Community & Economic Development Committee (ced) - Regular Meeting

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the Community and Economic Development Committee. Will you please take the role?

Present.

Here. Here. Here.

Thank you. The first item we have is a review of the work plan, and we are requesting that we defer modern income housing strategy status report to May 19, CED meeting. Second. Do we have any community members who wish to discuss that?

No, we do not.

I heard a motion and a second.

I'll move, to defer that item.

Second.

Great. Any discussion? If not, let's vote. Great. Thank you.

Moving to the reports to our committee. The first report is team San Jose, the semiannual status report, and we have a whole contingent of people from team San Jose. And and before we begin, I just wanna acknowledge that this is Nancy Klein's last meeting with CED. She's retiring. I hate to use that term. She's moving on to whatever next chapter in her life is because she's too young to be retiring.

There you go.

I wish you well and have truly enjoyed working with you all the six plus years that I've been here and even knocking on your door when I ran for city council and having a very interesting conversation with you before you disclosed you were a city council member or a city staffer. That was fun. You remember that, I'm sure. I just wanna thank you for your professionalism, for always responding to us with dignity and grace, and even sometimes when we're maybe asking questions that you're not ready to answer for us, you're always graceful on how you do answer them. So thank you so much.

We're gonna miss you.

Thank you.

But I'll see you in the neighborhood. Without a doubt.

With that, I just wanted to mention or say very much appreciative of getting to be here today to talk about Team San Jose. So much has been going on with Team San Jose and there's a lot still going on, but a lot of it is really great. Not to mention, gotta start with the obvious, with the fantastic work that Team San Jose has done with GTC. It was stellar, stellar, great great partners partners with with Parks, Parks, OEDCA, OEDCA, DOT, but as usual, Team San Jose was at the heart. And it was a very positive and Jensen said ten minutes into his keynote, how do we grow and stay here?

That's a real tribute to the things that are going right. And what you're gonna see in the presentation is a lot of collaboration Council requested in June and that Team San Jose has dived into. So you'll already see the strong benefits. And you'll already see that there's more work to be done between Team San Jose and Downtown Association working on a joint dashboard to show you metrics that are integrated so that they can be cohesive look for council and also for staff. With that, I'll turn it over to the one and only John LaFortune.

Thank you very much Nancy, I appreciate it. And good afternoon committee members. I'd like to start by first thanking you all for supporting and understanding Team San Jose's unique model that we have with our two contracts. And again, they're the Convention Visitors Bureau, the CVB you'll hear, and that's our sales and marketing arm. And the second is the management of the city owned facilities. And last week, as Nancy mentioned, we hosted NVIDIA and this model proved to be greatly beneficial. The model allows us to be a one stop shop, which increases revenues

and clients only have to deal with one point of contact. The numbers from NVIDIA are not out yet, but they will be soon. But I can say this year was much bigger than last year.

And we're already going to start working on 2026 NVIDIA. So after they all take their vacations in NVIDIA well deserved, we take over the next week and we start to get that signed for the next contract. So we're really excited about that. Today we have the team here to discuss our mid year numbers through December and then the two recent addendums that Nancy also mentioned. One, to lead a collaborative marketing group and two, to reach out to our business partners twice a year.

And I feel and I've spoke to a few of you about this is I feel both of these new addendums have really made Team San Jose more relevant and more visible throughout the committee. So let's start it off with Laura who's going to talk a little bit about our collaborative marketing group. And again, I just want to thank Nancy for all she's done over the years with Team San Jose. It's been invaluable. So thank you.

Thank you, John. And again, thank you Nancy for everything, for years of support. You'll be missed every day. Okay. So everybody saw at their seats, or I hope you did, what we left was an example of what we do in digital ads. So I want you to, if you don't mind, please take a look when you have time at the Visit California visitor guide. This is their annual visitor guide. It'll go out to a million people will see this. It will be anybody who gets travel and leisure will have a copy of this mailed to their house. You'll see a special article on food throughout California.

And in the middle of it all, you'll see the delicious pineapple curry recipe by chef Cheney Lau from Anchor Chef. And then next to that, you'll see an article on all the diverse ways to shop for food and culinary experiences in San Jose, highlighting six or more of our neighborhoods. When you look at their road trips guide, I hope you'll be pleased to see in the third page, a journey into San Jose's historic Almaden Valley. Because San Jose hasn't had money in market telling our stories for a long time, we use these placements to educate people on our destination and all the things there is to do. So all those NVIDIA people who came in, we hope we try to get them to bring their families and extend their stay in California.

Okay. So let's talk about collaborative. Thank you. And of course as John and Nancy just said, this was something added to our contract in July. I'm pleased to report that since then, we've already had four meetings with initial partners.

These partnerships will grow to include partners from throughout the council districts. Initial partners are San Jose State University, San Jose Downtown Association, OED, the Office of Cultural Affairs, the mayor's office, and of course our friends at the airport at SJC. When we first got together, we all agreed that we would share all our marketing channels, that's all our websites, all our social media, all our digital billboards on the sides of our buildings where applicable. And we would look to identify an editorial calendar that would look at campaigns where we could share a brand and sing the same message together. I'm pleased to announce that after just a few months we launched the first shared campaign and that was a very San Jose holiday.

Next slide please Ben. Importantly, this was also the first time Team San Jose marketed San Jose to locals and we results from that. Next slide please. So through these five partners and everybody telling people to come downtown, go to Enchant, tour the neighborhoods looking at the pretty lights and definitely don't forget to eat and drink in champagne. Drink champagne, sorry.

Gosh, that was Freudian. Anyway, we saw San Jose residents increase by 23% and for something that is a tradition in San Jose, that's a significant growth. We're very pleased about that. One council directed us to spend on locals for locals. We wanted to make sure that we weren't in any way hurting the revenue we were driving to hotels.

The great news here is that downtown hotels during that same time period increased occupancy year over year by 42% and revenue per available room, which is really how hotel partners deal with understand how much money they're making, grew by 48. So talking to locals and getting them to move around San Jose paid off really well. I also wanna let you know that everything we're doing with these collaborative campaigns will be leading to us singing together, sharing the same branding for 2026. So it's all to get ready for that. Thank you.

Good afternoon, committee. Great to see you for the record. Ben Roshke, Vice President of Research and Strategic Development hiding behind the wall here. As John mentioned, our other new addendum to the contract was to increase our outreach to local businesses to help them learn how they could better leverage us to really break into the experience economy. We hosted, if you'll recall those of you that were on the committee, our first biannual summit for hospitality or Bash in September.

We had our second one in February and saw great growth over it. We grew attendance to over to 177 attendees from 100 in the first one. And importantly, we launched industry pages for the business community. So they have 20 fourseven access to Team San Jose research, access to information about upcoming events through our 60 calendar and event resumes, and then also how to reach out to Laura's marketing team, Matthew's sales team to really leverage all the opportunities within the experience economy and work better with Team San Jose. Big thanks to Vice Mayor Foley and Council Member Mulcahy for coming out and helping us out at the Bash, and we look forward to continuing this program.

Important to note that overall our partnership network network or email list of business partners has grown largely through these efforts, and also through our own efforts from 189 at the beginning of the fiscal year, to now over four fifty. So we are growing our reach with local business community and look forward to continuing this process. Thank you. And I'll turn it over to Nancy for this next one. Thank you.

When we came to see you before and we were talking about targets, Jim Shannon, pretend he's here, shared this particular side and we thought it was important to bring back. The budget with Team San Jose is somewhat challenging next to our budget in that we ask for numbers and must have numbers before our budget season is through. They at Team San Jose have an ever changing situation either with folks who are signing up or folks who are canceling. So big swings can happen in the course of a year. And in terms of how to get the targets, Goldilocks just right, we don't want to overshoot the target because if the target is much higher than we thought, the city funds backfill that target.

So we don't want to create a more difficult budget situation for the city, but that's why occasionally you will see 200% of goal say in some of these things where there's good logic for that, it's just not intuitive based on the way we have done our budgeting. Thank

you.

Thank you Nancy. Ehab Sabri, CFO of Team San Jose. Good afternoon. I'm going to present the financial performance measures for fiscal year 2024 through December 2024. The first item, estimated direct visitor spending.

The actual number was $31,900,000 compared to a goal of $29,400,000 and we have a positive variance of $2,600,000 The reason of having that positive variance that we had significant increase for one of the groups in October and exceeded our projection by far. We also had a couple of Broadway shows. We had a lot of success with those two shows. One was in September and the other one was in November. The next item is future hotel room nights booked in citywide.

We had 58,000 room nights and we're a little short against the goal by 167 room nights. Basically those room nights are booked for the current fiscal year and also for future fiscal year. And Matthew, you want to add some color to that?

Thank you. Welcome. It's good to be here always. When we say booked room nights, we're talking about contracted future groups. So, it could be for a month from the point of signature to several years. I'll explain a little bit later in the presentation when a booked room night becomes a consumed room night.

Thank you, Matthew. Theater occupancy, 94%. We're 9% actually short of budget. The main reason for that was we had a fourteen day show, international show basically got cancelled. They could not bring the equipment to The United States.

So that was a huge impact, negative impact basically to our theater occupancy. As a matter of fact, that show was actually impacting six different venues across the country. The next item is gross operating revenue, dollars 22,600,000.0 compared to twenty two point six million dollars yes, it's almost flat to budget. However, we had a shortfall of $48,000 We had some cancel group in September and basically it impacted our numbers for gross operating revenue. The same group actually impacted our gross operating results positively by 1,300,000 We collected cancel fee and this cancel fee was 100% profit.

And the 100% profit actually went all the way to the bottom line, so that's why we had $1,300,000 positive impact against budget. Customer satisfaction was 90 compared to 95% goal. We had a shortfall of 2% and the main reason for that we had two negative or fair customer surveys. And one of them actually was because we had an event in South Hall and the hottest day of August basically. The AC was not strong enough basically to carry and cool down the South Hall.

So we had a mark down on our customer survey. What we did in turn, we submitted our capital for fiscal year twenty five-twenty six and we requested upgrade of the AC, the air conditioner over the South Hall. And the good news is through February we are actually 95% or at target compared to budget. So far so good in customer satisfaction. Thank you.

Thank you. Just a quick update. We also present sort of a quick snapshot of what we're seeing from the overall hotel economy. Important because we pay close attention to the revenue figures as that correlates directly to the transient occupancy tax that goes into both Team San Jose operations, but also the general fund and Office of Cultural Affairs budgets. What we've seen starting at the beginning of the calendar year for 2024 was a real acceleration in year over year growth of a couple of

key

indicators, revenue and then revenue per available room, which are really sort of the two statistics we look at that track the health of the hotel economy. This growth was driven really by accelerating performance in downtown. As we know, downtown was a little slower in recovering coming out of the pandemic, but it really started to take off in January. Through the first six months of fiscal year, what we've seen is that actually in our competitive set of 13 Western markets, we've been leading in the revenue year over year growth and revenue per available room year over year growth in the entire against all the competitive set. And specifically when other cities in the Bay Area have been falling behind year over year.

And that's really been driven by really strong performance downtown. Our outlook, we're continuing to see that rapid growth downtown, but there's been a little more volatility outside of the downtown market around airports and greater San Jose hotels. And that matches up with some national trends from what we've seen in terms of hotel class where more full service upper upscale properties that are down town have been performing better while there's been more volatility with limited service hotels which tend to be outside of the downtown core. So we're continuing to keep an eye on it, but remain cautiously optimistic as we move forward for the rest of the fiscal year.

We're

Good afternoon again, and welcome to the new members of the committee. Earlier in the presentation we talked about booked room nights. We're talking about group business, and those are contracts. The people, the groups have not arrived at that point. At the end of every calendar year, we do take a look back at the consumed room night total, and a consumed room is when someone has arrived in the city and actually stayed in the hotel.

So, it's when that contract comes to fruition. So, in the full calendar year of 2024 versus 2023, we consumed 14% more rooms in the city. Some of these are groups that would fit just in one hotel, and some of these are groups that use multiple properties like we saw last week. So, 14 is a step in the right direction, but we still have a long way to go to reach what we would call our optimal level of room nights. We've talked on past occasions about some of the challenges we have with citywide business as far as being an attractive destination when you have multiple smaller hotels rather than a couple of very large hotels or even a headquarters hotel.

