Economic Development, Communications, and Marketing Committee - Regular Meeting

Go ahead, Mayor.

Alright. Welcome to the Economic Development and Marketing Committee ad hoc committee meeting for June 23. I think Mayor is gonna start off with a roll call.

Call. Vice mayor Cox? Here. Council member Gonzales is not here at the moment, and that's it.

I can go ahead and read it. I can read it. Yeah.

Go ahead.

Yeah. This meeting will be recorded. The Zoom application will notify you that this meeting is being recorded. Please press continue on the Zoom application to stay in the meeting. Use the raise your hand feature in Zoom when you would like to speak on an item and to also lower your hand when you're finished speaking. Please unmute yourself when you when called to speak, and mute yourself when you are done speaking. If you're calling in by phone, identify yourself by name before speaking on an item. Press 9 on your phone to raise and lower your hand. Press 6 if you are participating by phone to unmute. Additionally, we have a workshop scheduled for today. I want to inform everyone that David from our communications department will be photographing. Our first item is the consent calendar.

Okay. So may I have a motion to approve the consent calendar? So moved. Which is the minutes from last meeting. Is there any discussion from anyone on that?

She was very particular about that too, I remember. She was a DEBI. We'd be in trouble. Alright. Very good.

Alright. That's a typo we can correct. We'll correct that.

Thank you. Any other comments on the minutes? Alright. We have a motion. I'll second your motion. Ready? Yes. You ready to vote?

I'm ready. Yes.

All those in favor? Aye. Aye. Any opposed? Motion carries. Alright. Of those present. Alright. Public presentations. Do we have any public presentations? And that would probably be well, anyone online? Do we have anyone online? For a public presentation? Okay. Seeing none, I want to, first of all, welcome you all, many of you back for the second time, some of you for the first time for this economic development and marketing committee meeting.

It's really important that you participate in this because we want this to be your committee. This is your committee. We want to be able to plan events that not only show off our city to our own residents, but also to the world for 2026. We have Super Bowl coming in February 2026, and we have six World Cup games. I also wanted to add another thing to the agenda that I I failed to in the first time around is that on 07/04/2026, our country is celebrating its two hundred and fifty year anniversary.

And when I was at the US conference of mayors in January, I signed Santa Clara up to be one of the 250 cities that celebrate the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary. So yay. So I believe it's gonna be two days after our last World Cup game. So I know I know it's on the agenda, but it's a really big deal. So I wanna make sure I add that to the agenda for the future as well.

And I know our park staff is so excited about that very much. Yes. I see them. Okay. So as we prepare for all of these events, including Super Bowl, World Cup, and now July 4, our goal is to make sure that these moments are not only successful on the global stage, but some of you are here representing, like, a bigger constituency. Some are here as just our local Santa Clarins that have been involved, and many of you are here because you have been so involved involved in the community. But at the heart of this effort is a simple but important question. Why are we doing this? Why? We have to ask ourselves.

So we're going to walk through some proposed community engagement timeline, which is designed to ensure that we get your early input into this, into these events, but we wanna collaborate and follow-up with some meaningful ideas. So we're hoping to come out of today's session with some of these ideas for the for our future. So we we are hosting a community driven work workshop and mapping exercise that has been put together by our staff. And can you introduce yourselves? Just tell us a little bit about each of you to those people who weren't here last time.

So Elizabeth Klotz, assistant city manager. And I have two of our wonderful staff with us today, a fellow from Bloomberg Harvard and also Alicia Knight. And Alicia, go ahead. Yeah.

Hi, everyone. My name's Alicia Knight. I'm development project manager supporting city manager's office, and really excited about assisting with community engagement. Some of my background in my personal life is really supporting some large scale community engagement events, and so I'm really excited to bring that lens in perspective to the city of Santa Clara as we kick off for the 2026 events. Well, thank you.

Thank you. And Elia?

Hi, everybody. Some of you I met last time. It's such a pleasure being here in this seat somehow completely, you know, out of context, but thank you for making me part of your community for the summer. I will be here for seven more weeks, so it's it's a very short time, but, therefore, also very intense. I'm learning a lot about Santa Clara. And the main reason why I'm here is I'm working together with the city and with the mayor, Lisa, on implementing more transparency and accountability practices within community engagement and community participation leading up to the major events. So that's that's what I'm busy with for the next weeks.

