to document that, the date. Because right now it's too general to attribute all that increasing frequency in Alhambra to windstorms only. You call it other. I think that we need to be a little more conscientious about the actual causes for the increase in Alhambra in terms of frequency. So I just want to point that out. I'm not quite sure we're going to have another discussion. Have you come back? But I'd like you to bring back a little bit more.

I have some explanations now, if you'd like.

OK, sure.

Yes. So the chart, I know it's not a ton of data. Didn't want to get it too clustered. Again, to differentiate from the SADIE and the SAIFI. The safety, which is that column in the middle, is for frequency of outages. While it does look significantly larger for the city of Alhambra, for 2023, for example, you have one average sustained outage per customer in the entirety of Southern California Edison service area. For Alhambra, you had 1.8. And so it was about two outages per customer. That being said, the amount of minutes were about the same. There was a 40 minute give or take difference for the city of Alhambra to the rest of the entire Southern California grid. Other cities, for their reliability reports, I won't say they look the exact same for the safety, but they are very similar for the safety within the San Gabriel Valley. And so for 2025, you're gonna see this exact same thing for quarter one for most of the cities in the San Gabriel Valley, and that they have much longer durations of their outages. and it's in that one quarter, and then it skews the numbers heavily, which is why 2025 you can see the grid as a whole experienced more outages, but Alhambra still outperformed most of the grid. For the surrounding cities, South Pasadena, San Marino, San Gabriel, I believe Monterey Park, it is comparable. And so I'm not saying that the windstorms are happening every single year, but that big, big spike in 2025, if you look at all of those cities within the region, they all have that exact same spike. And so that's the best assumption that we have is that it was the windstorm because again, when our crews arrived, whether it was a palm frond that fell in the line, the frond wasn't there anymore. That can be explained by heavy winds hits the line and then heavy winds also blow it off the line. Heavy winds might knock the wires together. They go out for a little bit. When the crews get there, they see that there's no equipment failure. There's no vegetation currently on the lines. There's no issues that are directly, directly identifiable. And so they would have to put that other. And you also see a spike in other in the first quarter of 2025 for almost all the circuits when the other years are more explained by other reasons. um and so i know it does look odd especially with that middle bar for the safety for the frequency but as a reminder it's not that big of a difference for 2022 for example it looks like it might be significant but it's 0.1 more outages sustained outages per customer as opposed to the rest of the grid

OK, thank you for the explanation. I do accept that to a certain extent. However, do you have more detailed breakdowns in terms of the hours of the day or seasons? During summer, as we all know, that there would be more demand on electricity in terms of AC and all that. How do we compare to other cities in the region?

Oh, shoot, yes. Sorry, I had something open, but I would need Internet access to get it. Yes, we have it by month. I don't know if we have it by day, but there is a reliability performance report that I believe that we can share with you. I'll have to figure out how to get it to show 2025. I have it up for 2026 right now, and I can't access it because of the lack of internet. But let me make a note of that, and then I'll find a way to get you that report to see even more specific data. I think it almost even gets down to the street. so you can see more about the outages per area. Bit hard to navigate, but honestly, if you want, I'd be very happy to come here and show you all how to navigate the website. I can have someone from our service center set up Zoom and see if they can just kind of walk you through it, give you a tutorial for the website. I'm happy to explain some more of the reasons and the areas where these outages are.

So the website cannot be accessed by the public?

I'm not certain about this specific one, only because the URL is a little odd, and I don't know if it's on our internal server. But I can definitely share the data with you all.

Okay. So that was my point number one. I'm going to go to the... The circuits itself is page eight in our agenda packet overview on Alhambra. There are 42 circuits that serve Alhambra currently, and they have names. OK, let's see. Okay, and then after that, we have pages of each circuit in terms of the frequency of power outages and the length. I like that. So without going through all of those circuits, my general question is, first of all, it's obvious that there are certain circuits that have many more customers than other circuits, 42 circuits. Let's just take the first one, Almanzar circuit. It has... Okay, you have the customer is 2,074 in 2022 and an increase to, in 2025, 2,205 customers. Do those numbers include businesses or just household average customers?

Yeah, so I believe they include all of the customers. Also, as a reminder, these numbers represent the circuit as a whole. And so it doesn't mean that there are 2,205 customers in the city of Alhambra. It just means that there's that many on the circuit.

That's correct. I understand.

And if you go to the next slide, you can see in the top right, and I'll have to get you a better version of this slide that's easier to read. But in the top right, it shows you the percentage of distance that each circuit has in the city of Alhambra. That doesn't mean that's the percentage of the customers. It just means it's the percentage of the lines that are in the city.

OK.

There's a number, city annual total customers. In 2022, there were 64,545 customers. And going forward to 2025, there's an increase of about 4,200 customers. The number is 68,722 customers in 2025. So that's an increase of 4,200 customers for the entire city. And I'm not sure Besides the windstorm, I'm just trying to figure out whether that is a contributing factor to the increasing frequency of all the circuits, going back to the other chart we had in 2025, because it just seems like the frequency has been increasing over the years. I have not seen... except between 23, 24, I'm not seeing a decrease. So I'm just wondering that with the continued increase in customers for the city weather, we're going to see in 2026 that the frequency will increase overall. I'm just hypothetically guessing a projection. I have quite a few residents have warned me about the infrastructure of Alhambra, that can our infrastructure sustain the growth, population growth? As we have seen is about 4,200 new customers over the years since 2022. Not sure what happens to our growth in 2026 going forward. So my next question is then naturally, How many more new customers can the Alhambra Circus take on without an increase in plant power outages? It's hard to project, but I think you should be able to give me some type of projection. Are you going to say, can you say, a number after another increase in customer, another 5,000 customers, for example, that Alhambra is going to see an increase in frequency of power outages? Or is that something where Edison's saying that we can take on as many customers as we can without interruption to our services?

Okay, yeah, so for this one, I don't know if there's going to be, and I can't answer it right now, although I have to talk to our service centers. I don't know if it's going to be a clear answer of X amount of many more customers, considering that each customer has different energy needs. But I can ask to see maybe what more power capacity the system has. I would have to talk to our service center to get you a clear answer on that. But I wrote it down in my notes, and so I'll make sure to chat with them.

OK, thank you. So you mentioned the word capacity. Talk about capacity for each circuit. Does each circuit, some circuit like we see in the chart, has several thousand customers, and there are some circuits that have just a few hundred. When you talk about capacity, now I'm not really, again, an electrical engineer, but just An average customer capacity means that there is a potential maximum output at any given time for that particular circuit.

So let's take Almanzar circuit versus a smaller circuit.

Correct me, I'll make this statement and see if I'm correct. So does that mean that the Almanzar circuit, which has 2,205 customers on it right now, does that mean that it can, it has a larger capacity potential than a smaller circuit? Let's look at Woodward, which is the last one. Right now it has 396 customers on there.

Can Almanzar circuit take on more customers? If so, how many more?

And Woodward, which is the last circuit, only has 396 customers. Does that mean that hazard reach is maximum? These are just general questions I have, because I just don't quite understand how circuits work in terms of capacity and potential maximum. I think the reason why I'm asking these questions, because we are now looking at, again, new developments coming in, and because of state requirement that we have to basically approve a lot of these developments that come in that meet the regulations. So these circuits, I think they're pretty old. How old are these circuits in terms of average age?

I do not know. I'll write that down.

I think what my question really boils down to is that how many more customers, new customers can we take on for each particular circuit? That's what it is, without an observable increase in outages. Because just as an average customer, every time there's a power outage, whether it's five minutes, two hours, it can lead to safety and health issues, especially with people that have medical equipment at home that cannot, that they don't have their own generator. These outages are very... can be very serious for them. But just in terms of general public, every time we power outages, it's inconvenience versus, I remember several years ago, I received emails from some residents along Mission that their groceries were completely spoiled because outages lasted over 24 hours. It was unplanned. So it was a few hundred dollars. And actually, I think Edison reimbursed them after I intervened. But back to what I'm saying, that every time there's an outage, whether it's one minute or two hours, there's going to be an impact on someone. So I'm just concerned about the age of our circuits, number one. Also, in terms of capacity, in terms of additional new customers that we can take on. I think Edison need to be honest with the council. Even though we may not be able to stop the new developments, but they do mean the new customers. Edison need to tell us, if you make a statement to the council, either today or down the future, that Alhambra circuits can take out as many new customers as possible, then that's your statement. But if you make a statement to the council that there are going to be limits to how many new customers that that circuit can take on without increasing power outage, I want you to be honest with us so that we can look at our new developments and be able to say, hey, we've got to balance this. OK, that's all there is. One last question. In terms of EV charging, we have people that are charging their EVs at home, as well as we have some EV charging stations in our public parking structures. Tell us about that. Is that, again, can we continue to have more EV charging? locations, whether it's at private homes, in the garages, as well as in the public, our public parking structures. I think some, I think Pasadena actually, I see them on in an outdoor parking area outside of a supermarket. It was all lined up. I think it was a Tesla charging stations.

On the Target on Costco, or Colorado is one of them. Right, right.

So give me a little bit more information about the capacity. Can we have unlimited charging, EV charging stations?

I mean, the one thing I can say, there's never going to be unlimited capacity for anything, but any capacity question, I will have to refer back to the service center and then get back to you with answers on that. But I'll add EV charging to the list of those capacity questions. But I am uncertain on what the exact number would be at this point.

Okay, great, because I want the answers as soon as possible, especially the cities looking at, just like many other cities are looking at more developments coming in. There are applications that we oftentimes have to approve, even though I'm not quite sure they're appropriate at this time, but that's just my personal perspective. But if you're telling us, if Edison comes back to the council, could be next month or a few months, that there's a capacity issue, that you're concerned about taking on new customers, I want you to be very honest with us so that the council can talk about this. Thank you. That's all my questions.

Thank you.