So, what we've done is we've developed some tools to mitigate the work for a customer to choose San Jose. The first one is our downtown availability calendar. So, I have received from each of the main hotels downtown what their availability is from now through the 2026. And, I have put them on one calendar, so that when we get an opportunity in this window, we can very easily see where the availability is, and then steer a customer toward those dates. So often, the speed to market with a proposal can determine who gets the business and who doesn't.

And if we're looking at something in this window, it's really important for us to know with some degree of certainty or likelihood that availability is there. One of the challenges also is signing multiple contracts and having to negotiate with five, six, seven, eight, nine hotels, because they need all of those to participate. So, we're working, and it's almost ready for launch, on a citywide contract where all of the legal jargon, all 17 or 18 pages of it will be the same for every hotel. So, the customer only has to go through once with their legal department and do that. And then each hotel participating would have one page addendum.

So, this will dramatically lessen the work involved, which is part of the issue, and certainly what if we're looking at the Hilton, the Marriott, the Signia, if they're satisfied with the language, then really what does anybody else need that they wouldn't have. So, we're excited about this, and Laura's already thinking about how we're going to market this, because it is a huge benefit customer when we can introduce this. And then, since our inventory is more limited downtown, we often have to use uptown. And so, we've put together, you can see the map up here, we are pre packaging the availability uptown for a customer. So, what this would mean is if I know that I need another 500 rooms, there will be a peak column to the right on this map that will tell the customer where they can get those rooms, and where the shuttle stops are because we often run transportation up there.

So, when people realize that uptown is only ten minutes away from downtown, it becomes easier. But we're excited about this as well because we've had more growth uptown post pandemic than downtown. And so, there are a lot of hotels up there that are anxious to be able to participate in our business in a way that they weren't able to before. So, thank you.

Hi, it's me again. So, I'm not helping Matthew by marketing to meeting planners, we're adding hotel rooms any way we can. What you're looking at right now is a snapshot of my dashboard for paid media only. So our marketing channels of course are owned media like our website, earned media like what we get placed in newspapers and in broadcast, social media which we generate and buy ads on, and paid media. So paid media, what you see in front of you the print is the only consumer print ad we actually do.

Paid media allows us to target to what I call travel intenders or digital intenders. So you've all seen it before. When you go on the internet and you search something, I'm buying your search terms and if you're searching for flights or hotels in San Jose, I am buying placement of one of my ads in front of you. Now very interesting is I'm also buying my ability to see how and when you purchase what I want you to purchase. So everything you're seeing here were people, real people. This is math. This is not multipliers. This is not a magic formula. All of these people were served our ads and converted paid their actual dollars and I get to count those dollars. So this is for the first six months of the first fiscal year.

What I want to point out is in the second column, second section, hotel bookings. Those are not rooms or numbers of bookings, right? That's one booking with one credit card because that's how I'm buying the data. So and again I should throw in this is audited by not one but three separate non affiliated audit firms to make sure it's correct. So when we multiply the hotel bookings by average length of stay, which is three point six days for a consumer, that's an additional 110,000 hotel rooms we sold in the last six months based on our media campaign.

Right? People who saw our ads and that was 13,000 flight bookings and the hotel and flight revenue from that was $30,000,000, well 30.6 in the last six months. So as a nonprofit we thank you for making for letting us do this and we'll be happy to take any questions. Thank you very much.

And I just want to add one thing. As you listen to this there are a number of highlights but we as a team know we've got a lot more to do on a number of fronts to build on local and regional, to make sure we're honing our work with our other groups much more closely together as we've just begun, we need to continue. And that the numbers that you see are very cyclical. We can't assume that growth will continue. So taking an analytical approach to that and trying to get out ahead and be strategic especially in light of the major events that are coming our way.

With that, I believe we've finished our presentation and welcome your questions.

Great, thank you. Do we have any members of the public who wish to speak?

We do not.

Then moving on to my colleagues, Council Member Ortiz.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I wanna thank Team San Jose and of course Nancy Klein for their great work, on this report. It's exciting to see those numbers and hear how the marketing efforts of Team San Jose is directly resulting in these purchase power going into our downtown and people coming in join our city. I wanted to ask, so are these numbers that you're showing specifically regarding the hotel usages and consumers, is that data limited to just downtown or is that the entire city?

For my marketing it's the entire city.

Oh, okay. That's great. And then I was just gonna say then like how does your work expand outside of downtown? Are you marketing other like hotels or I know we got the Mexican Heritage Plaza as a venue. How are you making sure that your efforts are citywide?

Absolutely. Thank you so much for the question. So as you can see in the ads that were placed in front of you, it's important that I do two things, right. I leverage the attendees that Matthew is bringing in, right? I wanna give them a reason to bring their family and a reason to extend their stay. And that means the wonderful things that are happening throughout all of San Jose, right? The wineries, the distilleries, the global dining in every one of our neighborhoods. So what we do is we direct them to our website. We run a series of campaigns that highlight these things especially global culinary is delivering us in huge ways. So we direct them there and then we highlight partners on a rotating basis there.

We're also and I could talk about this all day so forgive me. We're also always looking to leverage Visit California and their partnerships. They'll send down journalists who write in national travel publications. We work on our own efforts on national travel publications and consumer publications to facilitate visitation to these places. So that helps a great deal too.

So I think the importance of Bash, the biannual summit on hospitality is critical when addressing this. If you have businesses in your districts who are not yet working with us, we met tenth Street Distillery at the very first Bash, didn't know the best whiskey in the world was made in Japantown, right? Launched the San Jose Sour, helped him get national and global media around what he's doing. I hope that answers your question.

No. That's great. So then if I I went to your site, would be able to see like posts or, you know, some sort of acknowledgment to restaurants and happenings across the city?

Absolutely. And our social media channels.

Okay. Alright. I'll be looking forward to And check then you talked about the hospitality event that you have done. Very exciting. How are we like I know that, you know, I'm thinking on the East Side, right, we got so many Portuguese halls. Right? How are we, you know, bringing them to the table for those discussions? How are we, you know, hospitality, I always think of catering. How are I guess restaurants informed you know of you know I'm just thinking like it's Taiwan on Lincoln, how are they informed? Know how is China in and Win Chester Avenue? How would they know about this work and how to get involved?

Fortunately, we have a community engagement director. Her name is Nicole Dania. Nicole

Yes. Know Nicole.

And and I and Ben all go to neighborhood meetings and speak with the neighborhood business districts to tell them about our newly launched industry pages and how best to work with us. We do site visits. We rely in large part because we're still building our team back after COVID. We rely in large part on your help and the help of your offices to highlight things. There are influencers in our city that we work with on a daily basis to say what's new, what's going on, what do we have to talk about now.

For our dear friends in the little Portugal neighborhood, we became very early and very dear friends with the Carrera family. And so work closely with them, hopefully help them achieve best wine restaurant in the world several years ago and working with them again hopefully more Michelin stars coming this year. We're also I'm a part of the Visit California Food and Beverage Task Force.

Oh really? Okay.

So we look to leverage our amazing global culinary on a state level too. And if you ever want to talk more about it please just

Sure. I'd love to maybe bring Nicole out to have a discussion at our local business association, connect the dots there. We'll definitely follow-up with you in regards to that. And then I know that you were talking about your marketing, specifically your digital and your printing marketing and then you had the number that you showed I think it was 30,000,000 I think of I guess transactions in downtown dollars coming to downtown. How are you able to connect specifically from your social media to those transactions?

I can only do it through social media ads, ads placed where I'm actually buying the data. So you will search for honestly through Alexa or through Google or through Bing, you'll search for travel in California. And all of a sudden, you'll be highlighted and you will be served one of my ads. When you look at one of my ads, you will be I am putting cookies essentially on all your electronic devices across all your platforms. And then on the other end what I'm doing is I'm buying Visa and American Express data to track that conversion.

I'm buying data from Marriott. I'm buying data from Hilton. So they prove and these people work together, right, to sell me that's how they all make money. To sell me this ability to track real dollars through advertising.

Mhmm. And and just so that I know, the $30,000,000 that you showed us, is that directly tracked by you or is that just in total of the money that have been brought to downtown?

It's tracked through the agency I work with that places the ads.

Okay.

Alright. And but they have they are audited by three separate groups

to

make So they

kind of that's showed their work and said this is how we presented it. Okay. Alright. That's good for me to know. Wanted to make sure like were we just compiling all the the dollars that were generated or were we actually connecting them to the ads that we were putting out there. But no, sounds sounds good. I'm excited about this. And then I guess to accept the report. Right. I'll move to accept the report.

Second.

Thank you.

Thank you. Council member Mulcahy.

Thank you, vice mayor. Team San Jose, thank you for the report. Sort of odd sitting at this side of the table from you, but it's been a great thrill of my life to be involved with Team San Jose since its founding. And just a few things I wanted to sort of ask and a couple things to point out. Ehab, I think would be helpful as you're talking about, you know, where we've done well, like the two shows you named as Broadway winners.

Tell us what those names are because people here are ambassadors too and we may have heard of a show that did well or somebody went and saw it and maybe didn't perform so well at the box office, but it was good for San Jose. So some of those details might be helpful. And then of course the one that canceled, especially because it was a nationally canceled program that did affect the numbers. So just something to think about in future

delivery. The Broadway shows, first one was Frozen. The other one was Coming Away.

Yeah, Come From Away

and Frozen

and Come Away. And what

was the one that didn't perform here?

No, they actually all performed well.

You said there was a show that canceled for two weeks.

Oh, that was international show. Then do you have the name of it?

That's all right. Just kind of picking up what Councilmember Ortiz was talking about. I used this example years ago, you know, when you two had booked a show in downtown at the SAP and they sold out in two minutes and so they added another show. But if you were downtown, you know, didn't seem like any other restaurants knew that there was even a sellout, you know, performance that night. We were under prepared as a city.

And so I had the opportunity to walk with John LaFortune through NVIDIA's show and I was really happy to hear it. Maybe you can talk about the work you guys did in advance of the show to talk to restaurant owners, business owners to be really clear about the impact and the opportunity that was being presented to them.

Specifically with NVIDIA, we did talk about it in our bash. We also have a sixty day calendar event that we talked to people. We sent out the resume with all the details to everybody. But most importantly, what we did is with the city and with the Downtown Association and Team San Jose is walk all around the businesses and let them know that Nvidia was coming in. And that was the most important thing is to walk around with them.

So that calendar is available to all of us, right? And so if Council Member Ortiz who's close enough to get some of that, that would be a good opportunity for them to be aware and as they're communicating with their small businesses. So making sure that that's a tool that all the City Council offices would have would be a good idea I think. And then on the Bash, you've done two so far. It's probably a little too early to measure tangible results on that, but how do you see that evolving over time and sort of what's the point, I guess, ultimately? I don't know, that's for anybody. Matthew, you haven't talked for a while.

It's very unusual, attendance from one to the other, just on a metric, was about three times as high for the second bash. And, I think this is one of the best things that has happened in the last year, is that it is a direct tool to communicate with the community, with small business owners, people that are not downtown, for example. I think you could assume that all of our efforts are focused on downtown, but the more you see, the less true that that would be. So, the bash is an ongoing way for us to have a cadence of communication. And, for example, in the world that I spend most of my time in group business, whether it's citywide, which is multiple hotels, or self contained for one hotel, it holds me accountable that I talked at the last bash about the downtown availability calendar.

And somebody might ask me, hey, a few months ago, you mentioned that you were gonna implement this, create it and implement it. It. Have you done that? With the citywide master contract, same thing. It doesn't just hold us accountable, but that's one of the positives that it does, is that if we bring something up and talk about something we're about to do, industry pages is another one.

Did we follow through on that? And then they sometimes really great ideas for us will come from that audience. So they will ask us questions. They'll ask us we often end up speaking after the event is over to people that sometimes wait to say hey I've been hoping to get on your calendar to talk about this or that. So it gives us an opportunity for all of that.

If I could just add one more thing. Thank you Matthew. Is we can't underestimate the importance of the networking that is available there amongst the city and the vendors and so forth. At our last bash we had 10 wineries there, and they hooked up with several different hospitality groups and restaurants and were able to sell their wine at that point. And our next bash, what we're probably going to do is have some restaurants there to show their food and how they can work with us and other individuals around the community. So that's very important also in my opinion.