Thank you. Thank you. So if you get a call from her or contact from her, this is who she is. I know I've connected her with some in the community already. So as she gets to learn about our community, who we are, she'll be be able to better help us put together some of these events. And this is council member Gonzales, also a member of this committee. We started without you. Sorry.

No. No.

It's But we haven't gotten very far, so

it's okay. City hall.

I I knew that was gonna happen. So sorry about that. I like the library here. Thank you, Patty Wong, so much, our city librarian, for hosting us today. I I think sometimes a different environment leads to more creativity.

So here we are. So we're gonna revisit some themes that we've been developing, but I know and and some of the updates and the strategy that we received from the last meeting. I know our staff has put together, I think, a presentation on that. So we're gonna go over some lessons we learned from Super Bowl fifty, or we'll also talk about what worked well for us and what challenges we had and how we plan to to do it a little bit differently this time. But finally, we wanna hear from you.

This is really unique, a unique moment in our history. Your children and grandchildren and those in the future will talk about this because it's probably going to be a long time, if ever, that this happens that we have both Super Bowl, World Cup, and the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of our of our wonderful country. But whether it's, you know, community festivals or youth programming and cultural performances, small business opportunities, which I really like to to focus on that as well, we all want you to be part of the journey. So thank you so much for joining us today. It's really an honor to have you all here.

So with that said, I'd like to move over to our staff to give us a presentation. Is that Liz, is that what you're ready for? Okay. We have some slides here. First, I do want to

thank our stakeholders for participating. Your participation, your input is invaluable to us having these successful events for the city. We also know that your time is valuable. So we want to try to get through the presentation quickly because I think the workshop's gonna take the bulk of our time today. I do wanna highlight we had have had a couple community engagement activities.

On June, I think it was the thirteenth, we had the countdown to FIFA over at the youth soccer park, and some of our youth actually got to go play on the fields out there and have some fun. We have the countdown clock that was just debuted at that event, but now it's actually housed in the library. It's gonna be roving throughout the city. So right now, we will have social media put out when we do move it. But right now, it's at the library, so we invite you to bring your constituents, your residents, your your your community with your groups out there and help highlight that.

Let's take a picture before everyone leaves today with the countdown clock. That would be fun.

Great idea. Alright. So just really quickly, next slide, please. In back in April, we presented a strategic framework to the committee for community activation and event support in 'twenty six. Important aspects of this framework is the need for cross sector collaboration. Focusing on community engagement, our civic pride, and visibility to the rest of the world, we want to ensure that the city is ready for these events coming to the city and that our community feels part of these events. Next slide. Over the last two meetings, we established the role of the stakeholder group and held free flowing discussion on how this community can truly serve as a community engagement process that provides a true benefit to Santa Clara residents.

Next slide.

The purpose of today's meeting is actually to establish engagement goals that align with community and stakeholder values. We're going to encourage through our workshop creative input and collaborative engagement through an event through the event strategy workshop. We're hoping to align on a unifying theme and brand strategy process. It's going to be a fun process for us to get through. As you may have seen, we already had surveyed sent a survey out for event ideas.

Now we're going to send a survey out for some city values. We're going to discuss the next steps and refine our planning timeline. Before we get to the workshop, Elia, our Harvard Bloomberg fellow, who who described that she is developing a community engagement strategy for the city surrounding these major events, she's gonna go over our engagement goals and our timeline right now.

Right. So I just we just wanted to land some of the core goals of and kind of answering the question that mayor Lisa just said, why are we doing this, and why is this important? This is rooted in in research authored by many city leaders across the country and internationally that was put put together by the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative. So one of the one of the most important goals is advancing equity that leads to an outcome of social and racial justice. Building relationships is, of course, very important, and it leads to effective governance.

We want to hear from you. We want to build a relationship, and this goes much beyond, the major events next year. This is a long term goal. Generating knowledge is allowing the city to implement well informed policies, informed by the citizens being on the ground. Mobilizing resources is where we try to create a co ownership model of public goods together with with you, with the community, and sharing power.