Thank you, colleagues. A couple of real quick comments. I think it's, Jonathan, correct me if I'm wrong, but in the last several years, like five, six years, we haven't had a demand-related brownout or outage. Is that correct?

As an employee, I do not know. As a resident, I can't remember one. But I'll have to find that out.

Five or six years? So just to kind of level set, Alhambra is a member of Clean Power Alliance. It was nothing against Edison, but we did leave Edison as a customer for purchasing power. However, all Clean Power Alliance cities and counties still receive their power from Edison over the transmission lines, the distribution and transmission lines, and Edison handles the administration. So Clean Power Alliance works with Edison to make sure everything kind of works seamlessly, but Alhambra gets its power directly from Clean Power Alliance. And I can tell you as a member of the Clean Power Alliance board that this is an extremely complicated area of government and regulation. The state and the KISO, which is the independent system operator, that manages load throughout the state really the western United States they have in the California Public Utilities Commission they work together to to estimate load demands out you know almost multiple decades almost so they have projections into the 2030s and they account for all things and it isn't just how many more people can live in Alhambra but it is what is the what is the total load demand going to be in the state of California They break it down by subregions. They break it down by utility and whoever's providing these powers. So every entity that's involved in this is given sort of a to-do list. Part of that is to make sure they're purchasing enough power, purchase enough power long term, that they have buffers for the times when demand does spike. And if maybe some plant goes offline, they have to be prepared for it. And it actually I think is a it's quite impressive the progress that has been made over the last six or seven years that we were having brownouts for a while where there's just too many people using too much electricity and we didn't have the generation during the day. That is all flipped on its head because we have so much solar energy solar power being generated now during the day. And with the additional long term storage battery We have power through the day. In fact, so much so that the rates of power during the day from 9 to 4 are much lower on the time of use tiers. It's much lower than at nighttime because we have almost surplus power during the day so that we have to find a place to use it. And one of the places they're using it is charging batteries so that you can use electricity at night. Clean Power Alliance is actually going to offer a tier soon on a pilot program that if you have an electric vehicle or if you have some other home battery storage capability, some reason you're going to be maximizing your load during the daylight hours, they're actually going to be selling the power for free. That is zero money for a kilowatt hour. You still have to pay the transmission and the distribution charges and other associated charges. But the actual power is going to be free because there's so much coming out of the grid. This is really important. It's good news. It's a positive story. But it's just to say that there is quite a bit of capacity. It's now of power production now it's how to get it to where it needs to be that's where the transmission and distribution lines come in so in Edison and other entities that manage the distribution of power they are are required by state regulators to meet the load demand and how they do that I mean good luck to you but how they do that that's one thing but the power itself is there we haven't seen brown out based on generation for quite some time now i think the trend is is going up uh so long as we're responsible with the the types of power and the types of loads we bring on residential is a fairly minimal impact um we obviously have an issue on the agenda later today that is a big potential power issue so that's one of the things we're trying to to address um before we have any issues there but as a residential issue I don't know if you can bring back next time you come some of those facts and figures and flesh out some of these things that I may have screwed up because I'm just dabbling in this and you guys are the professionals we really appreciate it but I appreciate you coming out here today and hearing from the council providing this information to all of us it's really helpful and it's great to keep this relationship up so thank you Jonathan next time you come you'll have a few more months under your belt and you'll be an expert in rule 20. You can tell us all about how we can underground our power lines.

Give me a few more years. We might be there.

Thank you so much. Thanks, Jonathan. Appreciate it. Next up, we're going to have a presentation by the Alhambra Chamber of Commerce. We have John, Mr. John Browery.

take it away good evening um mr mayor and members of the city council john wary ceo of the alhambra chamber of commerce i'm before you this evening to give you an update since my i try to come regularly uh and since our last time together some of the things that we've been undertaking in partnership with the uh city and so Just a couple areas I want to focus on around economic development. This is something that we really focus on in the work we do. While there's a lot of activities that are undertaken by the Chamber, the work we do together is around economic development. How do we bring more businesses that create vibrancy in our commercial districts? How do we provide more opportunities for entrepreneurs to find their sort of American dream, if you will, here in Alhambra? And how do we continue to have the economic activity that generates tax revenues to fund the services that we have come to rely on and you've so diligently stewarded for our communities. And so those are the approaches that we take when we talk about economic development. Some of the things that have been happening lately and in the last couple of months, we've seen a lot of investment by national companies that want to come here and open a outlet here. Starbucks, Raising Cane's, and others continue to open here, which generates a tremendous amount of sales tax for the city. Our hospitality, tourism and hospitality sort of sector is one of the leading economic drivers for the city. As you know, I think later this evening you have the economic action plan, economic development action plan on your agenda that the Chamber is wholeheartedly supporting. looking forward to working with the city to implement but we we look at that hospitality driver as a key to this we also have been working to attract people so every every week we're actually reaching out to strategic businesses that are already successful in other neighborhoods that have shown interest in expanding and so we reach out whether it's a bookstore or a different kind of cuisine that maybe isn't as prominent here or other services that neighbors and community members have asked us to look at and so we continue to do that In fact, about three months ago, we hosted Open Your Business in Alhambra Expo. in partnership with the city and with the Downtown Association and the Chinatown Service Center, the Small Business Development Center, and others to bring all those resources to one location and invite people who are looking to open here. And we're still in conversation because it takes a while in helping some of those businesses actually identify locations that they can sign leases and open their business. Everything from experiential retail to services and health and wellness activities, all of those came in about 18 different businesses that we're seeking to open here and we're working with about five of them still in that conversation and trying to help them find a location in the city whether it's downtown Valley Fremont or other So we continue to work aggressively to do that, to make sure that people know that Alhambra is the destination to start and really succeed as a business owner, especially small business owner. We're also working to provide community assets and resources as it relates to community programming. Obviously, the Lunar New Year is the flagship event that we produce in partnership with the city, with nearly 20,000 people attending in the downtown district. for that one day event coming back in February 2026 to celebrate that but we also are putting on things like our Rose Court lunch last year where for the first time in a long time an Alhambra high school student and resident was selected for the Rose Court we were able to celebrate that as a community and so we continue to look at opportunities such as that and as the last six months have gone forward really looking at ways we communicate more about more broadly about Alhambra as a destination for businesses and as a destination for attraction, especially around restaurant and retail. And so I know that we have seen everything from ribbon cuttings for small businesses down in the downtown. Coconut & Co. just opened two weeks ago after moving from San Gabriel because they wanted more lively businesses. uh foot traffic and more a place where they could have a greater connection to their community uh to the work in um uh excuse me to the work where you saw probably uh that sam woo barbecue and the kogi truck partnered so how do we continue to amplify those activities bring people here to spend their money here and really generate success for our local businesses I could probably go on for a long time, but I know that you've got a full agenda, some of which includes economic development. So I'm going to leave it there and let you know, I really appreciate the partnership with staff from the city manager to the community development department. to public works and public safety, we have this partnership that hopefully drives businesses to be successful and really working through when there's an issue that does come up for a business. We work together to solve it. We manage expectations to solve that. I'll leave it at that and happy to answer any questions you might have, but really, again, appreciate the opportunity to partner with the city in creating an economic vitality that we can all be proud of and we can all point to as a success for our community.

Thank you, John. Any comments? Vice Mayor?

Thank you, John. It was nice to see you last week at the legislative luncheon where Congresswoman Judy Chu gave a briefing of... the horrible things that are happening in Washington, D.C. Anyway, but we were glad she was there. And you guys did a great job. So thank you. Thank you for providing that. John, I wanted to ask you something. If you would consider bringing back the Around Alhambra, and I mean the paper form. And I'll tell you why. I read it online. I have no problem reading it online because I have access to the internet. And then I also have the tech knowledge to be able to pull it down and to read it. But many of our residents don't. So that's number one. And they miss all the fabulous things you're doing. they really they really do i mean they look forward to seeing that in their mailboxes and and seeing everything that is happening i don't mean about our comments it's not about us but it's about what's happening in the city of alhambra i'm particularly concerned a lot about them missing out um i hope you find it in your budget to do that if not come come ask for help i'm concerned about We counsel getting questions about things that are going on in the city when they could have found out in around Alhambra. Right. What projects are public works is working on how our development department is where our police department is doing. They're not getting that information any longer. Some people a segment of our of our people are not getting that information. So they come to us and they're wondering, what is going on? Why do I have to drive? Why do you cut us off? Why are you not providing a better way for us to get home and things like that? Because we're working on projects, right? And so it's informative. It's so informative. I'm also concerned about the enrollment issues at Alhambra. Unified School District. Everybody is dealing with this. I realize that. However, the newspaper was a tremendous outreach because our schools are doing such amazing work. They're getting ready to come back in August. They come back in the big heat. And yet they give us 100% They really do. People move in here because of the school district. So I think it behooves us as a council and as a chamber to work together to try and get something done for that. And as quickly as we can.

I will just quickly say we are planning to do print editions at least twice a year. We have one scheduled for October and one for coinciding with the Lunar New Year. Those will not be mailed but distributed in great quantities around the city. as a way to continue to try to provide that print material. As you are well aware, with the cost of living generally, the cost of paper and printing and newspapers has been a challenge for two decades. And we did our best to keep it going as long as we could without being a financial drain on the resources of the organization and the community. We're up against changing times. That's why we're committed to doing these print additions. We're not going to probably be able to mail them because of the – I mean, postage goes up every year. Printing of paper goes up every year. The cost of fuel impacts the cost of paper, which goes up a fuel surcharge every month almost when we were doing it most recently. I'm not trying to provide excuses, but simply context of this hard decision. I mean, we took a couple of years to make this decision to phase out a mailed newspaper and the school district was a tremendous support and the city has been a tremendous support. But even with that support and again, the stewardship of public dollars and the restrictions that come with public dollars, it becomes challenging to meet the financial obligation to do mailing to every household and do it well and do it in a way that that is cost effective. And I don't mean to to to deny or reject or even say that we don't want to. We do want to. But it is the news business is difficult. And it's the same reason the LA Times has a very limited print run. It's the same reason why new nonprofits start and some have success across LA. We've tried to reach out to LA Local, which is a new, but it's all online. Even that is online. So we're really looking at how we continue to communicate as best we can. Again, these quarterly or quarterly less regular but as often as possible print editions are what we're going to try to do to remedy that i wish i had a better answer but it's it's the city's not in the publishing business the chamber really isn't in the publishing business in the school district isn't in the publishing business And therefore, we don't have the resources required to make this successful and financially viable for our community. It breaks my heart to have to say that and be the one in the last five years to get there.