So the business has a lot of lingo like every industry does. And one of the things I think is interesting is when you're talking about the booked room nights, Matthew, you went through some numbers from 2023, 2024 year to date year over year was up 14%. Were those rooms booked within the portfolio of Team San Jose or were those hotel rooms no matter where they are in the city?

All of those

You know what I mean, the ones that we helped contract?

Those were all groups that we helped contract.

Can you put that into context for my colleagues what that actually means? Because it doesn't mean that those are the only rooms that were booked in the city of San Jose, right? This is what the business, this organization is driving, not what hotels overall are generating.

Correct. First of all, it's only group. So all of the room nights that Laura spoke about are aside from this. And, these groups, it might be a corporate retreat, for example, at the Hayes Mansion. That's 100 rooms for three nights and some really nice banquet functions.

And, it's a real deposit of trust with an individual property when we really help them work on that. Because, it's only benefiting one hotel in that situation. But, every single one of these room nights is a group represents part of a group that we helped contract. Some of them are years in the making. We can work for two, three years for a group sometimes, and sometimes it happens very quickly. People also travel here for other reasons. They may be on a business trip. They may just decide to come for a weekend. None of those room nights are the room nights I'm talking about. It is specifically group contracts.

So like to put it in perspective in downtown with Nvidia you have in years past we've always had very kind of congenial relationships between all of the hotels collectively, right. So you're able to book groups to all of the hotels. And, currently we don't have that same situation. So, we had sort of group activity with all hotels but two downtown, right?

Well, even the one that I think you're alluding

to has It's okay to say those names out loud, just like I want the Broadway show's names out loud. It's okay to say the names out loud.

The Westin Hotel had a very small block for Nvidia, but that took a little bit of arm wrestling. Most of the hotels contributed a very significant block. We were able to get up to 80% of the inventory at most of the downtown properties, which big was win for Nvidia because as they continue to grow and as they continue to push the limits of what we as a city can provide, the amount of hotels is a big pain point for them. So, did a good job helping to mitigate that. We've already put out a save the date for next year to try to do the same thing. But, we do have a couple of challenges downtown that end up reflecting bad on everybody unfortunately.

So I'll just finish with this. I'd love to figure out maybe in the next time you come back to put more in perspective that which when you're talking about the numbers, the numbers that Team San Jose has driven, but then what is the overall picture of hotels generally? I think you could probably look at TOT maybe But for just to put it in perspective, the two variables in terms of what matters to San Jose in terms of the TOT drivers. What is sort of driven by TSJ and the bookings and what is the whole other piece look like in terms of numbers.

Great. We'll do that moving forward. Thank you.

Else? Okay. You're obviously the expert on this five council member panel. Council member Kameh.

Thank you so much. First of all, I I wanna say thank you to Nancy. I'm really gonna miss you a lot. I'm gonna miss all the meetings, but I hope that we stay connected because, you have been someone who I go to as a thought partner and, really with a lot of different ideas. And, we've been able to launch, one event that I know of, that has been, very, very popular.

And and I think that I I didn't know much in the beginning, and now I know a lot more. So I wanna just publicly thank you and thank you for all your work in making San Jose better. I also wanna say that, over the last two years being on this committee, I've learned a lot from the team. I didn't realize the difference between booked versus consumed rooms until I started to talk to John. And you know, I think that where we were, and I know that I was very critical in the beginning, but I think that one of the things I find is that over time, you know, I always try to seek to understand and understanding it is it is a whole language.

And the lingo and what is and what is not, I think really is important and I I wanna say that you've done tremendous work in terms of really bringing San Jose more visibility. And certainly, you know, what happened just a few days ago with NVIDIA is testament to the good work that you have done. And and it takes time. It really does. So I I applaud you for that.

I also wanted to ask a little bit about your, growth uptown versus downtown. And kinda similar to the question that council member Ortiz talked about in terms of, when I talk to people about team San Jose, they always think downtown. They always think, oh, downtown, only downtown. But in reality, it's all of San Jose. And so as you've tried to, you know, sort of like bring greater visibility to what you call the growth uptown, as well as downtown, is there is there some thought of how do you grow other areas of San Jose?

Because I think that there's a uniqueness. I mean, in my district with the Winchester Mystery House and having Santana Row right there, there are lots of opportunities. I see a tremendous growth in that whole area. And I'm just wondering how do you, you know, like, I'm sure you're doing some work in that area. We just don't know.

So I I'd like to hear a little bit about, you know, not just downtown. I mean, obviously downtown is critically important, but, like, what are you doing to reach out to the Mexican Heritage Plaza, to, you know, the Winchester Mystery House or or Santana Row or, you know, other other areas of our you mentioned Almaden. Right? I'm just curious as to how do you where does that live? The other sections of San Jose.

We're going to pass this question around. Thank you for the question. It's interesting you have a new business district along Winchester Boulevard and I've met with them already. And the marketing we do I think with Bash and the industry pages we immediately give them tools to tap into what we do. Again like you we have very small teams.

In the past we've reached out to every council district to ask specifically, okay this is what we're looking for, can you please help point us in the right direction. I'm hoping that continues and I'd love to meet with the business districts as I have. That new business district is really interesting. They've got a ton of heart and ton of great ideas. They're still kind of finding their way in the marketing space which is interesting and which we can help them with. I'd like to talk to Matthew too about how you're defining a whole new district. If you want to take it?

One of the products that we're working on is we're calling it a mini wide. And, what that means is the cost structure at the convention center can be difficult for some groups, as far as just the cost of operating. And, we all know the cost of operating the building, the maintenance, the utilities. And, some groups find that out of reach. So, what we're packaging is an uptown citywide, meaning the Doubletree Hotel, which is five zero five rooms, could be the headquarters property for let's call it a group of maybe 600 rooms, or a group that needs 600 hotel rooms on their peak nights.

So, they would have the headquarters at the Doubletree, and then there are so many surrounding properties that they can get the overflow there. And, then the food and beverage would the events food and beverage wise would take place at the Doubletree. This is not going to replace a group at the convention center. This will be a group that we would have lost to another city altogether. So, you can imagine the owner, I met with the asset managers up there, and they're very excited about this because this is a whole new genre of business that is not available to them now.

So, that's one thing that we think will have tremendous effect. And then, the more activity that there is up there that will spur other types of growth. So, that's one thing. And then, when you mentioned the Winchester Mystery House, travel often throughout the year. In fact, we have some people.

I would be in Boston today if it weren't for this important conversation, trying to bring some pharmaceutical business to San Jose, which would be a completely untapped market for us. But we do have people in Boston, and we always bring a couple of hotel certificates to try to encourage meeting planners to come visit. We always put two tickets to the Winchester Mystery House with these certificates. It is one of the most unique, you know, one of a kind locations, and it is very unique to San Jose. So, we always tell that story about Sarah Winchester.

And, the idea is of course, come see the city, come see the Winchester Mystery House, and then they're close enough to Santana Row that it isn't all about downtown. So, are a couple of things specifically that we do right now.

I can just jump in real quick with one last piece. Also, from a research standpoint, we're investing in new tools to look at cross visitation. So we know oftentimes the convention center or something downtown can be a catalyst for the visit. But then Laura's team is always pushing all the great experiences across the destination. So we're looking now to utilize geolocation to help us track and see how is that how are these people dispersed throughout the city. And we'll utilize those insights to help us better track and better attune our efforts to make sure we're getting people not just into San Jose, but through.

Oh, that's great. But now that you mentioned it, you'll have to let us know what that is. Right? Absolutely. So well, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. I also appreciate John you reaching out to me and, making sure if there were any questions. So, thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you for the presentation. Really informative. A lot of good questions from my colleagues. I think this is the first time we've seen a report that generated so many questions and comments. So, and you answered them brilliantly. And thank you. It's it's a delight to have miss council member Komal Kahi here who's had so much experience with team San Jose from the beginning days. So thank you all for being here. I'm excited to hear that NVIDIA is coming back because there was some question they might not be coming back next year. So what magic

I feel good they're coming back. They don't have a contract yet. They don't sign contracts till after the event and then they take vacation and then we start

Okay. Bothering And you're working on them. Absolutely. Got it. And I I love Matthew, the downtown availability calendar. I just think that is brilliant to be able to have a convention group call you up and say, where do you have hotel rooms?

Thank you. We're we're very excited about it. And I did promise all of the hotels that nobody would see it, meaning one hotel to another. Yeah. It's it is only for our eyes.

No. But that's Yeah. That's fabulous. That that way you can curate the hotels for the for the number of people. That's that's fabulous. With that, seeing no other hands raised, let's vote. And Nancy, thank you again. Although you may be up for the next one. I'm not sure. Thank you. Moving on to the next item, which is the flea market update.

Good afternoon. Nancy Klein still with the Office of Economic Development and Cultural Affairs. And I am here with Nathan Blage and Jessica who are on the San Jose team. No, we're on the various item Just now, And thinking about the I'm really happy to be able to say we're here to give you an update on all the activities that have been related to La Puja over the last several months. And also want to note the very positive and quite large attendance from the vendors in La Puiga community today.

This report will go through a number of activities reports many of which counsel had heard about before and most of which have completed their work. And there has been an ongoing set of information that we've been collaborating with La Puiga community and vendors very closely. There's a tremendous amount of passion from the vendors for La Puiga and the Puiga community very much wanting everyone to know that the flea market is very much open and a wonderful opportunity to still bring family and friends to experience just a fun time with friends and family. With that I'll turn it over to Blagge.

Good afternoon. Vice Mayor Foley and committee members Blagaszlolich, Deputy Director in the Office of Economic Development. I just wanted to give very brief background on the direction that was given to city staff in June 2021 and that was in a nutshell to support the various flea market vendors through the process of potential site redevelopment. There are a number of kind of tools and initiatives that were kind of put into place and into motion at that time and those are listed on this slide. The biggest was really around just vendor engagement and support something the vendors that felt like had been lacking previous to the council direction.

The composition of a vendor transition fund which Jessica will remind you of at the end of this presentation. The formation of the Flea Market Advisory Group, which is kind of the main place we as staff have done our work over the last kind of year and a half two years. This idea of also exploring what might happen on a five acre smaller market as the site is redeveloped, and then economic, cultural, and feasibility studies to go along with the decision making process. And so we're gonna touch on basically each one of those here today in this presentation.

Thank you Blagge. So key to the success of all of those things that you talked about is really outreach and engagement with the flea market business owner community. And so from the early days of this effort, staff worked closely beginning with the Berryessa Flea Market Vendors Association and with the property owner to keep the community updated and seek out their voices and ideas. Some of the tactics included outreach going stall to stall by city staff using text messaging services, emails always in multiple languages, and also hosting drop in meetings online. And all of that was super important when it came to setting up the advisory group, getting the word out about upcoming advisory group meetings and resources or meetings like this one and completing the research related to the studies that Blaget mentioned.

And then finally while not on this slide is the concept of broader outreach to consumers in our region. So we've heard from the vendor community that some people may not be aware that the flea market is still open and an amazing place to shop and spend time with your family. So our communications team has been working to support marketing efforts, amplifying social media content from the market and from the vendors association including the flea as one of our top destinations for our shop San Jose local holiday campaign. Another leg of the support stool is supporting vendors business goals through access to resources and technical assistance. Last spring, the city launched a program with a nonprofit called Mission Asset Fund.

They're an organization that specializes in helping primarily but not only immigrant owned small business achieve success. And their goal was really to provide vendor technical assistance in the areas of business planning, credit building, and financial education. And the program also provided access to 0% interest micro loans. It took many many weeks probably more than we anticipated to develop the trust in buy in to the concept that Mission Asset Fund as a city contractor was there to assist and support business owners with financial education and other beneficial resources. And although the math contract has officially come to an end with the city, they are really really committed to staying engaged with the vendors who have engaged with them to date and there's a couple of data points on the screen around their work.

So to support the continuation of the flea market in some form, staff worked with consultants and the vendor community to produce a package of three studies, economic and cultural impact, sustainable market operations, and an alternative site assessment. The economic and cultural impact study is all about not just the economic value of the flea market in dollars and cents, but also its cultural importance and community impact. And this information we think is really important for a future investor developer or even a philanthropist who might want to join forces and help this effort. Just a few data points are on the screen, overall the report really does confirm significant economic value of the market to the city and really to the community. Flea market businesses are real viable businesses that support families often across multiple generations with relatively low barriers to entry.