So giving more resources into the community's hands to to create more self determination. These are the five goals that we would like to bring to you and also ask you which of those goals do you think could be strengthened and which one do resonate most with you in the context of Santa Clara? Next slide. This is the timeline, the community engagement timeline we put together. This is a high level timeline that will probably keep on evolving and becoming more and more detailed as we go.

But as you can see, one of the ideas here is this two layers, the blue and the green layer, blue being the city hall in the lead and the green one being the community in the lead. So we just wanted to visualize how those two efforts come together seamlessly by the end of the process. But for now, we we said, you know, the the end point would be the FIFA World Cup, but as we just heard, probably it will stretch out. So we are now at the community mapping work workshop, which is marked by red star in the process. We have started four weeks ago, so it's been already some time, and time is ticking.

So we should really, you know, gear up. And as we go further, the next steps would be from the city side to map and strategize, analyze the workshop outcomes that we will produce today, and for the community to keep on responding to our surveys, for you to encourage people around you to send us their, their values, their thoughts, their ideas, and to provide input on events and general expectations. And then the city will be analyzing that and making sure that every idea and every thought is implemented and heard and valued. So after that, the city will propose a selected common theme that will be the overarching theme, and my colleagues will talk about it more in detail later. We'll finalize the events list.

We will choose and fix the events that will go ahead. And then together with the city will be a moment to develop budgets and look for sponsorship opportunities. And then the the community events will kick off with within a joint effort of the city together with the community, so leading up to the major events. This is how we envision it now. And as I said, probably it will be changing, so we'll we'll make sure to keep you updated.

Xelia. So before we can really plan for this year, we really do need to look back. And in starting, we wanted to look back back in 2016 when we had our super community. And these were the events that we highlighted during the super community year. We had a couple of concerts and fireworks shows. We did a tree lighting and an ice rink during the tree lighting. We had a Hall of Fame Gridiron Glory exhibit. We had a community fun run. We also had a super community ball, the Santa Clara Super Community celebration. That was at Santa Clara University. And then we had the STEM Innovation Bowl.

Next slide. Never had the ball. We never had the ball? Oh, it didn't take Oh, no. Okay.

Okay. So this was the budget that was set October before the event. And the city council had adopted a $2,000,000 budget for the events. And the city the way the city had planned the events was that they could expand in scope depending on fundraising and sponsorships. If not enough funding funding was raised, then events would have to contract in size and and also in cost to adjust. Just to kind of go over to see how they were allocating funding, the tree lighting and the ice rink was budgeted for 65,000. The public art exhibit, did we get that one? Was that the Public art. The commemorative public art?

Yes. And that was the statue outside Levi's Stadium.

Okay. And

that Father throwing the football to the sun. That was our that was our art.

Yeah. So it was budgeted for $100,000 Our exhibit at the Triton was $300,000 Fun Run didn't have any allocation for budget. The concerts were budgeted about $600,000 They had an extensive volunteer program. It's not required for Super Bowl this year because they have a different system for getting people to actually work at the event. But back when we the city had to get volunteers, we had budgeted about 75,000 for that.

And that was really for some merchandise that we bought for the volunteers, but also we had to do the fingerprinting and brow backgrounding of those volunteers. And then the STEM Innovation Bowl had a $17,000 budget. Our Super Community celebration was budgeted at $750,000 And then three fireworks events was budgeted at $60,000 As you can see, there was the budgeted amount, what we had pledged from fundraisings and sponsorships, and then the net city costs. But this might be just a good resource for us to go back and look to when we're creating the budget for the events that we identify for this coming upcoming year.

Yeah. And so some of

the lessons learned from 2016, fundraising and sponsorships were difficult secure because we're competing with other regional events. Right? So other cities, bigger events, they're they're securing they're able to secure some sponsorships. And so it's a bigger lift, but something that, you know, we can go after. We just have to be recognized that we are competing with lots of different groups out there.