I appreciate your comments, but that just means maybe we go somewhere else to have them do it, right? Have a nonprofit or an outreach.

Yeah, I think it would be great. I mean, this community has a history of newspapers that have not been able to sustain it. I mean, Alhambra Source was a great resource. And that ended in like 2020, I think. It was before I was here. And great resource. online, great reporters, great partnership, nonprofit, and they couldn't get enough money to sustain itself. And I think that this is a question we grapple with, and we have to use the tools at our disposal in partnership to reach as many people as we can, as cost-effectively as we can, with the tools that are available and realistic for us today.

Do you know off the top of your head how much it costs?

On average, the most recent edition that we did that was printed and mailed approximately cost $17,000 to $18,000 not including staff time. So not including any of the time it took to actually report or design or collect and write those articles. Additionally, that was when we reduced it to 24 pages and yeah, but mailing it was the other piece. So it was about $17,000.

So we can't look at the Cal State Los Angeles? Do they have journalists?

We reached out to them. We even paid Cal State journalists to help write. And again, the writing, it's the production and the mailing that is the bulk of the cost. And just to clarify, none of the city money that was provided in the last five years I've been here is allocated towards this effort. And while it is still a great opportunity, we do, you know, we promote the news that is put out as press releases. Anything that's available on your website, we utilize your calendar listings. Anything that's widely circulated, we would utilize in the newspaper to deliver to community members. But we did not have a formal agreement, I just want to be clear, with the city to fund this newspaper. It was through advertising, which has diminished over time because it's, frankly, you reach more customers buying a Google ad or a Facebook ad directly, and you actually track the result than buying the marketing that comes in a newspaper that's printed.

So does that mean at the library we're going to remove that bronze thing of the guy who used to write and replace him with a computer?

I hope not. That's our legacy. But times have changed. We're doing everything we can to continue to provide information as cost-effectively as possible and at the speed at which people are getting news. I'll acknowledge another thing. When we moved to every other month, our news was no longer news. It was just information. So things that happened this week wouldn't get covered. Maybe if we went to print last week, it would be another two months before someone heard about what was happening at today's council meeting. And so the speed at which people consume information and really demand information has changed so much. And man, do I wish I had a printing press in the basement and we could just turn things out every week or every day. That's not the reality we're in right now.

Any others?

Thank you, John, for your update. It's always great to see you. And thank you for all of your work in supporting and promoting the businesses in the city of Alhambra. I follow the chamber, and it's just great to see all the events, all the ribbon cutting, and your effort in supporting all businesses. I know you talked about that we're seeing these national brands coming to the city. They're great. But I think hearing from the community, we also want to see diversity of businesses. And you mentioned small business, mom and pop businesses. I'm glad to hear you're intentional about reaching out to those. So just hoping that we put in that intentional effort in reaching out to a diverse variety of businesses and talking about, you know, school schools in the city and we want to be able to retain families here so family-friendly children activities enrichment programs and you know all those things will be great to have and thank you for the effort in reaching out and identifying opportunities for us. And I know that, and you also are aware that we do have economic development plan later in this agenda. And I think that we have formed subcommittees on the council to do like a deeper diving to that. And I hope that you will weigh in on that process as well. Thank you.

Thank you.

John, thank you again for being here. As always, you know, I know you have a real heavy task on you to try to support these businesses. But, you know, happy with the work that you guys have done. I second bringing back the Randall-Hambra. You know, I know it's tough times and, you know, we're up against the current on that. But hopefully, you know, there will be a way to get the word out so that people can kind of get up to date, you know, electronically and get their news that way. Other than that, I know you have some challenging times. ahead of you, just economically. Things are not easy, and working with our city's own economic development team, we see what's in front of us, and so not easy, but we appreciate what you do. Thank you.

Thank you, Mayor. So John, I know behind the smile you have a lot of ideas. I'm glad that you mentioned reaching out to small businesses. It's very difficult to start a business with the capital, and then it's about three years before they decide they can continue. And I'm not quite sure they average the life of a small business. But so I think that is a great focus. And I have seen ever since you arrived in Alhambra, there are many other new ideas that came on with the leadership luncheon, all those things. And I personally attend to quite a few of them. I think they're really a sign of that you're... I'm complimenting you too much. I know, but... But it's true. It's true. When I see someone who's doing a really good job, I need to make sure that that person is recognized. I'm sure there are many people behind you in making sure these ideas are carried out. But I'm just saying that since you're standing in front of me, I have to just compliment you. And so continue to do the good work. And I know we have had a conversation about ideas I had. and but just it's just good that you're continue to come to update the council about what you're doing and I personally try to visit small business along Main Street and some of them have some issues and I try to help them out so you know anytime that anytime though the the small business have issues hopefully that Hopefully they can reach out to you too.

Absolutely. I just acknowledge that part of our work is to be that sort of support. Sometimes a small business just doesn't know how to get something solved. It doesn't mean we're going to waive fees or waive rules or let them do whatever they want, but just help them to understand the process. And that ombudsman service is what we provide through our partnership. And we're actually going to be starting to promote that a bit more. as a way to intentionally let people know, like, this is what the chamber can do for you, even if you're not a member. And I think I want to be clear about that. We provide these services to any business that is looking to open here that has an issue that they want assistance with. And we're playing a long game here. Some of the reach out that we do now, a year from now, they might come back and say, okay, we're ready to open. And so we do keep in touch. We remind people it's that high touch. And again, working with the city staff to make sure we're strategic about the small businesses we're reaching out to that complement the work that we're doing. I think this action plan that's before you, not to get ahead of myself or yourself on the agenda, it really helps lay out the ideals that you as a city would like us to support. And it will help create a roadmap for us to continue to refine our work in supporting this vision that you have. So thank you.

And I just want to, again, just my personal observation, we have so many family businesses that have survived and stayed in Alhambra for so long, 30 years, 40 years. And more. And they're still going. They don't want to retire. It's actually a compliment to Alhambra as well, but I want to, again, give you credit and the Chamber credit for whatever you've been doing to maintain that very friendly atmosphere for the city. But I'm sure there's still a lot more to do on your part.

doesn't end there's always something to do to help businesses all right thank you so much thank you John appreciate the updates all the small business stuff's great I agree with bringing back the around Alhambra so do we need a motion for that or just kidding no no motion it is difficult we should discuss ideas about how to do that but we appreciate you trying and keeping that afloat so I We have a big stack of speaker cards here, so we'll go ahead. Not for you, but unless you want them. But we'll go ahead and move on to our next item. Thank you for that. So we're going to item three. So let me introduce this. Do we have a staff report for it? Okay. So let me just introduce this. First of all, especially for Jennifer who spoke who called in earlier about the special meeting I appreciate that we were supposed to have a regular meeting would have been yesterday but typically in the summer for vacations and usually a little bit slower workload we tend to go dark the first meeting of every month so that's the second Monday we typically take off so that would have been yesterday couple things came up that sort of necessitated for a special meeting tonight first one is that There is a couple of requests to pursue ballot items so things that will go on the ballot to be voted on in November. The process for putting these items on the ballot are to adopt it adopt them as an ordinance. So ordinances under state law have to be approved upon a second reading at a regular meeting of the city council. Our next meeting on the 27th is a regular meeting. But since we didn't have our regular meeting scheduled for yesterday. We had to figure out if we could how we could call a special meeting to consider them in order to give us time to do the second reading on the 27th. So this tended to be the only day that all the council members could do it. So we did it. The secondary thing is that because we our workload really didn't slow down we had quite a few things that were built up. and instead of staying until 1 a.m. on the 27th or it would have been the 28th I request is my request as the mayor this is one of the few things that I can actually do is call a special meeting. So I did ask staff to identify some things that might be easier to put on to tonight's agenda. That's why we did the Edison report. That's why we did the economic plan and the Chamber of Commerce and some of the other items there so it's not everything got moved but some of the easier items we did move to today so thank you for your indulgence on that and we are going to have some visitors from from out of the country coming to our next meeting too and I just wanted to make sure we were we weren't overloading everything in one meeting with all these different items on it so it was my prerogative to call a special meeting and because of the time crunch to get the ballot items on the ballot we had to do this quickly so I recognizing that there were two proposals to for ballot measures first one being the proposal to to alter the term limit language in the city's charter to currently as it stands, you can run for three terms in a row, take four years off, come back, run three terms in a row again, take four years off, take three, you know, on and on and on. So the proposal was to limit that. So three terms in a row take four years off and then come back for two terms. The proposal actually was identical to the city of Pasadena's in all aspects including the way it treated existing council members. And this was tonight's putting this on tonight's agenda was a way for the community to discuss for us to get feedback. And the one thing has been made clear to me over the last few days and weeks or so that there really is no community consensus on this item there's it's a big it's a big step to amend the Charter in any scenario especially when you're talking about term limits and how council members are elected these are things we want to take seriously and we want to spend appropriate amount of time had there been an overwhelming you know, eruption of community consensus on this, I think we might be having a different conversation tonight. But that's not what I heard. I heard lots of different ideas. But primarily what I heard, and I don't know if my colleagues feel the same, but primarily what I heard is, why are you rushing this? This doesn't seem like urgent right now. Is there a real need for this? We should slow down and take our time. And ultimately, I agree with that. I agree with that. I do think this is something we should look at. I do think the charter as a whole is something we should look at and consider an amendment. I mean, the city is over, you know, 115, 113 this year. What are we? we're old it's an old city it's been around for over a hundred years and our charter is old and and alhambra's charter developed at a time when cities didn't really have clear governance from the state now we have a whole section of the government code in california that governs how cities are run so most new cities now newer cities are general law cities they're not charter cities who basically write their own constitution they are general law cities and they abide exactly by what the government code says so I think we have some I think it is it sort of raises this topic and I think there is probably some need to do this but if we're gonna do this I think we should do it in a slow maybe not slow but in deliberate and intentional way and not try to rush something in and squeeze it under the deadline to get on the ballot for November so I if folks want to talk about this tonight that's fine but what I would ask my colleagues is is your indulgence for me since I did call the meeting to table this particular issue this portion of this item tonight to pump the brakes on that. If anyone objects to that we can have a full discussion but I don't think it's personally I don't think it's ready. I don't want to curtail the public's right to speak on this because it will be helpful for future discussions or. You know, if there's an overwhelming support, maybe we can reconsider. But I'd like to table this particular item, so we are not voting on this tonight. We will absolutely keep the data center issue on there. I'll get to that in a second. Unless anyone objects. We can discuss it, but I think we should probably pull it off.