The vendor community already knows this, we know this, now we have this report that kind of puts it in black and white. One eye opening data point I think is that the market supports over a thousand jobs directly and most of those jobs are considered the primary income for the survey respond ent, and that would actually make the market one of the city's top 50 employers if you look at it that way. Next, the market operations report was intended to inform stakeholders of potential market models like ownership, financial, and operational factors. It also looks at what makes the existing market tick so successfully. Some main takeaways are shown here, one example is based on the consultant's estimates, the existing market really does show a good business proving that markets with the right parameters can be good opportunities, but the report also provides a realistic look at challenges that face many markets especially in California that are facing similar displacement pressures.

And finally, the report provides a brief overview of potential alternative ownership models like nonprofits or land trusts. The good news is there's a number of options worth looking into more deeply as we move forward. With that, Blage.

And certainly last but not least, we took a look at the alternative sites assessment. So quick recap of the current market, it sits on 65 total acres, 45 of which are used for parking in facilities, 20 for the actual market. There are about 3,600 parking spaces that equate to about 900 and well not equate to, but in addition to the 3,600 parking spaces there are about 930 rentable stalls. So eight alternative locations were studied in this alternative sites assessment and it was conducted by retail consultant Greensfolder Commercial Real Estate. The sites were assessed based on factors such as size, site accessibility, surrounding demographics, ability to provide parking, and financial feasibility.

You can see the list of the eight locations on the screen, an in-depth explanation of the opportunities and challenges with with each of the eight sites was presented and discussed at the market advisory group meeting in September 2024. The three most viable options, the former Sears building at Eastridge Mall, the Santa Clara County Fairgrounds, and the Singleton Landfill faced significant challenges for a potential market on these sites. So quickly we wanted to just run through each of this kind of three most viable sites a little more closely. With respect to the former Sears site at Eastridge, staff did engage the pro bono services of Steinberg Hart architects to do some preliminary site layouts and cost estimates at the location. They reviewed the opportunity to utilize both the indoors in the former building as well as some of the outdoor surrounding parking lot, And they provided initial cost estimates were mainly around much needed tenant improvements, mostly leveling up fire life safety requirements which amounted to approximately 10 and a half million dollars at kind of a very base level.

That significant price tag coupled with the uncertainty around the current markets closure date and the timing of available funding also in line with the fact that the owner of that building really wanted to make an arrangement more immediately, really ruled that out as kind of a viable site currently. With respect to the County fairgrounds transition in the fairgrounds operating personnel and also the county's ownership of that site with multiple different conversations around redevelopment kind of have made it very challenging to really pin that down as a viable option. Obviously there are many variables outside of the city's control that make that a difficult and not necessarily viable conversation at this moment. So the last site which is potentially the best option to evaluate for a long term option is the city's owned Singleton Landfill at 850 Singleton Road kind of close to Highway 101 and Capital Expressway, and this is where we we focused most of our effort. This is really the only site that could host a market comparable in size to the one that currently exists, however there are significant hurdles to this site.

One of them being the large cost associated with environmental mitigation needed on the site, 3 to $4,000,000 an acre, and the timeline that that will take so at least three to five years for that environmental mitigation. Additionally we anticipate the construction costs on this site would likely be significantly higher than on a non landfill type site. Secondly there is something called the California Surplus Land Act that the city is required to follow, and in that California Surplus Land Act the city must prioritize the development of affordable housing on land that is deemed as surplus. So to this end we had sought to acquire an exemption to that requirement from the Housing and Community Development Department, something our real estate team has been working on. We've received an initial verbal denial from them on this exemption, but are awaiting their official determination in writing.

Good afternoon. Another component of this update is the status report that is periodically released by inform us and the community about the timeline for closure. The latest property owner update indicates that no one year closure notice will be issued before 07/01/2025. The master plan development permit and tentative map have not been resubmitted since it was withdrawn in October 2023. And at the moment, there is no indication of an imminent redevelopment proposal for the site at this time.

We also have a component of this update sorry. In response to the rezoning, there were funds that were allocated to support the relocation of vendors. The vendor transition fund, as you can see on the screen, is composed of a commitment of $5,000,000 from the property owners as well as 2.5 from the city of San Jose. The owners have released $500,000 and will release the rest of the money in phases as outlined in the chart above. At this time, 15% of the fund has been allocated and used for the setup of the advisory committee, the studies, and the business transition program that was led by Mission Asset Fund.

So looking forward what we expect is the next property owner status report to come to us in June 2025, so a few months away here. We will continue with the evaluation of the Singleton redevelopment potential. Staff anticipates pacing our work around site redevelopment, so both the information that we receive around the current market and also any potential around the Singleton site. This is definitely a marathon and not a sprint and so we're looking at it in that way. And then future CED committee updates we anticipate bringing to you wrapped into OEDCA's business development division annuals activity report.

And with that, we'll conclude our presentation and we are here and available to take questions. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Good report. I just wanted to ask you about Singleton before we go to public comment. Three to 4,000,000 per acre, how many acres is it?

It's roughly 90 acres. It isn't necessarily true that you'd have to do all at once, but you couldn't do it by twos and threes.

Understand, okay, thank you. Was just trying to get a scope of how big, I mean three to 4,000,000, that's a big didn't know how many times that would be. Alright. Thank you. Turning to public comment. We have 26 speaker cards, so I'm going to ask every speaker to limit their presentation to one minute. We do have a translation. Are we using Wordly? Okay. So to my colleagues who haven't used this before, if they press number 2, you will get the translation in front of you when the speaker comes forward. With that, please, call the cards.

Okay. I'm gonna call five names at a time. You can see the interpretation on the screen above you. I'm gonna point just to make sure you see what I'm talking about. We have Jose Wall, Isabel Kay, Caluro, I think, Cayetano I can't read the last name. So Cayetano, Chava Bustamante, and Alma Jacobo, come on down.

Good afternoon. My name is Jose Wong, one of the vendors at the flea market. I just want to say thank you so much for your guys' times and opportunity. I'll just make this short. I just want to say the flea market has been around since 1960, has supported thousands of family members throughout their generation of time.

And there's still a generation of business continuing over hundreds of business. This site actually has actually more than just an iconic feel to San Jose. This is actually known through Truvana, through Facebook, through social media, through San Jose face market apps, and many other outlets as Instagram. So when they look in the Google search engine from people traveling from out of town, from out states, actually this is one of the top 15 locations through Google suggestion. And so it's actually a known suggestion to be looked at. As a vendor there, I have dealt with customers from Napa, Sacramento, Arizona, Texas, Louisiana.

Thank you. Next speaker please.

Yo soy Betty. Thirty three years ago at the Flint Market. I am a member of the free market vendors. My question is just for you to ask. What are the chances of them agreeing to relocate us to Singleton? Because we are going through a very drastic economic situation, all sellers, and we would like to know if we have your support for the entire time.

Next speaker, please. Thank you so much.

Hello. Chava Bustamante.

Thank you. Next speaker, please. Hello, Chava.

The resigning of the San Josefli market four years ago marked a very full time for hundreds of families who relied on La Puglia as a source of income. The Office of Economic Development was tasked with helping vendors identify alternative sites and to ensure smooth transition. This work is essential not only for the vendor's economic security, but also for preserving the cultural and communal significance of La Pulga. However, proposed staffing reductions in the OED now threaten this mission. Reduced support, risked railing the efforts to secure a viable alternate site, jeopardizing the stability and livelihoods of hundreds of families who depend on the market.

Without adequate staffing and resources, the relocation process may falter, leaving vendors or their families without a reliable economic foundation. We urge the city of San Jose to continue supporting the vendors by maintaining

Thank you. Next speaker, please.

No. Earlier I asked for one minute because we have so many cards, so many people to speak. Thank you. Next speaker.

Good afternoon, everybody. My name is Alma. I'm a vendor at the Vereesa flea market and member of the advisory group. My family has been a vendor for the flea in the flea market for the last thirty five years. We do embroidery and silk screen.

Thank you, Nancy, and thank you to the CE team members for all your support and help. We are here today to make ourselves visible to all the council members. We are in need for your help to count on your voice and support for 100 families who depend on the income made at a flea market for a living, and it's now at severe risk of disappear if we don't take action. According to the studies made to CD, Singleton is the best option to relocate market. This relocation is possible only with your support. Only we can be part of your agenda. And, of course, the c the city's commitment to continue to have our need in your butt.

Thank you. I'll call the next batch of speakers. So we have Chris, I'm not able to read this one, maybe Bruce or Brie, Isabelle, Manuel, and Caesar. So if you're able to introduce yourself by your name, we can keep track of who's, spoken already. Thank you.

Good evening council or afternoon council members. Chris Lepe. I've been a long time supporter and advocate for for the flea market, and I'm excited to be here once again with other members of the various flea market vendors association and the community coalition. I'm as excited and energized today as I was twenty years ago, almost now, in 2007 when this issue first came to the city council. The issue of La Poulega's future is a uniting force for many San Jose residents and organizations, everyone from representing labor, the business community, racial justice, urban planning, historic preservation.

This is an issue of really great significance for many of us. And I know this issue is very important and means a lot to you as well. What we're asking for today is clarity, is resources, is continued commitment and direction of the city of San Jose and OED as it

Yes. Thank you. Next speaker please. Thank you. Next speaker please.

Your name has been called, can come on down and sit in this first row. We have reserved for the speakers who are waiting.

For the speakers who are waiting, me name is You, you too. And to the comrades who came to support us. We just want to thank you and let you know that we are not a public burden to the state or the city and that we would also like to own our own business to continue increasing our income, that of our families, and ourselves. Thank you for your time.

Thank you. Good

afternoon, deputy mayor. Member of the members committee. My name is Manuel Delgado. I'm part of the ride sharing app driver community. Today, I am here in support of the flea market association.

Today, I'm here to ask the city to continue supporting small flea markets. For years, they have been a place, a place where whole families enjoy a great day. I ask that there be transparency and clear steps in the relocation process for all sellers. Flea market vendors create jobs, have families, and need to support their own and are part of the city's economy. Thank you so much.

Good afternoon, vice mayor and members of the committee. My name is Cesar Palancares, and I'm the lead organizer with Get Workers Rising here in support of the Vendors Association. For many years, my family and I have my family and I have visited the iconic place La Pulga. Some vendors have been there for years, if not decades, creating jobs, paying taxes, and just creating an environment where families from this and other counties like to visit every weekend. We ask you to continue to support vendors at the flea market throughout the process of relocation.

There must be transparency, clear steps so that vendors can prepare accordingly. Thank you very much.

Thank you. We'll go ahead and call the next batch of speakers. We have JP Humberto, Marco, and Nubia. So please go ahead and, sit in the reserve seating and, come up when your name is called or in in whatever order.

A. The Flea's Companions, to Nancy Tu. Good afternoon, counselors and everyone. All I want to know is if you could commit to reopening the market with us for the progress of our children. We are already old. We can no longer work. We need to give our children an education.

The

best study and see why America is an opportunity, and thank you for having us.

Thank you.

May God bless you. Thank you. Hello. My name is Tatiana.

My name is Tatiana and I'm a community organizer speaking on behalf of the Latina Coalition of Silicon Valley. Through civic engagement, leadership, and development, we offer opportunities for all to grow. The Latina Coalition stands in strong support of protecting and expanding economic opportunities for our communities, particularly those that are top 50 employers of the city. As decision makers, we are all dependent on each other's future, and we are all here in in solidarity of the Pulga's future. We urge the city to ensure that existing vendors have affordable and sustainable spaces to continue their business.

Latinas in our community, many of those who are small business owners, workers, and consumers at La Pulga deserve policies that foster their success and displace and not their displacement. We urge this com committee to align with the values of equity, economic opportunity, and cult Thank

you. Next speaker, please.