We also have to recognize our public safety resources are stretched thin during major events. It limits our ability to program around the days of major events. And so if we spread out our community events around the major event days, then that way, it can alleviate our stress on our public safety. And also the types of events that we're drawing. We need to look at the scope and the type of event and have early alignment with our city goals and our capacity.

It's important to understand what type of events and what type of crowds we're drawing to understand whether or not the investment that we're making will serve the bigger community. And then also execution and planning. So having clear roles, timelines, and cross department and stakeholder collaboration will ensure that we are able to hold these events successfully. All right. Now I'm going to pass it to Alicia, who's going to start our workshop process.

Yeah. Yeah. Do you

want to pass the mic to her? Yeah. Yeah. Well, for people online. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Back. Were there any were there any events that were more popular than others?

About the library event, I think, is probably the most popular. Patty, how many attendees did you have? Can you give her the microphone? Remember, there's people at home. Okay. Locus heart. A little music for the answer here. 10,000 people, and the concerts were very popular at Santa Clara University and Mission College. There were thousands there. I I don't know the numbers, but it was really, really popular.

And that was the same night as the concert, wasn't it? The same day as the concert. So it was the celebrity I forgot about that. The celebrity football and then the village. Mhmm. We had the village there and then the concert. So it was a full day of activity that was free for Santa Clara residents. So I'd say those events.

Alright. So as Liz mentioned today, we're gonna get a little creative and then open up into a workshop. Our event strategy for today is really about mapping our community vision by using place, story, and community engagement to design the events that reflect and celebrate Santa Clara. So again, as marked on the screen, the goal of today's workshop is to understand the spatial potential of city landmarks and assets, to map event ideas to places, cultures, and communities, and really about building a connection that is inclusive to a narrative for 2026 and beyond the the major events that are coming up. So once we've identified and located all the events that are currently proposed, the events will be categorized into three buckets, which will allow the community to define the roles and really clarify expectations that align with resources while supporting a diverse and impactful event calendar.

And so what you see here on the screen are the three city led events. So this is what's currently known historical, long standing city supported events. And then also the proposed events, which we'll be coming up with today in the workshop. There's also community led, so these are organized by local groups and nonprofits and individuals. City acknowledged events with varying levels of coordination and support.

And then sponsor partner led events, so produced by external organizations in collaboration with the city, and the city may provide in kind services, so permits, logistics, staff time, etcetera. So what you see in your clusters on your tables is a visual map highlighting city landmarks and district boundaries. The goal is not to identify where the events or not to only identify where the events should take place, but also to understand why they should take place there. This will help us take shape by aligning the event locations with neighborhood demographics, cultural identities, and community interest. So through this exercise, we hope to answer the guiding question, which Mayor Gilmore identified earlier, which is what does meaningful community engagement look like in Santa Clara?

All right, so we're going to get started. On your tables, you should have giant map with tracing paper on top. Sorry? See. So, yeah, maybe we should rebalance the room to make sure that the maps are we get as much engagement on the maps as possible.

So we have five tables, and there are, what, one two three four and five. Do we wanna move to two clusters, or do you wanna make three clusters? I do grand. I do three clusters. Is is anyone willing to join? Okay. Great. Yeah. Let

me just this up.

Alright. No, it looks good. I think we've got five at each. All right. The tables are looking great. Also, I'm going to invite the commission members to join the tables as well. This is a full community engagement exercise.

Clean zone. We didn't get that. So while

we're setting up, just really quick, I wanna give you all quick I wanna give you all quick instructions really quick so that you all know what you're looking at on the table. Hey, David. We're gonna give quick instructions so everyone knows what they're looking at on the table. So and we're also going to continue to project on the screen. So step one, on the table, you should have a list of known proposed events.

And so take a look at those events, and I believe that's the blue chart that you have. And so those some of those are historical community events that Santa Clara will be doing. And then there's a couple of additional creative ideas as well just to spark some interest. The next step is gonna be to choose five to 10 events that resonate with you. You can choose them either from the blue list, or you can create them yourself.

And then we're just gonna ask that you tag the events on the map based on the category and the geography. We want to remind you to just visualize the neighborhood's identity as you're mapping the events. So that's accessibility, population density, underserved areas. And then again, we're going to tag the category of interest. So maybe your category of interest is target population or target age of 34 to 50.