Mayor, I completely agree with you. I'm very confused. And I shouldn't be confused about something that's going to change the charter. And I'm sure there's a lot of people who would be interested in really actually taking a look at it, so we should take our time with it. I totally agree with that. So if you need a motion to table, I make a motion.

All right, we'll just pull it off. I don't know if we need a motion for it.

Council Member.

Oh, yeah, I support that. I support the idea of going through a robust public process to discuss something that's very serious to me. And I just want to make sure that I understand you correctly. Mayor, we're still going to allow people to speak on this.

I mean, it's agendized, and I guess we could try to stop people, but I'm not going to do that. So if people want to speak to the item, please feel free. When you do come up for a public comment, because we have so many comment cards tonight, It's going to be three minutes per person. If you want to speak to both items, please let me know and we'll give you a little extra time. But please try to keep the comment short on both items since we have a lot of folks here. We want to make sure we get through everyone and everyone gets a chance to be heard. So any other?

So let me understand this correctly. I'm very neutral on this, the charter amendment. But there are speakers here tonight who want to speak to the charter amendment in terms of term limit. I think we should go ahead with that. And I think... quickly, if you wanna table it, I'm not against it. I just wanted to, I think the point that you made was well received as far as I'm concerned is that the idea came to us quickly and I don't think we should just rush through this and vote on it because of deadline. Changing the charter is a very serious move I personally is very neutral on this part.

Yeah. Thank you. I think this was a this was a discussion sort of forcing item here because this was our only chance to do it if we wanted to get it on for November. So I think you know no harm no foul on this if we don't move forward on it. But we do appreciate the suggestion and the way that it worked out. And I think that this leads us into maybe a larger discussion of what the charter looks like for the future of our city. So So for the for the data center item I do want to be clear that we have two items under this one agenda item so be clear. Let us know if you're speaking to to one or to both just data center or term limits just let me know so we can manage the timing here we'll have three minutes to speak. I want everyone to know though going in here is that the city is already by action of the city council a unanimous action of the city council. has prohibited data centers in the community. We have already prohibited them under our zoning code so that if somebody came in yesterday with a proposal for data center, we'd say we don't allow them by order of the city council. This is something we adopted previously. I think it's in effect now because the timeline, kind of the waiting period for ordinances has run. data centers are prohibited. What we're doing tonight is considering putting this on the ballot so that future councils cannot undo that action. So that if all four of us, I'm sorry, five of us are gone in five, 10 years, then that council can't say, you know what, we really like this idea of data centers, we're going to put it back on. We're just eliminating that possibility. The only way, if we adopt this tonight, And it goes through the second reading goes on the ballot the voters adopted the only way to undo that is by another vote of the people. So just to be clear and I and I know that this is a really controversial topic these days and I appreciate everyone being here for this and speaking to the item. I want to be clear that that all five of us already voted for to prohibit data centers in the community. So keep that in mind. There is no proposal for a data center in Alhambra. We have not heard about a proposal for a data center in Alhambra. And I don't want to prejudge this discussion, but at the last discussion we had on this, it was pretty clear that none of us felt like data centers were appropriate for Alhambra. So that's where we're starting from. So still, we appreciate you being here. Again, let me know what you're speaking to tonight. We'll have three minutes per person. And I think that's it. Thanks, everyone. Let's go ahead and start. I'm going to get out the order just by one or two and allow Michael Alex Jones to bat the lead off.

Go ahead. Thanks, City Council. I'll be speaking on both.

I only need three minutes. First of all, the ban on data centers going to the will of the people so we can keep it extra cemented, so to speak. I'm all for that. There's people who are far more informed on that issue than me. I'll let them do the lion's share of the talk on that. I am aware, however, that a data center is already built in Vernon with another one coming out, Vernon, California, just south of LA. It is a clear and present danger that I do think we need to address as rigidly as possible. Moving forward with the term limits. I understand there was some pretty passionate discussion about that. I'll be clear. So my, I say I live on, as I said before, I live in District 1. I have gotten the blessing of Working Families Party LA to come and present this to the council. I showed them, and by that I mean specifically a couple of elected member representatives of Working Families Party. I was in communication with them. They took a look at Pasadena Measure PC. They asked some questions. They go, all right, you know what? That looks decent. You can press forward with it. So I was the one lobbying and, frankly, twisting the arm of the council a little bit for about 14 months or so. And I apologize for the calls and the badger and all that. I try to be polite. And you all were great to me, so thank you for that. So for those who are upset about it, you can be upset at me too. And if you're set, please reach out to me. I've been trying to reach out to a bunch of activist groups in Alhambra. I feel like I'm chasing ghosts. I can't find them. I ask everybody how to get ahold of these people. No one has an answer. So I apologize for that. As far as that goes, though, it sounds like tabling is what's going to happen. That's fine. I do not mind discretion being the better part of valor, and I don't mind having a discussion with those people who felt very passionate. And that includes the council as well. You guys are welcome to be part of the discussion as well. And, yeah, basically, yes, let's put it on the belt to ban the data centers. And sorry for any hurt feelings or misunderstandings as far as the – As far as the term limits are concerned, I'm the guy to talk to if you're mad at me, and if you're mad at me, yell at me first, and then tell me what your ideas are, because I want to hear it, because I've been chasing whoever's angry at you guys. I've been chasing them to talk about this for well over a year, and I can't find them. So, yes, please talk to me, even if you're mad. Thank you all for your time, and thank you for listening to me the last little over a year or so about both of these measures. Thank you.

Thank you. No, you do not need to apologize. This is part of the public process. We appreciate you bringing this forward, and sometimes this stuff happens. So we are, we are, it is... It was helpful to get a lot of different ideas, so apologies not necessary, but thank you for your work.

Appreciate you all. Thank you.

Okay, next up is Amy Wong.

Good evening, honorable mayor and city council. My name is Amy J. Wong. I'm a resident of District 1 and co-founder of SGV Progressive Action. I urge you to support a ballot measure asking residents to vote on a permanent data center ban. Last November, I first heard about a proposed data center project in our neighboring city of Monterey Park. Since then, I've been leading the No Data Centers movement here in the San Gabriel Valley alongside community. We packed city council meetings, hosted community teach-ins, canvassed neighborhoods, and distributed multilingual flyers. Monterey Park City Council listened. They banned data centers via ordinance and put it on the ballot for voters. The measure passed with 88% of the vote. 10,833 people in Monterey Park voted yes on NDC to ban data centers citywide. Alhambra now has the opportunity to do the same. to protect our community's health and put people before profits. So why add a ballot measure when the city has already banned data centers in the zoning code? A voter-approved data center ban reflects the will of the people. Once approved, the ban cannot be undone unless by another vote of the people. Regardless of who sits on city council in the future, the ban will stay in place. This provides permanent, long-term protections against data centers for current and future generations. When I think about what makes Alhambra great, I think about all the places we love, like our farmers market, library, schools, parks. And when I envision our city in the future, when I think about the type of city that future generations will inherit, I envision an Alhambra with safe neighborhoods, parks, schools, affordable housing, thriving local businesses, clean air, and reliable transportation, not data centers. Please move forward with putting a data center ban on the ballot for November. No data centers here in Alhambra or anywhere in the San Gabriel Valley. Thank you.

Thank you Amy. Next is Andrew Yip. So come on up and while he's coming up please feel free folks if someone says what you're going to say please feel free to say ditto or same as them and we can move on but if you You have your whole three minutes if you'd like it as well. Go ahead, Andrew.

Thank you. Good evening, Mayor and City Council. My name is Andrew Yip. I'm a resident of District 1 and a co-founder of SGV Progressive Action. We are part of the No Data Centers SGV Coalition, representing more than 40,000 members across the region. Thank you for placing the data center ban ballot measure on tonight's agenda. I urge you to place the data center ban on the ballot so voters can decide whether to codify it in the city charter. Our Hamburg has already taken an important step by prohibiting new data centers through its zoning code. Tonight, the city has the opportunity to provide stronger long-term protection by placing the ban in the charter. The cost is minimal compared to the lasting protection it would provide against rapidly growing industry. We've seen data centers proliferate across the country, including an attempt in neighboring Monterey Park. Fortunately, community members successfully stopped that project before it moved forward. We're also concerned that a future city council could weaken or repeal the current ordinance. Although Alhambra limits individual campaign contributions to $300 a person and prohibits contributions from PACs and businesses, candidates can spend unlimited amounts of their own money on their own campaigns. There are already examples of data center projects and developers retracting their projects in cities and then running their own candidates in other communities. Across the country, we've seen hundreds of millions of dollars spent to support candidates aligned with AI and technological interests A voter-approved charter amendment would ensure that any future decision to allow data centers remains in the hands of our Hamburg voters and not a temporary majority of the city council. Please support placing the data center ban on the November 3rd ballot. Thank you.