To the

flea market vendors association. We ask for the continued collaboration and support of the office of economic development and Cultural Affairs. There's a lot of focus on the city center, and we need the same energy when it comes to the market and other commercial sites. We need to work together to enable the use of the marketplace on the Singleton site. Who in the city can affirm their commitment Thank

you. And

interest in relocating the

We'll go ahead and repeat the names that have been called already. Nubia, Marco, Humberto, JP, Isabelle K. So if you want to come down and sit at the reserved seating. I'll call a few more just in case maybe you've changed your mind. Carla, Francisco, Flouso. Please come down. Thank you.

Thank you.

Please.

Hello.

Good afternoon to the deputy mayor and committee members. My name is Carla Koiak, a member of the Flea Market Vendors Association. I want to thank Nancy and the office of economic development for their support. We are here today, the flea market vendors, to ask them to continue helping us, also so that they give us more promotion. We also ask for clarity on the next steps to achieve a fair relocation.

The Sea, which is a tourist place where many come and spend time, so we want to continue having your support. Don't forget us. You.

Are here. Speaker, please?

Hello, deputy mayor. Mi nombre es Francisco Ayala. Miambros. Flea Market Vendors Association a. We have worked at La Polga as a family for over thirty years.

I want to thank Nancy and the office Arroyo Economico e. Yes. For him. For the presentation and the dedicated work. Collaboration with the with the city in this one.

In recent years, this has never been seen before in the market and with our businesses.

Thank you. Next speaker, please. Thank you. Your time is up.

Yes.

Next speaker please.

You Come

can give her the card afterwards. She's already got the card.

Was just waiting for that. Hi, I'm Kelly Snyder. I'm a chair of the Parks and Recommission, but I'm speaking on behalf today. I'm a housing developer a Hauser and I'm also a professional planner and a professor of planning at San Jose State. It's been very interesting hearing the first report in this one.

Lots of great information. I'm sorry that this can't be an action item and not an update because the number one thing the city should do is find a place for a 40 acre public market. Whether you're trying to drive economic development, tourism, neighborhood development, vibrant public spaces, open public market on city land is the key to all of that. So put this in your priority list, put it in every department's work plan. These vendors deserve a great place for a forever flea market and I hope that we can find a place for them in San Jose on public space for them to thrive. Thank you.

Thank you. I'll call the remainder of the cards. Susana, Anastasio, Carla again, Roberto, Neil, Maggie, Santiago, and Manela. So ahead and sit at the reserve seating and then, approach the podium one by one please.

Good afternoon everyone. My name is Maggie Castellon, and I am one of the advisory board members. As an advisory board member, I am here to report that this project lacks urgency. It lacks transparency, and it lacks a real plan. As an advisory board member, I'm here to report also that the advisory board has spoken with all of the committee members. We have proposed solutions. We have shown up, yet our voices are met with silence. Our ideas dismissed and without consideration. Advisory boards and meetings are meaningless if they are only served as check boxes for the city's optics, not real dialogue. This isn't collaboration, it is neglect.

As an advisory board member, on behalf of the vendors, we demand accountability, monthly progress reports from the city relocation efforts, clear timelines, and make better use of the advisory board members that you have.

Thank you, next speaker please.

To conduct the necessary studies and demonstrate to the city that we are a worthwhile business because we pay taxes. And on top of that, our families depend on us to continue developing the city, which is now ours, our family. Ma'am, it's important. I don't know. And we would love for you, as members of the council, to commit to us so we can offer us a place where we can continue to develop economically and also because time is running out.

We are a few months away from the flea. The flea owners give us some time to leave. Maybe it will happen, maybe it won't, but it's important for us to start with the next steps so we don't get left behind.

Thank you. Next speaker, please.

And, yes, our income because we have little time and the development plan is quite large and we don't have the resources. So have. Thank you. Next speaker, please.

Hello, vice mayor and committee members. My name is Roberto, president with the various flea market vendors association. First, wanna thank OED for all the work you guys have done. Special, special shout out to Nancy and I'm super bummed that you are retiring, but And happy for sad that we won't be able to see this thing through. I know you'll be cheering us on from the sidelines and hopefully integrating into the work that we are doing post retirement once you're ready. But as you guys can see, there's a lot of work that's been done, but the job is not done. Right? The job is not done. We need more clarity in this process. We need commitment not just from yourselves, but the full council.

And we need to drive this thing home. San Jose has been home to the flea market for sixty five years and we want it to be home not just to the flea market, but we want it to be a market city with everything that the report beforehand beforehand mentioned, right? You guys are trying to drive economic factors and attraction.

Thank you. Your time is up. Next speaker please.

Today, I come to support La Polga and especially my aunt,

this. I

want to thank Nancy and the committee for all the support they've given to this situation, and I want to make two special requests. The first is to give visibility to the flea, understanding that there are people who depend on it, and many have spent more than thirty years in that place. So I also ask you to respond to them in terms of relocation and to take this situation as something important Thank you. Because the fleet is also like heritage of San Jose. There is a lot of culture and there are many people, as I say, who depend Thank on

you so much.

Vice mayor and committee, I'm Neil Martin. I'm with Working Partnerships USA. I think we've all heard today about the importance of this institution in terms of you know how many people's livelihoods depend on it, the cultural significance. But I think you know we also see that there is a need for like a clearer roadmap. Know the report which I think is wonderful shows that there's a best site for the relocation to happen, but there are clearly obviously some also big, also some big challenges there.

So I think what we need is as other speakers have said coordination across you know agencies and devoting staff time to this to really figure out a plan and set up a roadmap with you know with responsible parties and figure it out so that we can figure out a site for this. For what it's worth, I lived in a city for most of my adult life where the flea market was the

Thank you. Next speaker please.

Good afternoon council members. My name is Santiago and I want to share the importance of the flea market in my life. My family as well as all others who depend on the market as their their main source of income are families who are determined to put food on the tables of their loved ones and to give their younger generations easier lives. Ever since I was younger, my parents have worked every weekend away from a shop to sell our work. And ever since a couple years ago, I would go with them to help any way I can.

As a result, I learned how to interact with others as well as the importance of hard work and the amazing results it can bring. And I think those values have reflected in my life in many ways. Due because of that, I could I could have been was accepted into a high school of very high prestige, and I learned how to project my voice many other things that will help me in my years to come. We humbly ask you to keep the relocation of the flea market as a possibility so others my age can have the same privilege as I did. Thank you.

Thank you. It looks like there no more people sitting in the reserve seating. So we've called quite a few names, not everyone has spoken. So if you did not hear your name and would like to speak on this item, now would be your time to come on down to the podium.

There's someone coming down.

Hi. My name is Frabio Zapata. I started selling at the flea market about five years ago. It has potentially helped me a lot financially wise. And due to that, I was able to help my family. My cousins helped them open a business. All my cousins, three of them, helped them open business. They're entrepreneur now. And I feel is when you go free market, it's a environment for family, friends, and everybody. Also, it's very important to the community as a small business.

I feel we need your support to help us. You're helping small businesses. You're helping families, and I feel like we need that help from you guys. And also young generation, young entrepreneurs like me starting a business in a food market. I never expected myself to start a food market business. It worked out well.

Thank you.

Thank you. Next speaker please.

Committee members. My name is Mario DeVilla, a member of the Flea Market Vendors Association for over twenty three years. I want to thank Nancy and the development office for this matter, which concerns us as sellers. Simply ask the city council to consider us for the next fly market, and let it be a commitment from the city to fair relocation so we can continue working because, well, our families depend on these businesses, and we also contribute to the city's economy.

Thank you. Next speaker, please.

Paula, AJ. Many thanks to the people who are supporting us this. I thank god for the opportunity he is giving me to be in front of you, and my request is this. Please take us into account. I think you have the opportunity to sit there and have the power to practically make some decisions, right, which correspond to us as members of the city.

La Pulga is a place where not only we are as sellers, but we also support many people who come to our business, people who maybe they say we want to go, who are clients precisely of the businesses. So this one supports us in this situation.

Thank you. Back to the committee.

Thank you. Thank you to everyone who came to speak on behalf of the flea market. The flea market is a very important business in my heart. My husband had a flea market business many many years ago, and it helped contribute to our, financial success. So you are hard working, I acknowledge that.

I remember every day my husband going out on the weekends to work at the flea market. So I I share your thoughts and and support for the flea market and know how hard you are working to help take care of your families. So thank you all for being here. Thank you also for the presentation on the status of the flea market and where the current flea market is and possible locations for other relocating our flea market. With that, I'll turn to my colleagues, Council Member Ortiz.

Thank you so much, madam chair. First, I also wanna start by thanking our OED staff for your hard work, especially the time invested working directly with our flea market vendors. I understand that this is a complex issue and it's hard to just pick up 500 plus or how many plus vendors and just automatically find a place there. So I want to let you know that I understand that and that it's not a simple thing. Also I don't know, is Jessica is this your first time here?

So congratulations Jessica, someone who started as the business, East San Jose business coordinator and now doing big things. So I just wanted to give you your little kudos there. I just, you know, I've met with the street, I've with flea market vendors. I've heard what they're saying here today and you know I'm concerned with just some of the language in the memo. Specifically ones talking about or using the language of pace to work around the site.

And I think on page five there's language that I think says pausing. That's something that the vendor association is very concerned about. Jesus Flores from Latino Business Foundation, concerned about Chava, Chris Lepe who's here, individuals who I've been organizing with for a long time. And so I just knowing and seeing, right, if we do wait for whenever the family wants to redevelop the site on the flea market, that would only give us a year. But as we said earlier in the presentation, with the most viable site being Singleton, it would take multiple years to remediate that site.

So it could leave our vendors vendors I guess high and dry remediate for a while during the time in which we're remediating that site or exploring it or other solutions. So I just wanted to hear like using these language pacing with the current owners or pausing. How are we going to make sure that we are staying on track with the timeline so that there isn't a pause in them being able to operate their businesses?

Council Member, thank you very much for the question. I want to just make a couple background comments. Part of the genesis of the real challenge here is the first rezoning of the property fourteen years ago, I believe it was fourteen. At that time, very different council, the city did not create any plans for a relocation. At that moment on that initial rezoning, that was when the time when the city had the most leverage.

Four years ago, as was referenced, we had a zoning but much less leverage. But the council was able to draw funds and cooperation from the owners. So just want to make sure we know that we're all situation based on prior decisions that this council had nothing to do with. Also wanna mention that the Singleton site is extremely difficult. It would have been so great if there was a site that was relatively turnkey.

The city has very little land. So other than this site for 40 acres, we don't really have the option. Also need to have a site where the circulation, the traffic, the one to three to five mile radius for customers as well as being a radius for larger folks. So that is why we've gravitated to Singleton. The challenges with Singleton and I'll mention council member the notion of pacing and just the real issues that you have, we have.

The business development side team isn't the staff that would need to be able to work with the site. It would be real estate. Going through based on skill set. Going to HCD, Housing Community Development, they have told us verbally and we'll need it in writing that we will have to go out to offer the site for affordable housing which for a number of reasons we don't agree that it makes sense to put it out for affordable housing. But that may well be the step that we're asked to go through.

That in and of itself takes a fair bit of time. If we were able and it's not a given to get to the point where we could pursue remediating, remediation city staff out of public works and environmental services estimates that the remediation could take anywhere from three to five more likely between five and seven years. You have to go through three state agencies that govern landfills which is a challenging set of work to undertake. Are nonetheless all of these challenges. We believe there is a potential pathway.

It would take a fair bit of time and a fair bit of creativity. So I very much hear and take seriously the concern about transparency. And it's a different issue to walk through all of the steps in development as you and particularly council members Casey and Mulcahy work in on a day to day basis. So there's a lot that's there and if there's pacing it's on the real estate side to make sure that work could be done. And there's also, speaking very directly, a number of other activities that the real estate group is handling.

So there's just the reality of that.

So when I hear the word pacing and another word pausing, that tells me that you're not gonna be working at the same level of effort. Is that what you mean in this language? Because that's I think what people are interpreting.

Very fair question, the biz development side. The bulk of the work is not those staff in business development. To move forward it would be the staff out of real estate. And part of that set of decisions and work have very long lead times is the recognition and the fact. When we have worked with the Vendors Association we very much agree and understand the value of the market.

And we said very directly that the work we were going to do is to analyze what sites are possible and we really aiming to have this happen, but we can't promise it will happen given limited city land and the difficulty with the characteristics of the sites.