And so we want to we want to identify who our target category is. And then, again, as you all are mapping, we just ask you to reflect on the site suitability, so access to these events, safety, transportation, neighborhood alignment. And then we also want to draw connections between the events to the broader cityscape. And so as you all are working through this, it'll make a little bit more sense as we move into the theme. I think the goal is to make sure that we have a through line, right, to the the events that we've proposed. Yeah. Okay. Is

Is there a timeline that we want, like, amount of time pre these events, or does it matter?

I don't think it matters yet.

Okay.

We'll

So now just be great.

Right now. Yeah. So for now, we're just ideating, and we'll we'll put the timeline together. Yeah.

Will the pool be done by then? Hello? Okay. Will the pool be done by then? No? Will the International Swim Center be done? Nobody's listening. Though the reason I ask is I did an email to all my Santa Clara friends and said, what would you like to see? Pai Fai Fai, for instance?

June February for Super Bowl. June for FIFA. June. June.

Oh, never mind.

At the ISE.

We we could still hold. Especially outside of the swim center, doesn't have to be swim center.

That's true.

Swim center.

That's true.

How's it going over here? You all have any questions?

The green section, those are set? Or

No. Add something. The green section,

this is from our community server.

I will say this. I just wanna I had a really good question here at table number two. Gonna call you all table number two. So there's a green matrix that's on your table as well. Just so you all know, these are the responses that we got from the community survey that we put out. So what you're seeing here is the type of event that the community said that they'd like to see and then the frequency, so how many times it showed up in the survey. We haven't received survey. When You did not receive the survey. Okay. I will get it out. It's open until the thirtieth, so I will get that over to you. Yeah. No problem. Do we have any questions?

No.

For those of you on the Zoom call, we're we've broken out into groups, and that's why there's no audio at this time. After we finish the in person activities, each of the tables will report out, and you guys will be able to hear that. But for the time being, the in person activity is gonna be off mic. Thank you.

Okay, everyone. I think everyone is having a great time ideating, but we are at time. And we still have another small activity that we want to conduct as well. So if you all can start wrapping up, we'll probably do a quick five minute share out for each table just to have you all take us on the journey that you all went through with your map of Santa Clara. And then we'll keep going.

Okay, everyone. I'm gonna start at table three because they look ready. Thank you. So if you just wanna share a few of the events and ideas that you all came up with. And then just for the greater group so you all are aware, we as staff, we're gonna take all of these maps back and analyze them and create a larger map and bring that back to the group once we've kind of broken it down. But for now, table three.

Okay. I'll take it away. So our process here in determining which events to feature was really to look at the community responses and make sure that everybody who took the time to fill out a survey would be heard. We looked at all of these suggestions here in green and kind of group them together into, like, categories that we thought, you know, if

we

addressed, like, top five events that it would pretty much satisfy the majority of people's suggestions. After we identified those few events, we kind of looked through the different assets in terms of space, also taking into consideration perimeters on the big games, things like that, and paired events with different locations. So watch parties was obviously the top the top suggestion, and we thought that the two best locations for that would be Youth Soccer Park and Raiden Grant Sports Park. We saw here that, you know, a big ask was for NFL player events, so there might be an opportunity to gang up a watch party and something with NFL events. And thematically, it would just fit well to have it at one of our fields.

As far as concerts go, we put concerts suggested at Santa Clara University, Mission College, and potentially at Great America. Santa Clara University, we have the city has successfully hosted concerts there in the past as well as Mission College. Great America, we were looking at that as a concert location in conjunction with the Super Bowl event specifically. Night markets, we kind of categorize night markets together with food vendors and food crawl. We identified Mission College as a great location for that.

There will be a night market there in the coming months, so there should be some infrastructure set up for that. Oh, and yes. And Peddlers Plaza in Downtown Santa Clara right across the street from Santa Clara University for a night market. Regarding food crawl, right at the end of our meeting, we didn't get to build out this idea much, but we talked about the density of Korean and Portuguese restaurants right on El Camino Real. So that's an area where, you know, we could play off of the existing infrastructure and community to kind of create and show off the the best of Santa Clara.