Thank you, Andrew.

Next is Grace Wang.

Hello. I'm a member or a resident of District 3 here in Alhambra, and I also support this ballot measure. Ditto what people have said. The reason I'm here today, I'm a mother, and we have already seen in our country how there are ways in which my daughter has right less rights than i did uh 10 20 years ago because there are things that were not adopted nationally that could have been adopted and so i think it's important for us to have a change to our city charter so that a change in representation here could not affect what we presently have as consensus. Maybe not consensus, but there is some consensus. And so I think it's critical that we have this vote in November so that we can change the city charter so that the voice of the people can be maintained in the charter and not be able to be overturned in the future should either circumstances change or should corporations choose to want to come to our country and lobby in such a way that they could overcome the voice of the people so thank you for your time and again i'm in support of this ballot measure thank you grace um dylan foster and followed by victor

Hello, I'm here to comment on the data center ban. I'm an environmentalist in Los Angeles County and here on my own to speak in my own capacity. But when it comes to data centers, there's a lot of concern about things, whether it's land use, whether it's noise pollution, whether it's light pollution, whatever it may be. I think perhaps the scariest part of The negative downsides to data centers is what it does to water and the way it pollutes water at large scale in our society. In the American West right now, we're living in an age of water wars and water bankruptcy. And it's not entirely because of the data centers, but the data centers are exacerbating the issue. Several states just... in the American Southwest, including California, are fighting over water resources. There are cities in states like Texas and elsewhere are running out of water altogether. The best way to protect drinking water, not only in terms of pollution, but in terms of just running out of it altogether, is to find ways to make permanent bans on data centers themselves. There I saw a statistic the other day that a study found as if we continue to build data centers at the rates that we're building them, we could run out of water as soon as four years. And that's clean drinking water. A lot of the world already lives in water poverty, but that would push the American West into water poverty altogether. And it's not an easily solvable issue, especially with the lack of other... Keystone species, but that's separate from the data centers. The data centers will push us further into that water bankruptcy. And I personally, for that reason, cannot support not only expanding data centers, but any future council that might want to take back the data center bans. So putting the data center ban into the city charter is the best way to protect clean drinking water for the future and for future residents of Alhambra. And I yield the rest of my time. Thank you. Great. Thank you.

So Victor followed by Ron Sahu.

Good evening council members. My name is Victor Alcala and I have lived off and on in the city of Alhambra most of my 52 years on this earth. I consider Alhambra to be my hometown. I went to Fremont Elementary from K through 8, played baseball at Granada Park, rode my bike with my friends through the neighborhoods, and enjoyed my childhood here in this city. I am here to support putting the data center ban on the ballot so that Alhambra residents can decide ultimately to keep nuisances out of our little town. I want other kids to have the same opportunities that I did to have a healthy childhood without fear of these data centers and the harm they can cause. Air pollution noise pollution water pollution global warming. unwanted surveillance. All these things are bad enough as it is. We cannot allow data centers into our community to make any of these things worse. Another thing that I found a bit ironic, I guess, we had a presentation from Mr. Horton from Edison educating us on power outages. You know, we all get those notices from Edison that we should adjust our thermostats so we have power for everybody. You know who doesn't have to adjust their thermostats? Data centers. And if the power does fail, don't worry. While you have to suffer through the heat or maybe head to a cooling center at the senior center or the library, the data center is sitting there nice and comfortable at 68 degrees because they have backup generators that automatically turn on, thus polluting our air. So these data centers either suck up our power or suck up our air. Either way, data centers suck. Please put this issue onto the ballot and let the people decide. Residents, where's the camera? Right there. Residents, when you get your ballot for November, vote yes to ban the data centers.

Ron Sao followed by Susan Saunders.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I did have a couple things on both items. So since you've decided to table the first item, I will just note for the record that Grassroots Alhambra did submit comments and they're part of the official record. On data centers, I have just a couple of points. I am not for data centers, but which absolutely have adverse community impacts, and the issue is therefore very meritorious. I don't have any issues with that. I will speak a little bit about my experience with them in a minute, so no issues with the merits of the argument. I will make two comments, however. One is putting something on a ballot does have a process issue, meaning a precedent issue. Here's, as you know, there are two ways to get on the ballot. Council can decide to put it on the ballot, which is the request here, quite frankly, overwhelming request to you. The other is for the proponents, anybody's proponents, to collect signatures to put it on the ballot. We did that as part of grassroots when we passed Measure V. We collected signatures. And then council accepted that, and we did that process. In this situation, unlike Monterey Park, where there was a real threat, absolutely agree with everybody that has spoken before and will be, the data centers were being proposed, our data center was being proposed, there was no protection, and that had to be countered with a threat. As you, Mr. Mayor, pointed out, and this council has taken some steps, this council, I agree, has taken some steps to foresee to forestall something like that happening, at least in the next foreseeable future. We don't have a land, we don't have a proponent, any of that stuff. So from my perspective, data centers right now in Alhambra are a, the ban rather, is a nice to have, not a must have. And why I say that is, if you go ahead with this proposal, which is a good one, What about the next proposal to ban something else, to ban something different, where there may not be quite the unanimity on this issue? How will you deal with that? In other words, you should have a process to decide what gatekeeping you need to do to put things on the ballot. Without that, I think rightly so, people like me and others can come, including folks here, to think we should put some other things on the ballot that are equally meritorious or not. So there's a process issue I want you to think about. This issue is meritorious. I will say personally, I'm working as part of my private capacity on one data center that I'm opposing as a technical expert against a guy you probably heard, Elon Musk. He has a massive data center proposal that I'm the only technical expert opposing him on a community basis. A second one in the Texas Panhandle, proposed by a very powerful group of interest, including an ex-governor of Texas, Mr. Perry, and his son, and others, and Donald Trump Jr. So I understand the pushback. Nothing against it, but just think about the process. Thank you very much.

So Susan. Left.

Lewis McCammon. Followed by. Mario. Man. Manzuala. Sorry.

Forgot my reading glasses at home. Lou go ahead.

Just very briefly on both. I know in the case of the term limits one, there had been some concern. I heard from people that, oh, this might be some underhanded move. by members of the city council. I never took it that way. And I think term limits in general are a good idea. And I think the general proposal is good. I think some of the wording that was proposed for some of the specific parts of it are worth taking a look at. Language is pretty antique on this point in section 11.5 of the city charter and so forth could be more elaborately done I very much agree with taking some time to do that rather than to try and rush anything tonight or Some other proposal I put out about just changing the effective date down a few years or something I think it's better to do the other process that you're looking at here On the data centers, I think the cost, we already have one measure that's undoubtedly gonna be on the ballot, the transit occupancy tax. I understand it's, and we have to pay a fee to uh to the county which administers all this and i understand it's uh it's uh if you're gonna add a second item it's cheaper than the first item so if you want to go ahead and do it i think it's it's okay to do it i kind of agree with ron it'd be good to have a process for this for the future um so uh if you want to go ahead and do that it would certainly drive the silver stake in its heart but i don't think there's any proposal that was going to happen here immediately anyway and we've already dealt with the issue uh with the zoning code uh just uh add a little bit more on what i was speaking about earlier tonight i remember um as we boarded the bus there was a gentleman already on it an elderly gentleman who was coming down from the uh Granada, the new limit on the green line there. He had his cane with him. It was made out of a branch. It was fairly well done. But he was just thrilled to have the extension down East Main Street. Because he said he often goes down to the thrift store down there or McDonald's or something, and he was just thrilled to be on there the first day. He had not been, he said he'd been riding that bus for over two decades. And so he was very glad to see that. And just to see all the people around the city as we went around there, all ethnicities getting on and off. And I think the more people can become familiar with it, it's a really good opportunity to get around the town.

Thank you. Thank you, Lou. I agree. Manzanilla, is that right? Okay, Mario, go ahead. Sorry, I forgot my glasses at home.

Well, good evening and thank you for the opportunity of being here actually this is my one of my first meetings that I have ever come here because when I heard about the data centers, it kind of caught my attention. I live here in by Westminster just south of Hellman and been living in Alhambra for about 30 years and I totally love the city and I do understand as we have You have express AI is coming, technologies getting bigger, cell phones, everything is now this. But this kind of proposal, so I mean of the data centers where you have to have a center that is going to be increasing and then using a lot of our the water, electricity, and all of that. And in addition to that, possibly creating even pollution. I don't think the city of Alhambra, we don't have the lots for that. We don't have the capacity to accept like Monterey Park and all of that. Where? You know, I mean, if we had 50 miles, okay, put it over there in the middle of nowhere. But where are they going to put it here, which will affect Pretty much every citizen that lives in Alhambra and their resources. And I really appreciate to have that put it on the ballot. And one more thing that I highly recommend. Actually, I learned this today from my next door neighbor. who couldn't be here. She goes, oh, go to the city council. What? What's going on? And she explained to me. And I said, I wasn't sure what data centers were actually. So that's another thing. I would think that the people need to know what this is about. Because I didn't know what this data center is. They say, what is that? Right? So we need to explain that. I will explain that to the neighbors and to make sure that when it comes out on the ballot to reassure that this is not really for the city of Alhambra and really the local cities around here. We don't have the room. I know that we're expanding, technology is changing, and things are going to be much, much more aggressive. We just heard from the Chamber of Commerce. I was surprised. I'm not getting that paper anymore. I had to look it up online, right? So, I mean, things like that. But we don't have the land for that kind of things. So thank you so much, and I appreciate your time. And I have seen you at the farmer's market. I know Ross. So thank you. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you.