Council member, if I could just add. It sounds like what Nancy is describing is that the work moving forward is going to be housed on the real estate division side of OEDCA, a different set of staff. Not that we're necessarily pausing the work, but laying out and setting expectations. The body of work moving forward is going to take some time working with the state. If we get permission, like remediation, she's just laying out the time frame that it would take. But it's just a different set of of staff working on moving forward.

Okay. Thank you for that. So in in theory, like, is this saying that, like, what level of involvement is your department going to have or OED going to have moving forward?

Thank you. Real estate is in OED. We have been, the real estate folks have been tracking and engaged at a higher level based on the analysis of the sites themselves. And biz dev staff will maintain outreach and connection to the vendors. It's not going to be intensive because the work that's happening hopefully can still be on capacity building like technical assistance directing where services might be had.

But the bulk of the get it done work would come out of real estate. And I just want to be transparent that the work that real estate is doing there will need to be trade offs.

Okay. I'm just concerned that a lot of our priorities are being focused to downtown, Super Bowl, World Cup, making sure that you know we're a destination place for events which is all very important. But we can't forget about the economic contributions of the vendors of the flea market. And it kinda just seems like people are like oh well who knows what's gonna happen. We're gonna reprioritize what staff are gonna do.

And I'm just, that's why I'm concerned about it. So I wanna accept the report but I also wanna reference it to the entire city council because I think my colleagues should be able to provide input on this. And then I may work with a Brown Act to introduce a memo to the rules committee because I think that we may need to change direction to staff. Because it shouldn't just be about whether it's one site. The end goal needs to be about helping the flea markets move past what the flea market is right now.

Helping the flea market vendors move past what their current condition is whatever their future is. And I don't want us to be like oh we found a site but that's seven or eight years away but there you go we've completed what the directive was. No. We gotta help them get off their feet regardless of what their next steps are whether that's the Singleton site or whether that's helping them get in brick and mortars. Whether that's looking at local school districts who are closing down schools and seeing if we could put events on those campuses. We just gotta be more creative. I'd like to review what the initial feedback was by the council. And so that was my motion. Thank you.

Can I Rosalyn, can I ask you a question about cross referencing? Does that that doesn't typically happen here unless we it's called out for ahead of time and it's agendaized to go to counsel. So is there any reason that it needs to go to rules first or we can send it directly? Okay. Okay. Thank you. I wasn't sure. I've never had that happen before. Okay. Council member Casey.

Wait. What was the answer from Roslyn? Does it have to go to rules? No. Okay. We didn't hear that part.

Okay. Thank you. I appreciate the port. Appreciate the work. I'm gonna try to be constructive, but I was on the planning commission when this came before us in 2021, and the level of anger it created in me was hard to keep down. The fourteen year ago council whomever dropped the ball on that, that's it's an embarrassment. We shouldn't even be here. The value that the flea market brings on a cultural and economic level is immeasurable and I don't know that we even needed those studies to understand how valuable this community is. I just, we dropped the ball. It's incumbent upon us to do right here and try to fix this.

However, and not necessarily how much however much it costs, but in a thoughtful and constructive way. But to Peter's point, I'd hate to see us take our foot off the gas in terms of figuring out a resolution to this situation. There needs to be a thriving flea market if not the same size as it is now, something comparable to it. That's just an editorial comment but secondarily I noticed that a million dollars has been spent already out of the funds that were available and that seems excessive, 340,000 for the studies that were done and I think a million or a couple 100,000 for I don't know what it was for, but how mindful are we being of the money that's left there and is this amount that's been spent reasonable? It seems excessive to me.

So council member, the money that's been spent is a combination of money received from the property owners as well as as some portion of the money that was initially set aside from the city. Everything that has been spent was vetted through the advisory group and approved through the advisory group before the studies were initiated, before technical assistance with math. So we have been kind of lockstep with the advisory group receiving approval to spend that money as was the commitment that was made when that money was allocated. And our intention, so right now kind of what sits technically only the city's kind of commitment sits in our reserve fund. The additional funding that will be given from the property owners not given until the one year closure notice is provided and then again when the closure actually happens.

But the sum total of that kind of that will be available is the 6,400,000.0 and the intention is to continue to work hand in hand with the advisory group to come up with the recommendations of how that money will be allocated.

Okay. Going back to the state's permission to use the Singleton site, that's not going to happen. We're not confident that the state's going to give up that site for anything other than housing are we?

We believe there is a path forward there either through looking at some of the exemptions that are in the surplus land act law which to demystify wasn't trying to hide anything there. There is an exemption that would allow a relatively small amount of affordable land, housing to be put on the land which again isn't going to be affordable for a super long time if ever. And then proceed on the remainder of land. The other potentially is legislation that would say in this particular interest that it doesn't make sense, environmental justice issues, financing issues, the value of the market. So we believe that is possible to explore.

And then I did just want to mention that part of the reason for the studies is we had early conversations with the folks at Sobrato, the prior Knight lead, Packard, who all said that it would be very helpful when there were requests for philanthropy that to have the studies and show as they approve with their board systems. And in that part it made sense to have that professional work done.

Okay, thank you that's helpful. Just one last editorial comment. I mean a city, San Jose without a big thriving flea market, I think it would be a big loss and I can't imagine not having them thriving in our city. So anything we can do on the council as a city to make sure that they're up and running, if not as large, but something comparable. I'm just a 100% behind that that notion. So just wanted to one last editorial comment. Thank you for your help.

Thank you. Council member Kameh.

Thank you. It's clear to me that some of the individuals who came to speak today didn't fully understand where you are and what it means. It seems to me that however things are getting communicated needs a bit more clarity. And the gentleman who talked about a clear roadmap, I think is is correct. So I don't know how you would want to do it, but between the time from now until ever go you know, whenever it is gonna go to counsel, it would be really helpful whether it's working with the committee or working with, others in the community who have come today to have a more deeper understanding of everything, what the options really?

I mean, I'd like to know a little bit more about the entitlement. The property owner has not submitted their plans. How much time and I guess Chris is up there. How much time is is left? Because if the only thing you know is that, you know, people are not gonna given be given notice before 07/01/2025. Well, that's in a few months. Right? And so, you know, if if their timeline, meaning the property owners, are such that, hey, is it two years? Is it, you know, like, what is it? Right?

Because I I think that one year, given that some of the solutions would probably take three to five years, maybe seven years, I think that it would be appropriate to know, okay, what are these other things that are happening in tandem and whether or not they can plan on something that's a year away, two years away, three years away. It's only fair, I think, to be able to have those conversations and, you know, like if you get to a point where we don't know. Right? I think we have to be a little bit more transparent. And if we do have that road map, then we can say, well, you know, HCD, they're not gonna let us do that.

But if we go this other route, then I'm kind of a visual person. So if we go this other route that the possibilities of doing legislation, well, takes two years. I don't know. You know, I I just think that people's livelihoods and lives, you know, need some certainty. Right? You have an answer for us? Because from from a from a development point of view, this started fourteen years ago, and we could have done something different, but we're here. And what can we do?

Thank you, council member Chris Burton, director of planning building code enforcement. So the property was zoned, I believe it was 2007, so eighteen years ago potentially then rezoned again four years ago. There was a number of subsequent actions that were included in that rezoning that had to occur including the master plan development permit and the subsequent permits that came after, many of which have not either been finished processing or gone into effect. We did receive an application from the property owner under SB330 under the builder's remedy sort of avenue that was not completed on. Again, a lot of the land use entitlements kind of sit right now waiting for further action by the applicant.

How much time do they have?

Well, but the zoning is it runs with the land. Right? Okay. So the city council has rezoned with a site specific rezoning. It's not effectuated at this point, but that is in place. There's not a time condition where it would necessarily expire.

So he can come in at any time since it's already resolved? Correct. That's unfortunate. And and in terms of, you know, looking at the alternatives, you know, I think that because Singleton was the only one who was sort of valuable, I don't know, you know, is is there a way since there are 90 acres, is there a way and I don't know, you know, in terms of location or whatever. But in terms of and I know that the real estate people are the right people to take a look at this.

Is there a way to be able to, know sooner rather than later whether or not it's really viable? Because I think that if it's not, then why are we putting more effort into it? You know, it's very expensive to do remediation. Remediation.

Thank you for the question council member. Couple different things and an opportunity to clarify. The remediation for residential, which is why it's so expensive, is 3 to 4,000,000 an acre. The remediation anticipated for the flea market or other industrial roof uses would be 2.5 ish.

Okay, so half.

So just to clarify the difference between residential and industrial. So there are other flea markets in the state that currently operate in a very similar way to ours. I know of one developer who is active in our city or has been active in our city who has 14 flea markets. Three of them were done on landfills that are very similar to ours, household waste landfills not industrial landfills. So to answer the question, is it possible?

We think so. The other options are very challenging. Just to be straight, like doing some consideration for brick and mortar.

Yeah. And I understand that, but I guess what I'm saying is option that is the most viable, right? And we're gonna you know sort of like keep it on the industrial side. What are the steps that are gonna be necessary? Because the thing is that if you don't do things on tandem, time is not our friend.

It just flies away like crazy. Right? So I I just I just think that if it is and this is what is possible then we ought to really like say, hey you know what we don't have that much time. And given our current circumstance with the developer that they at any time, at any moment can say, we got the financing, we're gonna move forward and here's your Are they required one year?

Yeah.

One year? Okay. That's not a lot of time. That's not a lot of time. So I think that if we're committed and I think that, you know, we will find out when it goes to the city council. But if we're committed, then we ought to say, okay, this is the road forward. This is the path we have chosen And these are the the things we have to sort of tick off to to say go no go. Right? Because I think that it is really not fair to kind of hold things out for people who can't, who who are not able to make decisions, proper decisions on their livelihood. Right?

So I think I think that we need to we need to find a way, you know, between now and when when it goes to the city council to give greater clarity whether it's through the committee, through the people that are here today, whatever, as to what is a path forward. And if there's no path forward, whether it be economic or whatever, da da da da, we need to be very clear about that too. Because I think that stringing people along is not fair. It's not. So I just think that if we're gonna do it, let's do it, and the council can decide and and be clear as to what are the things that need to get done, whether it's going to Sacramento, going whatever, doing whatever it is that we need to do if we are gonna do it.

Thank you.

Council member Mulcahy.

Thank you vice mayor. Thank you for the presentation. I can remember back in 2005 running for actually for mayor and Dave Cortezi is a candidate talking about needing to have an international market and he wanted to flee at the fairgrounds. So I just think about we've been talking about how I think he sort of probably knew something at that particular time that we would be here at some point. How much do we know at this point and maybe Nancy I'd look at you just from real estate's perspective and how much do we know about the business case, the business model, right, because this is an absolute economic engine for the city.

Sales tax wise our vendors pay rent, it's a parking revenue generator. How much do we know about the business model?

So the business model which again proved out by the work from Greensfelder. From a larger community economic perspective incredibly valuable. If you're asking specifically from the city not very much is realized in sales tax. The parking revenue and the low cost, low barrier land cost because the bums own this outright and have for many years. The business case for having a large piece of land with a lot of parking revenue and stall revenue super solid.

The Did you say super solid?

Solid by being able to have a market if you don't have much of a rent or any rent payment and you're able to collect parking revenues to then infuse back into the market or that's also your profit. So that is the experience currently at La Pluga.

Got

it. So that's why having a city property or a no cost option anyway is so critical to make the model work.

Right.

And acreage?

40 acres as Kelly mentioned is about what they have now and you could scale down to some amount based on economics and reality or availability.

As long as

you can park it. As long as you park it.

Got it. Okay, thank you.

Okay, thank you for the good discussion on this issue. I think it's an important one. But I would caution everyone to look at the finances of Singleton knowing what budgetary situation we're in right now, and likely we will not, as a council, I don't know, make a budgetary decision when this comes to council, as we're looking at the budget right now. So I'll just put that out there. I think it's an important discussion to have at the council level, and I guess I was the only one on this council four years ago when we moved into this phase.

Looking at the development and how long the development has taken this time, or to this point, we can't be certain that it won't take the same amount of time in the future, but we can't count on that either. We have to move forward and see what what can be done to keep the flea market going. With that, let's vote. Thank you. The next item, and and I would ask we have two items, and they are fairly large items.