We had some some fun ideas surrounding the art contest suggestion. Obviously, the natural fit would be to host anything art related right at the Treiche Museum of Art. We came up with a couple of cool ideas for that. One was to bring the Burning Man art into the Triton Museum outdoor areas and parking lot. And then another another idea was to do, like, a chalk art contest, like, reminiscent of what some of the really cool things that we saw during COVID in the in the Triton parking lots as well.

And then

oh, yes. And our most exciting idea of all, something for the kids STEM program, which was a huge success in the past. We had a lot of conversation about trying to engage NVIDIA and see if we could do STEM program there on campus, of course, making sure that their employees were brought into the mix as well to participate. And is there anything else I missed?

Good to see you. And I see Albert too. Hey. How are you? So I I am I'm good friends with the CEO of the Hispanic Heritage Foundation. They are partners with the NFL directly. They have youth awards and honorees every year that award kids that are student athletes across the country. And every Super Bowl venue on the Tuesday to the Friday, they have events, and they have a gala. And it brings in, NFL celebrity types, former NFL players, celebrities alike. And, I'd like to set up a call with with the council and our mayor.

So and we're thinking, Santa Clara University because if we don't get him now, San Francisco will get them for sure.

That's it. Thank you.

Thank you, group three. Those were incredible. We're gonna move over to group two. And, Anna Anna, make sure you use the mic. Yeah. Fine? Okay. Well,

we had a lot of ideas here, too. But we do see a lot of overlap. Obviously. Number one here is night market. We just think that's a great idea. Everybody's asking for it. Why not? The 6 Acres comes to mind because it's just pretty much a dead zone, and it's close to the downtown, so that makes sense. And it's near the university, and we need a space that connects the two, our city to the university. I think that's common ground.

We like the an event in the old downtown, maybe the six acres again, painting the parking lot with art and inviting all the community to paint along with us. You know? Sort of like San Pedro Square, how they painted their street, and they invited the whole community, and they filmed it. Was all over social media. That could be a really a boost for us in downtown and for Santa Clara.

Very photographable, Instagramable. We want that. We want and maybe keep it going for good. But also, I think you had the idea of recreating the old downtown with facades so that it's a destination place. Keep it up from February to July and activate it with music, DJ, whatever we want down there. Just make that an active space for the entire year. Lunar new year. Diane had a great idea. She's had tremendous success with this. How many people?

2,000 people came to her event in Sunnyvale. It's a multi it's cultural. It celebrates the new year. It'll be in February, so it'll be close to the Super Bowl. And we could also she thought about also the downtown, moving it to that six acres area. That's gonna be a busy spot. Mission College. Definitely, the summer concerts tie into cultural events and create, like, a permanent stage there. So it's not just the one day, but during that time period from February to July, something that tourists can stop by and visit. Another idea that came up was Paint The Corridor on Franklin Street, Street, because technically, that's our oldest street in Santa Clara, and it's under utilized.

Although we have our community village there, and we also do the street dance there now, so it would be great to bring color to that space. So paint the street, basically. The ugly brown building on the corner of Homestead And Lafayette. I think last meeting, somebody said, why not put a wrap on that building? We all agree that's a good idea.

Diane came up with lighting, maybe light it up in different colors of different days, utilizing the empty windows with art contest in the city so that people can submit art that would fit the windows around the entire building, make use of the Commerce Plaza. And again, that's down by the six acres. Triton Museum I like the idea of human sized soccer balls and various sized soccer balls. It's definitely Instagrammable. People who want to go buy the Triton and get pictures in front of that.

It was another comment about maybe getting the players to sign the giant soccer ball and making it a monument of this blue moon year we're having. Let's see. And of course, Preston said we could film the whole experience and use that over and over in social media, drive people there. Social media is a big part of this. We and colorful examples of what we describe so people take pictures and post.