Thank you for coming. Appreciate it. We have Sienna Martinez, followed by Daniela Zuniga.

Okay Daniela are you here. No. Natalia Mata.

Nope. We're on a roll. Shirley Totsuno. I know Shirley was there. Yes.

I was just doing shout outs to the crowd.

Good evening. Mayor Maloney and city council members. I am for banning data centers, but what Ron said about the process of how we put something on our ballots, I think is really true. And having been one of the ones that gathered those signatures, which changed my life, really. Because before, when I was a kid, I I was very shy, and I could never sell anything. Raffle tickets, nothing. But I really believed in having bi-district voting rather than citywide. It still is an amazing thing, I thought, that we did, going door to door and all the effort behind all the people in grassroots that put that whole thing together. Kudos to them, is what I have to say. And the other thing about this turmoil is I was just shocked. I was just shocked. I see our city council as one that would, you know, want to talk with the citizens and see what they felt. Because I definitely have my opinion. But, you know, there's so many other opinions. So I couldn't... I had to really read this how many times to figure it out. So I'm glad it's being tabled. And it really should be... Really, people should be, residents should be notified about such an important thing and have, you know, good discussion. And I'm so happy because I didn't want to come up here to say, I was just in disbelief. So I'm just very happy that you've decided to table this. Thank you.

Thank you, Shirley.

Nathan Barrios, followed by Maggie Sy.

Hi, good evening.

I didn't know I was going to talk today, but I just wanted to come out and support, because it's about the ban on the data centers. And I've been living in Alhambra for almost a decade now. It's a point of pride for me that I live here. I have a lot of friends who are out in Silver Lake and Echo Park, and I tell them that where I live has better food choices and all that. But no, I support putting a ballot measure to, like they were saying, ditto, further cementing the ban and making it a one-time investment for a long-term project so that whatever happens in the future, whether I'm still here or whoever else is sitting here, that the city will still be protected. I don't really like data centers. And I think that if there were ever a data center in Alhambra, then I would have less pride living here. So that's all I want to say. Thank you.

Maggie, Cy, and then Barbara and Guy.

Unless Maggie's here. Is Maggie here? Okay, Barbara, you're up.

Hi, my name is Barbara Ngai, and I'm a homeowner in District 4. I live with four family members that are also all registered voters, and we're all excited to vote for this ballot measure in November. I was honestly jealous of Monterey Park residents because I couldn't vote in their ballot, and now we get... So now we get an opportunity to vote. I mean, us Alhambra townsfolk. So I'm excited we can do this. Yes, I want to echo all the sentiments of my other speakers against data centers, and especially the young person that I mentioned. I love being an Alhambrian. I think it's a nice hidden gem of LA. I tell people not to tell too many people about us. I also like all the nice parking here. So thank you so much in advance for getting this on the ballot and slam dunking this so that data center developers don't come bothering us either. Thank you.

Thanks, Barbara. We have Chloe Tan and Elizabeth.

Good evening, Mayor and City Council members. I'll keep this short because a lot of the points I want to make, Amy already covered. I support a November 3rd ballot measure that bans data centers in Alhambra. Although I do not live in Alhambra, I do live at around the edge of Alhambra and I have pretty much gone here to small businesses, food places, gift shops, and all of that my whole lifetime. Although it doesn't seem like an immediate threat, although data centers doesn't seem like an immediate threat, I feel it's very important to make sure that these companies cannot find loopholes and find ways to to try and barter Alhambra the way they bartered Monterey Park. I've expressed being against data centers for a while now. And on social media, I was sent very misleading advertisements from that foreign company who was trying to build the data center in Monterey Park. And they were trying to assist that they could be environmentally friendly when that is not the case at all. That's all. I support the ballot measure. Thank you.

Thank you. Elizabeth, do we have Elizabeth?

No. Doug Flores? No. Marcos? So I'm here to show my support.

It's important to put these on a ballot measure. And it's important to support term limits for turnover and elect more representative constituents to lead the community. We need to limit generational politicians from keeping power. It is very important because there are others who are capable for the time. It's very serious and supporting it is very important because politicians who drag their feet or politicians who refuse to take action are able to hold power and limit community input. It's important to give power back to the people and It's also important to let the voters decide on how they want to ban data centers for more consistency. And this ban will provide that. It will secure that. Voters can decide for themselves. And you have the ability to transfer power to the community. It will definitely be a win. Just look at Monterey Park and how they decided for themselves with overwhelming support. Only folks who drag their feet would not allow this onto a ballot measure, because we have seen how this might not go according to plan. And it's important to support a greater ban on data centers for the voters to decide for themselves. Thank you. Thank you.

Last on speaker card here, at least, is Aaron Reveles. Aaron?

Do we have anyone on Zoom?

No, Mr. Mayor, we do not.

OK. So I think before the council for discussion, we've tabled the term limit portion of this item. So we do have the active item of the data center. proposal to go on the ballot any discussion want to lead off. Vice mayor.

Thank you mayor so much and thank you to everyone for being here today and those of you who are listening at home. You know Alhambra is a sustainable city. We actually work very hard to get that designation. So what does that mean, huh? I remember in 2018, back in 2018 when I first got elected, we were 25% renewable energy. And today, we use 100% renewable energy. That's remarkable. We also have three projects that are capturing the rainwater. City of Alhambra is doing that. We're in the process of having those ready for use when we get those big rains. You know how California is when it rains. It rains like in three days, and you get it all at once. And we are ready. We're going to be ready to capture some of that, we hope. How do we go from being great stewards of the environment and allow any type of data center to be accepted in our city that would require so much water, because it requires water. And I'm going to say this, but I'm also concerned about guidelines, because I understand there's not a lot of guidelines that have been met for the data centers that have been built. But we know that water is a human right. and the city of Alhambra is a sustainable community. And I think it was, jeez, I think, I can't remember the date, but there was an assemblyman by the name of Assemblymember Miking, and he authored the state's landmark Human Rights to Water, or Assembly Bill 685, which made California the first state in the nation to legally recognize that it's a human right. But it's a human right to have safe, clean, affordable, sanitary, all those things are part of this assembly bill. So for me, I think it's a no-brainer for me. I definitely do not support data centers being put in Alhambra. And we do have an area that is industrial. And we have plans for that industrial, too. to not be so industrial any longer, but to actually flip it so that it becomes a place where people want to go and want to take their children. And it's not an industrial area that can carry a data center. And data centers are different sizes. They're not all huge. Some of them are smaller. So for me I'm a big no and a big I support a ban and I support it going on the ballot because always going on the ballot what it does is it gives us a picture of what the voters want. So make sure you're registered to vote. Make sure those of you who are going to be 18 by the time the election hit that you're registered to vote. so that you can help us fight the data, fight those centers. Thank you.

I'll start by saying thank you for those that came and speak on this issue with your passion and sharing your thoughts on this. And thank you for your advocacy. It's important. I also want to thank our staff for staying on top of this issue. It's When the data center became a concern for the community in Monterey Park, I know we've taken active steps. Our staff has been just working on this. They were exploring different options, looking at our zoning code to make sure that we will not be allowing any data centers. They were looking at ballot measures. They were asking the question, what else can we do for our community? So I really want to recognize our staff's work on this. I'm just recognizing that it's an important need for our community, and I'm really happy that we're here today, that we're putting this on the ballot, that we're asking our people to vote on this, and hopefully we approve this, and it's going to be in our charter, and only with the vote of the people that will be changed. So I think it sends the message of this council that we're prioritizing the people that live in our community. So thank you.

Thank you. Ross? Thank you, Mayor. Just a quick thank you to everyone that came out tonight in support of the ballot measure. As we said earlier, through an ordinance, we all had communicated to the community that we also are in support in banning any type of data center in Alhambra. But this was obviously just cementing it and making sure that In the future, it is secure for all future Alhambraans. With that, I mean, again, thank you all for coming out. Thank you to the council for supporting this. And I'd like to move to approve the ballot measure for November. Thank you. Council Member Lee.

Thank you, Mayor. I don't want to take too long to speak. I think a lot of important things have been spoken. So for me to speak longer, people just want me to stop talking. But the point is that I grew up in Alhambra with my family, graduated from Alhambra High School. I've been here for a long time. My family's still here. And I don't plan to leave Alhambra. So being a council member, but also being a longtime resident of Alhambra, I don't see data center is appropriate for Alhambra. There should be no data center for Alhambra at all. So the council already expressed our perspective already, but I think putting on a ballot for the voters to decide is very important because As we all know, all it takes is three votes on the council to change anything. So even though this council decided not to have data center just by voting, it's still not enough. The voters need to come out and cement it so that it's very difficult to change that. I mean, there's so many things I can see that future council members 10 years from now can decide that there is a different interest that they represent. Three votes is going to overturn this council decision. So I think the ballot measure for data center should be on the November ballot. I fully support that. Just make sure that the voters get to speak. And I second. Was there a second to your motion? I second your motion.

Thank you all. I also support this item and I'm happy that we're able to call this special meeting to put it on the to consider putting it on the ballot for November. Sounds like we're on track for that. So that's good. I just think at this point in time you know we need computing power. We need all this stuff but we don't need it in our backyard. We're a built out city. There's a lot of people in town here. We're struggling to find public park space. We're struggling to find areas for appropriate for new housing for new businesses for all sorts of different uses in our community and having an area you know would have to be a pretty significantly sized area set off for this type of use that has other impacts I think is it's just simply not the right choice for the city and I think it sounds like a lot of folks support that position I also think that you know like with any technology you know we're going to look back in some probably not too distant future at this time when when these when these developers are going in and it's like a gold rush and they're building these giant facilities trying to make millions of dollars and it's going to look so antiquated in just a few years it's going to look so silly like burning whale blubber for fuel or or guarding petroleum with warships you know from halfway across the world i mean it's it's a silly thing We're going to look back at this in time and say, like, what were we thinking? So I look forward to that. I still don't want data centers in Alhambra now or then. But I do think this will be kind of a period of time we look back on and think, no, that wasn't a great decision as these things are using diesel generators in parts of our country for backup power. It just doesn't make sense. There's got to be a better way, and I think that eventually folks will figure that out. So I do support this. I know we had a motion and a second. I know that Vice Mayor also wanted to make a motion previously. So, I mean, we'll take four motions and four seconds, but do what you need to do, Breonna.