I would ask my council colleagues to I would ask the the presentation to be brief and succinct in both cases, and that we keep our comments, on point.

Thank you, chair Foley and I

didn't say that.

Committee members. Chris Burton, Director of Planning, Building Code Enforcement joined by Sylvia Doe, Division Manager within our Planning team and Alex Powell, Chief of Staff. So this is

Excuse me, we're still conducting our meeting so if you could quietly exit the building that would be appreciated so we could hear our speakers down here. Thank you.

We're going into our fourth year of reporting to CED on our development services process improvements and our ongoing work to measure our performance and really understand our operations. And perhaps being brief for our new committee members and as a reminder, as a central tenet to the way we manage and operate PBCE, we're really focused on providing access to information for our customers so they can see how the department is performing and thereby make informed decisions on how they work with us through their permit process. This started somewhere in the region of 42 dashboards, we're down at about 35. But it really gives us that insight. This is operational data that we use on a two week basis to really understand how things are going, but then also be able to adjust for conditions as we see them coming.

Before I hand it over to Silvia and Alex, just to give you a deep dive on just a couple of the key elements that were noted in the memo, I just wanted to mention we did have one new dashboard. So most of these dashboards are operational. If you look down at the bottom left hand side you'll see three planning dashboards. One that we're going to talk about in the next presentation that really measures our work plan for citywide planning and policy work. One which is the work of the housing catalyst team, which is a cross functional team across our city service area that focuses on addressing the issues of the housing crisis.

But the new one which we've just added is our housing production dashboard. This is straight out of our integrated permitting system that delivers all the information that anybody would need to know that was trying to understand housing production in the city of San Jose. So just to give you just a very quick preview of what's in here. It's tracking all housing production through entitlement, through our permitting process, through completion. It gives you different levels of affordability.

This is obviously all tied to our housing production goals in the housing element. There are a number of different dashboards in here that you can cycle through on how we're making progress. And there's maps included on where we've entitled units, where we've permitted units. And then some specific pieces around some key areas like ADUs, so you can kind of see the density of projects that are getting submitted as well as processing timelines and SB nine lot splits, which is obviously an area that we're really focused on. So a lot of really great information in there. It's linked through the memo. And it's obviously on our customer service charter webpage. So we'd certainly encourage you to take a look there. And with that I will hand it to Sylvia or Alex.

Thanks Chris. Alex Powell. One of the first improvements in the demo video is just going to jump right in. So it's a permanent fee estimator. You can see how easy it is to use or the simple questions that we provide for users.

The two phases, this one demoing ADU is part of the first phase that gives customers really simple set of questions and an easy way to get to a quick estimate of what their permit fees and construction taxes or city taxes overall are. This uses past data, which in a sense makes us an evergreen tool. It constantly updates itself based on most recent information. They can look at similar permits and also it's hard to see in this view, but you can actually scroll over to the right and see more information about these ADUs to find something that looks most appropriate for your project to find fees that are similar to your project so you have a better sense. So as I was about to mention, there's been two phases of this.

First was the ADUs launched September. And then the second phase, which was commercial tenant improvements launched 12/18/2024. So the future phases, we're now working on new multifamily construction, a much larger project scope or typology that we'll be sort of taking a different approach on. We hope to launch later this spring. And then really the final phase, which is single family additions and alterations.

The next grouping of improvements that we focus on and we have been reporting to this committee is the 11/01/2023 rules committee memo. We've reported on seven previous improvements. We'll be talking about two more today that are related to one another with three more open items afterwards. So the two for today is evaluating multiple rounds of review for process improvements and then the plan review phone support versus official responses. These two items are related in the way that we actually interact in the review process.

So quickly to go through them, so for the first item, evaluating the multiple rounds review, there was five main reasons that we found for why multiple rounds reviews are caused. This is based on a random sampling of permits that we looked through the comments and then also the responses that we saw going back and forth between the city and the applicants and then also interviewing or following up with key project team members to identify exactly what was going on. So those five were one, incomplete submittals at the onset of the project. Second, poor quality plan is is round of review. The is the

second the

review. So some of these items we have already taken action on and some of them are going to be in progress or ongoing items. The first for incomplete submittals, really we've done an improvement to our website to consolidate information to make sure applicants are successful the first time around. If we cut down on the number of reviews, overall the work level does go down for us and we're able to get through more permits. So this will actually be part of actually the biannual audit status report that goes to council tomorrow.

One of the things we have done is consolidate our website to reduce the amount of pages applicants need to check. For poor quality plan sets, this is usually what happens is we must go back and forth with applicants many times on the rounds of review and comments. We instituted a new policy that for our plan reviewers if they reach a third round of reviews and it still seems like they're not going be able to address the comments, we actually require a meeting with the applicants to go through those questions to make sure that they understand what we're sending and to make sure that they know what they need to correct. Significant design changes. This came up in a couple of the permits that we checked in on.

And this is a difficult item to address. Design is going to change if the customer or the applicant has new ideas. So this is a tough one for us to address. Number four, the additional comments found after the first review. This one is with the city. It's something that we might miss initially. If the project changes of course there may be new comments, but there were some instances of where we would miss comments initially. Maybe it's because we asked for more information, we found them. This seems after interviewing some of our staff internally that this was probably most correlated with the experience of staff. What you see on the right hand side is actually a little different view.

This is for our planning division as opposed to the building side of it, the building permitting. On the planning end they've actually seen a long term trend of decreasing the average number of review cycles over the last couple

of

years. When we dive into this a bit deeper, does seem like most strongly correlated with the tenure staff. Our staff are a bit more experienced. They know what issues to look for. They know what the applicant may resubmit and how to address those issues before they even might find them in a formal submittal. So this is one of the dashboards that relate to this. The final item on complex projects. This is a difficult one also to address. It's likely with big projects there's going to be a lot of comments. But what we do proactively and particularly with our affordable housing is that we actually set up project schedules.

So while there might be a lot of round reviews, we create that clear expectation with applicants of when we're submitting comments back to them. So even though there might be more rounds of review, if we're both meeting our project timelines, it's more likely to be successful. So the second part to this was plan review phone support and the full sort of recommendation on this one was if there was the ability to provide phone support as opposed to formal response of comments. In our review it seems like comments are going to be something that we're always going to have to require. We want to document exactly what needs to change.

The additional sort of conference call that could be required for each round of review could add one to three hours for each project, particularly with like a frontline plan reviewer with their supervisor. And so this is something that we're going to continue to focus on just for projects that require that third round of review as opposed to each individual review cycle. Only for those problem matter projects to really focus staff time so they're not just focused on a smaller number of projects. So that's a quick review of some of the recent process improvements. We'll now go into what have been some of the trends in our permitting data.

Good afternoon, Sylvia Doe with Planning, Building and Code Enforcement where I oversee Planning's Permit Center team. And so for the next few slides, I'm going to be highlighting two improvements that have been made to the customer service charter dashboards, and I'm going to be using the planning's permit center team as an example of how we've applied that. So first off, The first improvement we've made is adding staffing indicators. So as you can see on the screen here on the right side with the box shaded in red, we've added a staffing indicator to indicate how many staff are assigned to deliver development services. So again as an example with planning's permit center team, we have seven planners processing administrative planning applications.

Also as noted in the summary box there, planning permit center team comprises of five different customer service charter dashboards, so while this screen just captures how many planning administrative permits that we process in any given week, the team also processes reviewing building permits for conformance with zoning regulations, and we also support public information services as well. So this just gives you a sense of the seven staff members assigned to one given work, they're just not doing one thing, they're balancing every day doing various different permit application processing as well as providing public information services. So the intents of the staffing indicator is just to give or paints a bigger picture of the variety of work that any team or staff member does. The second improvement that we've implemented for the customer service charter dashboard is customer centric metrics. So for example, all of the data that we collect on a weekly basis, we've now incorporated it into different planning, billing, and code enforcement websites.

So for example, if someone wants to schedule inspection, now they can see on the web page that an average inspection will take three days from the time they schedule the appointments, and for example as well if someone wants to email us with planning or zoning general questions, it would take the first response a little bit more than one day and then a little bit more than two days to resolve their question overall. And then lastly with regards to just giving a snapshot or bigger picture of how the economy has affected permit activity over the past six months or one year. You can see here for again the planning divisions permit center team, two of the core services we provide are reviewing building permits for consistency with the zoning regulations, as well as reviewing administrative planning applications. So over the past year there's been an 8% decrease in building permits that require zoning conformance as well as about a 7% decrease in the number of planning applications that require administrative review. What this all is kind of telling the story of is not only is permit activity declining slightly, but the scope of work also is changing.

So compared to about last year or so there were much more new construction permits being applied for whereas now much of the building permits and planning application review is mostly tenant improvements or alterations to existing buildings. And so as a cost recovery organization this decrease in permit activity directly impacts our fee revenue. As a result we've modified our operations to focus more on fee based work in processing permits, and we've also been pre screening our application appointments so that our finite number of planners spend their time on cost recovery work rather than supporting customers who may book our application appointment line for general inquiries. So this is just an example of the trade offs we have to make regularly to balance our fee based organization versus providing public information services and supporting customers with pre application services.

And finally similar measures for the building permitting process also show similar declines, so as Chris mentioned at the beginning we track these numbers both for operational information for us to see how we're doing, but also because it gives us that general indication of the market. What each of these diagrams show is that actually the level of applications that are coming in and also those that are being issued in the gray lines, both at the top and bottom respectively. And then those teal bars represent sort of what that backlog is or what we need to be working on. Taking a step back, of course what this is showing is that we've actually seen a general decrease over the last six months compared to the time before, the last time we presented to this committee. Taking a step back, looking at just the calendar year of 2024, we actually saw an increase in the total number of permits compared to before the pandemic.

This was a positive sign, but that but what's happened is that the average valuation of the permits, I. How much construction is actually taking place, has actually gone down by 27%. So that dramatic decrease now paired with what we're seeing as a more recent trend that permit activity overall is going down means that there's kind of this double impact to both total valuation quantity is both decreasing. So both of these sort of provide this indication of what that trend is and that slowdown of the overall market and what we're seeing for our permit process.

So that's a lot of information. I'll let you digest it, but we're available for questions as necessary.

Thank you. Chris, Sylvia, and Alex, thank you for that presentation. A lot there's a lot of information. I don't see any colleagues. I see no one in the audience, so I'm turning to my colleagues. I don't see anyone with questions, so I have one. The it was mentioned that after three rounds, that's when you reach out and schedule a meeting. Why three? Why not two?

The most at the second round, so the first round can be really level setting with what is required as part of the application. Maybe they missed something. Maybe there's something else that we need to see. It's difficult at that second round to say, hey this is we'll say that you don't have the ability to bring this back on track. By the third round, that's where we're actually getting a clear indication that there's some communication gap. Almost like thinking about the first round is almost like a fatal flaw. Are you missing something that we haven't seen? That second round is saying you got us everything at this point. You've given us everything. Here's really the full set of comments.

And if you still haven't addressed it afterwards, after that complete amount of applications, then that's when we realize we need to talk to the applicants.

Okay, so over time through your your process you've realized really it's after three that you need to have a one on one.

Correct. And it doesn't preclude a conversation from happening earlier. It's that we just require it after Sure.

I understand. Okay. Thank you. That that helps me understand that a little bit. Seeing no other hands, would someone like to make a motion to accept the report? Okay. We have a motion and a second. Let's vote.

Can you do a verbal vote? The computer just shut down.

Can I just do all in favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Thank you. Motion carries. Okay. Now we have the next item, which is probably the bigger item.

It is the bigger item. So, again, Chris Burton, director of planning building code Enforcement joined by our citywide leadership team, Jared Ferguson, Martina Davis and Ruth Cueto. So this is a really good precursor conversation to the budget conversation. Obviously on last Tuesday's March message discussion, embedded in the March message is a considerable amount of policy work that will impact our ability to deliver on all the things that we're doing within our citywide work plan. So we do this report twice a year just to kind of give you an update of where that work plan is and how we're balancing priorities.

This year will be a little different, right, because there's a significant add that will push us well over capacity, which either means things go a lot slower and take a lot longer, or we have to go through a process of prioritization and really decide what's critical work that we need to move forward first. So we're gonna dive into that a little bit. This won't be the last time we're talking about this. There'll be more opportunities coming up.

