City Council - Regular Meeting

You don't have the 6 o'clock agenda.

It's not there. Not like this. Mayor Armstrong, we're ready.

Okay, good evening. I'm going to call to order the special meeting of the City Council for September 8th, 2026. Please call the roll.

Council Member Adler. Council Member Dwayna.

Present.

Council Member Varos.

Here.

Vice Mayor Rubio. Here. And Mayor Armstrong.

Here. All right, we're going to move to item two, closed session. Item 2.1 is convened a closed session pursuant to government code 54957.6 to meet with the city's labor negotiators, Megan O'Donohue, Stephen Spadowski, and Martin License for direction to city negotiators Regarding a grievance brought by SEIU and the POA concerning retirement contributions, any settlement will also apply to retirement contributions to unrepresented miscellaneous employees. And let me ask if anyone wishes to make any statements before we call for public comment. Vice Mayor Rubio?

Okay. I was just going to say, as I previously announced to this council during this special meeting, August 24, I'm recusing myself from this item to avoid appearance of conflict. Okay.

All right. Thank you. So then at this time, I'm going to open up public comment on item 2.1. Public comment is open. Do we have any speaker cards?

We received one speaker card from We the People.

through the mayor. If council member Rubio has recused, she should leave the dais at this point. Yes, thank you.

Okay, again, public comment is open and please limit your comments to three minutes.

Mayor and council member, I represent we the people here to ask you to please edify attorney and also city manager for repeatedly not spelling out the proper acronyms in full words to the public. Why does it matter here? Because S-E-I-U stand for something that they're trying to hide from the public. I just asked them earlier, who wrote that? The clerk told me the attorney's office wrote that. And I asked if it was attorney's office, Naomi Yan, the paralegal who wrote that. He said, no. She said, no. And then he said, oh, he missed it. Despite last time, I asked you guys to spell it out, and you were kind enough to spell out what is POA. POA stands for Police Officer Association. SEIU actually stands for a Foreign Employee Union. Why is it that it is okay to lump the two together? Our police officers are being hired as foreign employees and the foreign employees are now considered Americans. This should have been separated as two different items. Police officers are police officers. Their benefit is by the American codes. The SEIU, God knows what it is, that they're unwilling to disclose. They have something to hide. How can an attorney, supposedly licensed, miss SEIU was not spelled out as acronym despite I have already asked you guys last time. It's on public record. How much more disrespectful and showing disdain can you guys be to we the people? I spend so much time participating in public affairs and this is what I get. City manager is already disrespected out of this country. Everything he does does not benefit our city at all. He ran our city into deficit, and he still continues to want to hire more foreign employees and put our police officers' retirement fund in foreign bonds, government bonds. Why is this OK? I would like you guys to please, in your closed session, Ask the city manager and the city attorney to separate these two organizations into two separate different items. So whatever you are going to vote yes for our American police is not going to be an automatic free giveaways to the foreign employees and vice versa, therefore impacting our American police officers because of foreign employees. Thank you.

All right. Thank you. Any other comments?

There are no more speaker cards and we did not receive any written public comment and there's no one on Zoom to provide public comment.

Okay. All right. Thank you. Then I'm going to close public comment and we're going to convene to close session. We will come back at the end of closed session and report out and we'll be back in a few minutes.

Ready.

Okay, we are going to report out on the closed session. The city council met in closed session, and we gave direction to our staff negotiators, and we had nothing to report at this time. I would like our city attorney, city manager team to make any clarifying comments on what we heard earlier, though, during the open session.

Just to address the public comment, there seems to be some misunderstanding about what's being negotiated here. And what is being negotiated here are settlements between two separate organizations, one SEIU and the other POA. There's no commingling of funds involved. These are two separate negotiations. And as such, there's no... money being transferred between one employee organization and the other. Okay.

All right. Thank you. And with that, I'm going to adjourn the special meeting of city council. For everyone else, please stand by. We'll begin the regular session.