So I'll make a motion as well. Yeah, okay. Thank you, Mayor. The data center will probably be in my district, so thank you.

All right.

So we have a motion and we have multiple motions and multiple seconds. We have one roll call vote.

Lee. Yes. Mazza.

Yes.

Wang. Yes. Andrade Stadler. Yes. Maloney.

Yes. There it goes. It passes. Congratulations everyone. Just to note, since this is an ordinance, this is the first reading, it will appear on the consent at the next meeting, but this is pretty much locked into place, and if it's going to go on the ballot, it's just a, I don't want to say it's a formality, but it's essentially a formality at the next one. and we'll move on to our consent agenda now. There have been some requests to pull item number four, so let's pull item four for further discussion. Are there any other items on this consent agenda that folks want to pull? Okay, so can I get a motion on all the consent agenda items except for number four? move to approve the rest of the consent agenda okay I'll second all right motion a second roll call please Lee yes Mazza yes Wang yes Andrade Stadler yes Maloney yes okay so item four is consideration of adoption of the Alhambra economic development action plan this is something that The council has been discussing a strategic planning process since all the way back to 2023. And we I think we revisited that this year and there was a draft economic plan presented to the council. Subsequent to that there were at least three different public meetings or sessions where the public could come in and comment review and ask questions about these economic development action plan. Can I ask just off the bat can I ask staff to kind of give a little background about what the nature of this plan is what it's intended to do because based on some of the public comments I think there were some concerns or maybe there's some information out there that that this would this is more of a regulatory action or would would do something to development standards and I just want to be clear about what we're dealing with.

Yeah, certainly. Good evening, Council, and good evening, Mayor. Yeah, so I want to reiterate the action plan outlines priorities, actions to attract new businesses, activate commercial spaces, and enhance the overall quality of life here in Alhambra in the next three to five years. It is not changing the zoning code or the development code. It is not proposing any height changes, development changes, nor is it a construction project. primarily it acts as a vision plan as we talk to property owners businesses the chamber of commerce the downtown alhambra business association and other economic development partners in terms of how we'd like to see the business community grow here in alhambra great um i i forgot what i was going to say so um so okay we do have a public comment on this so let's start with bernice ortega

I was daydreaming.

Anyway, I respectfully ask the city council to postpone the vote for item four, Alhambra Economic Action Plan. Residents do not have enough time to study the plan, understand this is a long-term effect, or determine exactly what the council is being asked to approve. The agenda should clearly identify the ordinance zoning action and binding policy connected to this item. This plan may affect East Main Street, Granada Avenue, and Chapel Avenue, including future mixed-use condominium developments. Residents have worked hard to maintain a 35-foot limit and its character to this area. This is a real vote. Consequences are merely a discussion or proposal. Please postpone the item 4. Provide clear information, remove it from the constant calendar, and allow the public adequate time to review the comment before the final vote is taken. And then I also wanted to address on Granada and Maine, we have a traffic signal that's been terrible for years. On the site okay when you're going north and we're not and you stop at main street there's that for bird really turn right there in the corner okay people park right there like from the signal all the way down to the alley they could park right there so when there's a lot of traffic and you want to make a right you can't because the cars are parked there so they all pile up on one lane going straight north of when you can't merge to the right to either. past the other car bank in the left are turning right. So that's a problem right there. So maybe if we could change that zoning to no parking, like a red, put red right there instead of they park there. So that's a problem. And then that's it. There's something else. Thank you, Bernice. That's it.

Any commenters on Zoom?

Yes, Mr. Mayor, we have one. Rita Ledesma, you may unmute yourself.

Good evening. I seem to have lost video, but can you hear me?

Yes.

Okay, cool. And videos back. Yeah, I submitted a letter to the council and to the planning, the community development department, several, a few months back when the plan was released. And I attended one meeting with two other community members with one of the planning staff persons. It was not well, you know, there were three of us there. It was not well attended at all, not very well publicized. But my specific concerns were tied to the development of the West Valley college district. And I shared and I've talked with Councilmember Andrade Sattler about this and with other folks in the community, and with people in the planning office as well, that and community members are well aligned I agree. I think that there needs to be more time and more engagement with community members before one adopts any kind of plan. I completely understand that the plan as proposed is, in the words of the planner that we met with, aspirational, which is a really interesting word because aspirational can be meaningless, unless it's tied to something concrete, some plan or some outcome. I think that for the West Valley proposed college district, I have not met one community member who says they want to see hotels. They want to see large-scale development. I also know that tying the plan to Cal State LA in this current environment, when the University is dreadfully under-enrolled and in a very financially precarious situation, as are all of the CSUs, but Cal State LA is particularly under-enrolled. I think tying a development, even an aspirational plan, to the service of and the creation of a college district really is a mistake. and it does not attend to nor engage the community. What do we want? The community wants local businesses, small businesses, pedestrian walkways, green space. We want to be able not to get in our car and drive up Fremont and head down Mission or down Maine to get to a restaurant, or just keep on driving and go to South Pass or turn around and go the other direction to DTLA, we want to be able to walk to a restaurant. We want to be able to walk and get a cup of coffee. We want to be able to walk and shop and purchase and not go up to Pasadena to shop. We want to be able to, we want fresh vegetables. We want family friendly and green space and pedestrian friendly spaces. I sent Adele a list this afternoon of the types of businesses that folks have indicated to me. These are the kinds of things that they would like to see. And the reality is, is any development on the West Valley Corridor is going to attract the university community in any event. I'm a retired faculty person and administrator from Cal State LA. I've lived in Alhambra my whole entire, for the last 30 years. And I've lived in this community my whole entire life. I lived in City Terrace and now I live in Alhambra Hills. And I lived in Monterey Park for part of that time. So my whole life has been here in the West San Gabriel Valley and in the Boyle Heights, East LA communities. And we need not gigantic development and mega development that serves a corporate need, but we need to meet community needs and we need to promote community businesses and we need to create family friendly housing and family friendly And anything we do that benefits the community of Alhambra or Alhambra Hills will deliver a direct benefit to the university community. And in fact, could possibly strengthen ties between Alhambra and the university community. So thank you for listening.

Thank you for that. Any other comments on Zoom?

Okay. All right, let's go ahead and start. We want to start on the other end. Council Member Lee, do you want to go ahead?

Yes, thank you.

I just think that we need to move forward on this, I think. Okay, so April 24, 2023, we adopted the plan.

It's time to move, keep moving this forward. I don't have much to say. I just think that it's much needed for Alhambra. There are a lot of projects we have. Our strategic plan is just another one that the council has discussed and approved.

There's nothing wrong with this action plan. We just have to keep moving forward. That's it.

Thank you.

Councilmember Maza.

Thank you Mayor.

So I do also think that this action plan is very well put together. Alison appreciate the work you and team. I think that it really captures you know our goals and our our our plans for and envision for what we want to see all Hamburg become in future years. I do understand the community's concern especially East Main Street with you know regards to the mixed use projects in height that of course they made such an effort to make sure that they remain at a certain height. I just want to remind the community members that this isn't code, obviously. This is something that is just a vision for Alhambra. We would still have to meet code and zoning laws, et cetera, regulations. But a question for staff. Does any mixed use project have to basically be above 35 feet in order to have mixed use? If that makes sense. I mean, can we have mixed use projects and keep it under 35 feet?

It's theoretically possible to have mixed-use projects under 35 feet. Typically, that would mean about 10-foot or so ceilings on the first floor, second floor, third floor, and then maybe five feet for ventilation, AC, all that stuff. To make the space more comfortable, most retailers, restaurant folks want 20 feet. So think about the height of the council chambers. It's nice. It's spacious. It's similar to when you walk into BJ's or Nordstrom Rack. They have taller ceilings. When you walk into some of the older buildings with the 10 foot ceilings the experience is different. So that's why more people more retailers restaurant tours want the higher ceilings and so if we want to bring in kind of that quality of restaurants and retail they're going to want the higher ceilings and so you know It'll be challenging for them to fit under that 35 foot limit if they need a 20 foot ground floor height. That only leaves maybe one floor of a 15 foot height above. But there are other parts of the city that would allow for mixed use and higher ceilings and higher heights for that. It would just limit in the EMC area that opportunity.

Got it. Yeah, that makes total sense. Thank you so much. Appreciate that. Again, I support the action plan. I think it was very well put together. I just wanted to address that concern to a lot of the committee members that wrote in and took the time to call some of us, email some of us, text, et cetera, that You know, obviously, you know, these projects would still have to meet zoning codes and building codes, et cetera. But at this time, I think it's appropriate to move forward and adopt this action. Thank you.

Thank you. Council Member Wang.

Thank you, Mayor. I thank you, Councilmember Mazza for asking the question. I had the same question I wanted to clarify. So this is this just to confirm this is just to adopt the vision that we are setting up for different parts of the city where we have business corridors. It's not to change any design guidelines it's not to change any heights it's not to change the zoning code which that conversation will come to the design guidelines will come to us next meeting. OK so this is not part of this. I do have a question I know some of us are still eager to meet up for economic development on Valley Boulevard. I know there's other subcommittees that need to meet up. How does it work with this action plan. It can it work separately or. when we do meet and discuss and have things, does it get incorporated even after adoption or how does it work? Can staff provide some information for us?

Yeah, certainly. We hope that this document and we plan for this document to be a living document. So if there's additional information that would like to be added or we can have a conversation, we want this document to be reflective of the community and including of the community's values on Valley Boulevard.