Alright. Thanks Chris. So first just a quick overview of our citywide teams. So our citywide planning group, we're the long range portion of the planning division within department. So we have teams working on a variety of topics, so a team focused on maintenance and updating our general plan, they process private general plan amendments as well.

We have a team focused on housing policy and implementing our housing element work. We have a team focused on maintaining our zoning ordinance and implementing other policies related to that work. We have a team that works on our urban village and station area planning. And then throughout the teams we focus also on our data analytics for the department. So Chris shared our new dashboard on housing production, we also do work around our general plan annual report and five year forecast.

We have a team that works on other special projects, so related to planning work, special policies outside of our normal work. Then we also house the destination home planner that's responsible for a 100% affordable housing entitlements. So we have 18 staff plus our deputy director and we currently have one vacancy to do this work. So So kind of going back to our last update, first update in the fiscal year, you know as we're thinking about our work into the future, we're really thinking through the adoption of our next housing element. So January 2031, and backtracking from that work, thinking what are the major initiatives and steps to get us to that.

We you know went through a long arduous process to get our six cycle housing element done, and we're subject to penalties for being late in that process. And so we really want to make sure that we provide ample time to complete that work. And there's also some precursor work that we have to do in order to get ourselves ready to do the work for the next housing element. And so we're really focused on the four initiatives here, and thinking how our our work revolves around those. So right now, you know, we're very focused on implementing the six cycle housing element and completing all the work associated with that that we're required to do.

And then kind of next up, or kind of concurrently, this is kind of a major change from our last update. Initially we had planned to start working on our tri elements update, so that was updating our safety element, that's part of our general plan, our open space element, and then the new environmental justice element. As we started to get into our housing element work for the current cycle, and sort of thinking ahead to the seventh cycle housing element work, we really found the need that we're going to have to start the four year review as soon as possible to try to facilitate that work. And so in order to accommodate that, switching that tri element work with the four year review is kind of a key change that we're making in our work plan that we'll talk more about soon in this presentation. And so getting into the work plan itself a bit, you know in the last update we shared with the committee and council, we've really divided our work into two categories now.

So first is state mandated work, so this is work that's really required of us by either state law or that we've committed to through our housing element, or it could be other things you know response to litigation. And then the other body of work, city priorities. So these are other work items that may have been directed by counsel for us to work on, and then there's a lot of other ongoing work we monitoring state laws and legislation, working with our IGR team, and then other data and analytics work that we have to do. And so I'll pass it to Martina now.

Okay, so what does this look like? This is a high level breakdown of the citywide planning's workload by fiscal year. So what we do is we calculate the hours, the productive or I like to call them project hours we have across the team. So that's the time we have to work on projects, taking applications, sick time, administrative work, other non specifically project work like training or development, etcetera. And then we calculate the hours required to complete all of the projects on our work plan.

Jared mentioned mandatory and city priority breakdown, right, so the state mandated items you'll see here in the pink, so this does represent the bulk of our work. And breaking that down further, you can see we are over prescribed right, so this fiscal year through this June we are at 116% capacity and then into the next fiscal year so June 2025 through June 2026 we already anticipate ourselves fully committed to our workload. So this does not take into account any new items added and let's take a look at what that might look like. First thing is as we're over prescribed we do anticipate some of the work we have now is going to start sliding into next fiscal year. Example I'll give is the staff member who was working on the five rooms urban village plan left the city back in the fall.

So while we're working on that we had anticipated finishing up our portion of that plan this spring, but it looks like that's going to be working, we'll be working on that into the summer. And then the other major change to the workload that we see upcoming is that as Chris mentioned, the March budget message included a large number of new policy items for this team to work on. And you can see adding those would put us significantly over capacity. So there will need to be a conversation around trade offs, stopping slowing or or moving items around. Another item I will mention is that yellow box toward the bottom.

We don't know what's coming from the state, but based on past years, we're anticipating continuing to mandates that this team has to address and I'll note none of that is funded by

the

state. And with that I'll pass it to Ruth.

Okay, so this last quarter as we started policy work on two housing element programs evaluating the urban village planning process and small multifamily housing, we realized that in order to accomplish that work we may need to modify GP policies and strategies and we will need to increase residential capacity beyond what we have planned for in the general plan. Both of these items would require accelerate the work of the general plan four year review to be able to implement the six cycle housing element and prepare for the seven cycle housing element. We're proposing a very limited scope for this third general plan four year review to ensure we complete the work in timely manner. Updating the residential capacity, which is the main focus of this work will take significant environmental review, staff resources, and additional funding. In order to achieve that, staff is proposing shifting the work plan as shown here.

One is to pause Coyote the Coyote corridor study, and the second is to combine the Saratoga sequel with the five four year four year review sequel, which will delay the adoption of the Saratoga urban village plan.

Another new potential large body of work for this team is the transit oriented communities compliance. Those of you who are on the Commission last fall may remember the update around this, it's a policy adopted by the Metropolitan Transportation Commission and they are tying conformance to the policy to accessing transportation funding moving forward. So I'll point out the OBAG funding program, they're going to tie compliance to the policy to that. We've received $148,000,000 in transportation funding through that since 2012. Everything from complete streets to pavement maintenance to planning work to smart city improvements gets funded through OBAG.

So what does compliance mean? For purposes of today I'm going to focus on what impacts this team's workload which is the minimum commercial and office excuse me commercial office and residential densities within a half a mile of our rail stations. And believe it or not when you count up all the light rail and Caltrain stations in San Jose there is 54 total areas that we have to look at potentially up zoning, so a lot of work. Now I have good news, it's not all doom and gloom today between when we put the slide together and now on Friday afternoon I received a phone call from MTC saying congratulations. They had put out a grant opportunity in the fall, cities could receive up to $1,200,000 for this planning work.

We put in an application and it has been approved. They told us they were gonna do the final approvals this week, but they let us know that we can consider this approved for San Jose. The city would need to accept it and this does also have some workload implications. Right now we would recommend would be pausing our SB thirteen thirty three rezoning, so our special projects team could focus on this TOC work, but more conversations around this would come through the budget process.

So going into a little more detail on our projects and capacity, this slide shows the list of projects from the current fiscal year. The projects in the pink area are those that are in the state mandated category and gray area are those that are city priorities. So we continue to make progress this year. These are the projects we have completed or plan to complete before July at the start of the new fiscal year. So we've completed our annual five year forecast work.

In October the City Council adopted the Pleasant Hills Golf Course Guiding Principles. We did work on an MTC PDA grant policy six dash four updates. We plan to finish work around the super graphic sign code. We're working to complete an SB 9 expansion that's in the housing element. In December, the council adopted changes to adopt a new overlay in our neighborhood business districts to allow for housing.

In November, we completed additional work in our zoning ordinance around emergency shelters required for the housing element. Of course in December we completed a major work item which was our ministerial infill approval ordinance, which was also housing element work. We've done some pre work around the tri element before we made the decision around shifting that to accommodate the four year review. And then we have some work upcoming to counsel soon around the airport land use and our response to that. And so going into the next fiscal year starting in July, July without accounting for kind of the spillover projects that Martina was talking about, we estimate that we're already starting out at 101% capacity.

We also have new work items to consider that we've been mentioning. We have to evaluate how those will fit into our work plan and what work items may need to be put on hold or delayed in order to accommodate this new work. So some of that new work as Bartina was mentioning, how the TOC policy compliance work fits in, and then also evaluating those items from the mayor's budget message. And so we'll need additional time to review those items and we'll be providing cost estimates and trade offs through the upcoming budget process. However, initially we've identified several work items that we're proposing to put on hold or delay.

So these are just kind of some of the proposed items at this starting point of the conversation through the budget process. Even with these proposed items on hold or delay, it does not fully get us to the 100% manageable workload, so we'll need to and make other trade offs in terms of our capacity and workload.

I'll pass it to Ruth.

Okay. So next steps for the team, as Jared mentioned, we're working through the various planning related proposals from the mayor's budget message, developing the scope of work and identifying total cost to implement those work plan items. And that work is gonna help us frame the conversation with council during the budget process on prioritization and trade offs of work underway and any new work that may come through that budget process. We will also return to City Council for approval of the MTC TOC grant and lastly staff is working on the scope of work for the general plan for your review and plans to bring that to City Council for approval in the spring. With that we are done. Questions?

No members of the public and no council colleagues with their hands right oh, council member Kameh.

You you know I was gonna say something. Right? I'd like to know how those who, the projects that were going to be deferred, how were they selected?

So right now it's really just a case of sort of looking at those things that represent the highest risk if we don't get them done sooner rather than later. The biggest risk out there right now is that come January 2031, which seems like a really long way away, but really isn't, is that we are not ready with a completed housing element and we reopen the door on builders' remedy projects, which have wreaked havoc from a land use perspective on this. So we know we have to do that, right? And to get there we know this last one took us a little over two point five years to prepare, right. So that puts us into 2028.

We're going to have to do an EIR for the general plan, which is going to bring us back another couple of years on that. And then I've got to get into a policy conversation ahead of that. So that's priority number one is get us ready for that process. Because not only does it set up our next housing element, it allows us to deliver on this one. On top of that there are a number of key state mandates that we have to meet, right. And so that's the key priorities. What is the work that we have to get done now? And then it's a balancing based on the staff that we have available and the time available to kind of plug it in. As you look at that chart, the dotted line is 100% of capacity. And so as more stuff comes in above it, I can either spend less hours on each project in which case they all take much longer or I can start moving the boxes around.

And so it's really just a balancing of kind of what staff we have available as well as what funding we have available. So when we talk about major policy projects, if there's any consultant or CEQA work, that money is getting pulled out of Fund two thirty nine, which is the general plan update fee. And so again, all the work associated with the four year review, there's probably $1,000,000 in addition to all the staff time that goes with that, right, over the two, three years. And so we're trying to sort of preserve capacity both from a staff side and non personal finance side so we can balance those priorities. So that's how we're kind of putting those things together.

Ultimately it's council's decision, right? That's why we're going to bring this through the budget process. We can't do everything all at once. If you want us to try, like I said it'll just take us longer. So there's gonna have to be a conversation around trade offs and priorities.

I guess I was surprised to see Saratoga Urban Village because it was thought that the Saratoga Urban Village sequel would be done with the general plan review. So I was surprised to see that. And you know I don't

Sorry I just want to be clear. So the recommendation would be to do the sequel. Of with the general plan for the urban village plan will continue to move on its current path. But then the plan was to then do the CEQA afterwards. So rather than doing that CEQA as a discrete item, we would just wrap it into the EIR that we need to do for the general plan update.

I see. I see. I see. Okay. Well thank you. Well I'd like to move acceptance of the semi annual status report on citywide planning activities.

Thank you. I just have one question regarding the TOC work that MTC requires. Can we get an exemption on some

of those

parcels? Are we in discussion with them about limiting the scope? Because that's a lot of work for us and we know they're not, all of those are not going to be developed.

Yeah, MTC staff we've been working with them for actually several years on this and so far they have been very great in acknowledging know kinda San Jose's unique position as a very, suburban city but has a lot of the stations and our unique challenges. So yeah, the goal with that 1,200,000 it wouldn't actually even cover all 54 stations and we were very upfront about that in our grant application. The way we actually structured the application is to have kind of the first half of it pay us to analyze what our best path forward is knowing that we're not going to just blanket do 50 units to the acre and a half mile around a transit station in the middle of nowhere. And so then that would kind of be the first half of the work in the grant, and then as part of that we would identify the key items, what's our best path to get the most bang for our buck essentially. And then it would fund us doing that work.

So in short, yes, there definitely an acknowledgement from at least on the staff level, MTC staff that we're in a unique position and they are giving us a lot of flexibility. They've also talked about giving us kind of flexibility on timing if we're moving toward progress, they will acknowledge that. So far so good. Knock on wood.

Okay. Clearly we're gonna have to make some decisions on priorities in the next couple of months as we look at the budget and your workload. Because every time we add something to your workload, we're not taking something away, and physically you just don't have the man or woman power to get it done. That's it. Anyone else have any questions? I see no hands, so let's vote. Thank you. Motion carries. I see no one in the audience for public comment, so this meeting is adjourned. Thank you.