Wonderful. So it's a working document and it will continue to receive feedback. And as we develop more thoughts on this, it can be incorporated. So for the members of the community, if you have any thoughts, ideas, then bring it to council. We're always here to listen. We're always here to receive your feedback and input. I know looking at the staff report, staff have tried to host multiple public meetings. I guess I would like to see if there's a better way, because I hear this a lot. We try really hard to host public meetings, and the attendance is not high. And then on the other hand, I also hear that communities don't always receive those notifications. And I remember when I was thinking about strengthening our neighborhood watch programs, I was also thinking if we establish like block captains that has emails or contact information from the block and neighborhood. And we have the emails and contact information of the block captains that can also serve as a network for communication. So if that's also a system we could utilize, then I would encourage members of our community to sign up as the block captain. and ask that liaison for your neighborhood. And when we have these public meetings, can I also ask staff to push it out to all of our block captains? And then they can further distribute into the community. Yeah, it's just neighbors talk more with neighbors. And I totally get that. We should build that communication infrastructure for our community and for better I hate to see that we spend all this effort hosting public meetings and the attendance is not high. And then on the other hand, we hear community members saying that there's not enough time to think about this. So I think there are things that we can do on the communication. And I would just ask folks to sign up, to be a block captain, to be a liaison of your neighborhood group. And then on the city side if we can try to push out those notifications of public meetings outreach as much as we can. And hopefully that's one step to close the gap. And with that I think I'm also ready to adopt this. I think that there's still a lot of work that we need to do from our subcommittees and to provide our input into this vision. But it's good to know it's a working document and there's always it's always ready to receive feedback and incorporate that.

Vice Mayor?

Thank you, Mayor, and thank you to the council members. I remember at our strategic meeting, both Noya and I raised our hands to be on that subcommittee for Valley Boulevard. And so I think we needed to be more a part of this. And so I'm glad that it's a workable document. It's not going to be in stone that it's a college district because I have to tell you guys, It needs so much work on the entrance to the city of Alhambra, from Los Angeles, from the 710. That's got to be more vibrant. It has to be more than just the college. It has to be something, and that's why we're working on the stub. It has to be something that's going to welcome people and make them feel like you're stepping into something that is amazing. And the action goals are very good. You know, the industrial corridor vision is great. I'm looking forward to that. It looks great. It's an art district. It's a district for pop-ups and all of that. And I think we could do that on Valley Boulevard because I know a lot of our places are vacant. So we need to first find out why they're vacant. And I know they're not an easy sell because they're not deep. They're small, small, you know, areas. So maybe that's pop-up, or maybe that's a bookstore, or maybe that's a go-to for coffee. I went to Fields Coffee, and it's amazing. It's great. Three Fields. I'm sorry, Starbucks, but Three Fields is an amazing, well... a run place, and it's loved, and a lot of kids go there. I would rather have that reach out to our college students, have it be a coffee shop, and a place where they can study, and a place where they can bring their laptops. But have it be a college district? No. I think it's bigger than that. I think it's so much bigger. So I will approve this, but we're going to work on this, probably tomorrow. So I'm just letting Pat know. She's one of our neighbors. And I know she was a college teacher, a college professor. And she knows what a college district would look like. And those days are gone, right? When college students get out, and they were going to Aloha Burger, and they were going to all those eating places. And they're not doing that anymore. Maybe they go to Aloha Burger and then go back up. because the food is now on site. So I would like to see something just more dynamic on that end, just on the valley end right there. Thank you. And I'll move to approve.

Thank you for that. I'm so sorry. It's OK. Yeah, I'm forgettable. Motion, did you want to second it? OK. Councilmember Wang seconds it I'll just real quick here I do want to emphasize for folks listening or watching this later this is not a regulatory document this is not mess with any of our zoning or building regulations nothing like that this is very clearly a vision planning document this is basically our way of telling our economic economic development staff to go out and develop our economy to help develop our economy according to the the base kind of the broad plans that we've come up for with for different parts of the community I did note that there's a handful of these comments that came in from East Main corridor east main quarter is is a special area and we've treated it um specially and differently and it and that holds true here too the one thing that the folks a lot of those folks there have been advocating for for years now and i'm i'm with them is an old town area and it literally says old town it's area two in the eastman east main plan this is you know i don't want to tell people what how they should feel but this is a win they East Main folks you won this is this is good for you this is a good thing this says the types of things we've been talking about for a long time retail a slower pace over there lesser density alfresco outdoor dining these are wonderful things that we have been collectively advocating for and fighting for for years now so However if anyone doesn't like something that comes out of this it still has to go through the approval process it still has to go through plan review it still has to go to you know Planning Commission if appropriate and even City Council. There's plenty of time to work on the nuts and bolts of it. This is a big picture. vision planning document and it's it's it's welcome now obviously we've been talking about it for years now and I'm really happy to see this here nothing is set in stone this is not an ordinance that we've adopted and not something that we're gonna put on the ballot the voters get to vote on this is something that helps us to move forward with the plan that we've been talking about for years so I really I like what I hear or what I read in this document, and I'm really excited about it. And I can't wait for the Valley Boulevard subcommittee to do their magic here. And I think we have a downtown subcommittee that may have magic, too. I don't know. But I think it's really good. And I think that if the public wants to participate in this, the door is open. You can come to us any time. Talk to us about your ideas. We're going to be working with the community on this. staff is going to be working with the community on this and the doors open nothing is approved I mean no project is approved tonight no zoning change no regulations changing tonight just this vision so in that sense it's it's a great document it's it's it's a real look towards the future of our city which is changing so I'm glad we're keeping up with the time so we have a motion and a second let's go ahead and vote on this

Lee. Yes. Mazza.

Yes.

Wang. Yes. Andrade Stadler. Yes. Maloney.

Yes. Do we have any additional non-agendized public comment? Okay. Any council communications?

Mayor, can I just make a suggestion that, I'm sorry, I forgot your name, Bernice, that someone in the Public Works maybe give Bernice a form to fill out, because this is only temporary. So it's that move through the act, the change to the act bus, it may be temporary, we may approve it, but it's not gonna be approved until really a year from now. So we're just sort of testing it. But what you're asking, you can put down on a traffic request form and get that to the right place. So I would start there, and that would be really, really important. So I understand, and we could talk about this off, but I just wanted to share with you that maybe somebody can, and you can get them on email, so if you have an email, I'll send it to you, okay? Let's talk about that, okay? Thank you. And then I just, you know, I had some people call me about the county animal control not always being the best program for us. And so I want us to think about maybe looking at Pasadena. I know it's more expensive. I know this is something we've talked about before. But the county is not showing up. Sorry, county. But they're not showing up when it's real important. And there's coyotes out. And there's animals that are dead. And they're in the street. And county is taking its time to retrieve that, to do anything about that. So I really want to see Pasadena see what they can offer us. And maybe it's a little cheaper than it was before, or if the council agrees to that.

Is this a proposal for a future agenda item?

Yes.

To just have a discussion about this?

Yes, but with information, right, brought to us from staff and then maybe the Pasadena Humane Society.

Is that what it's called?

What is that contract of?

I'll have to check, but I think we're in the middle of a five-year or longer contract. Of course, there's a termination clause, but I think it's been a couple years that we're only a couple years in. But I could find out and let you all know.

That'd be great, yeah. And I would support that because I think a few times we've gotten the same concerns as well from the community. And I know back then, at least, the issue was that Pasadena didn't have any more room for any other cities. So that was the challenge of it.

So the point taken, and I guess, can we just ask staff to keep in mind for Pasadena as an option as the contract opens up? Because right now, we're in the middle of a contract. And as our contract wraps up, we will be looking at Pasadena as an option?

Yes, but we have the option to get out of the contract. Oh, that's what you're proposing. The city manager mentioned that we have a clause that we could jump out. I just would like to see what they would maybe offer us. And maybe they don't have room in Pasadena.

So we could talk about this when it's on the agenda. Sorry. I think that we hear the majority. I don't know if it's unanimous. Obviously, it was likely not going to be on your next agenda. You're very busy for the summer months. But certainly, maybe in the fall, we could take a look at that.

That sounds good.

That's fine. Thank you for that. Council Member Wang, any comments?

I don't have anything. Thank you.

Okay. Council Member Mazza? Okay. I don't know if I had any announcements. I know that thanks for indulging for this special meeting. We covered a lot. We did get some things crossed off the list. We don't have to face it next time. I do want to give a heads up. Part of the reason why we wanted to keep it light for the next meeting and I hope that holds up is that we're we're going to be welcoming delegation from our sister city in Japan including the mayor and some of his team and they're going to be coming out and we're we're trying to put together a sort of a little reception for them ahead of the next meeting and I'm not sure what that meeting is going to look like but it would be nice if we can keep that as short as possible just to be to our delegation so that was also part of the reason about maybe spreading the work out to today's meeting as well so hopefully that works out but I do want to make that clear that they're coming out here because they want to really strengthen and in their mind formalize the sister city relationship I think is really nice We've done our thing. We have our policy in place. So everything we're doing is within our existing authority. But they would like to do this. And this was completely on their own volition. So I think it's very nice, and I'm excited about it.

Mayor, can I just ask a question? What's the name of the city? I just never remember.

It's Kirishima, but it's K-I-R-I-S-H-I-M-A. And it's located in Kagoshima Prefecture in Kyushu, which is like the southernmost main island of Japan.

My niece is actually headed to Japan for the second time. So I wanted to let her know about that. And then do you need me to get the Otani jerseys, or are you going to get this?

We're working on all the omiyage, as they call it, all the little gifts and trinkets and stuff. But thank you. If you want to pitch in, then feel free. So I don't think there's anything else. Thanks for everyone for tonight. We got through a lot of stuff. Appreciate it. Have a good couple weeks. We're adjourned.

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