So we need a strategy for that. Gateway place making. Most of the entry points in Santa Clara, like by 101 over by the District 1, they're not pretty. There's not a lot of banners or flags or art or something to welcome people into our entry points in the city. So there's opportunity there. Also, better community wayfinding signage. If you go to San Francisco, you don't get lost. People tell you what's going on, where it is, and that's what we would like that. Even if it's temporary, I think it would really drive visitors and make us a welcoming destination. Santa Clara Convention Center, Asian American Stories.

You had your event there? It was very successful. 400 people or yeah. So that is an underutilized space. Maybe and also, the library is an important gathering spot. We've got the places. We just have to activate them. We have a lot of historical landmarks that we're not taking advantage of and that we need to showcase also. Historical sports figures. I know Lisa had mentioned that we have a crazy, amazing, impressive history of legendary swimmers.

And we have the International Swim Center. We've got the iconic Aquamades, now called SCA because the boys are involved. And it's just so much history of sports here. And then Patty and I were looking deep into it about how we can tell that story and use it in social media, and then just banners and signage and photographable opportunities with those figures at different places, almost like a movable exhibit. Question was, what is a Santa Clara emblem?

We have no souvenirs. So what kind of souvenirs do we want? We if we had the Japanese here for the sister cities, and they're like, we want something that's Santa Clara. We're like, we'll we'll go to the university, you know, when we got something there. But it would be great to have some kind of branding where people can take a piece of Santa Clara home. Beautification. That was a good one, Albert. Let's start with the Saint Clair statue. That poor thing has little birdie turds on her head, and I think the yes.

Yeah. And then the birdie?

And the birdie? Yeah.

Thank

you. We need a crown on her, right? She needs a crown to keep the birds off her head. I mean, if you're going to photograph Saint Clair's, who's the namesake of our city, absolutely keep that off her head. And art, more art at Civic Center. So when you wanna visit City Hall, and and that'll take you straight to the Triton Museum. Banners. Also, can we put water in the fountains temporarily? It's almost like a dead zone without the water there. So, yeah, I think start with City Hall and Saint Clair's would be great.

Lighting up monuments. Where can we do that in the city? Obviously, Levi's Stadium would be beautiful lit up. Changing the colors, changing the themes, maybe lighting up Saint Clairs, you know, would be a good start. She's tall. Just looking at tall buildings. Drone show. We would like drone shows because that would tie in with tech, and we need to tie in tech more. And I don't think tech's that involved so far. History of the games at the Triton Museum, maybe having a digital display about the history of our players.

And Preston had a good point that if we're all doing individual social media posts, we need to share with one another so we reach a greater audience. So that was a way of consolidating everything. We still have more. School district. We like to involve the school district more.

Art contests, anything that bring the children in, tie it in with the library, display their art at the Triton, the library, anywhere, maybe that big, ugly brown building. Sports figure destination and historical collection of stories that's what we're working on to bring that to life. Fire department, public safety, sports family day, something that could happen in District 4, I think, because we couldn't think of anything for District 4. Something for the historic depot. We haven't come up with an idea there, but there was a great idea here about wrapping the buses, the VTA and light roll, that tells our how great this event's going to be next year. Just wrap the buses. Maybe they'll donate that. I don't know what the cost is. Restaurant week. We want to have a restaurant week.

High-tech, once again, it says, what are they doing? That's the question mark. Senator Weih Bajab. She has a turkey trot or something. Maybe bring that to Santa Clara. Events at the Agra Hood, because we're really proud of that. I thought it'd be fun to have a Halloween party at our oldest cemetery in Santa Clara. It's kind of maybe a rave or something to tell our historic. Why not? It's successful in other cities. Annual garage sale near Valley Fair. That's a community engagement. And here's three more points here. Oh, this is mentioning beautifying City Hall again. A city tour of some kind, maybe on a rented cable style looking bus.

Yeah, to have a tour of the city and all the places we talked about. And that way, we can take them on a bus to every district. That's it, sorry.

Thank you, group two, and thank you, Anna.

We had a think tank going on here.

Alright. We're gonna pop over to group one.

Be fast. We, again, stuck with responses of what they had put in as priorities a lot like group one did. So our first consideration was where would watch parties be appropriate. And, again, we didn't think of Reed and Grant, but that's a great idea. I think that Buckshaw Stadium would be amazing too because it's the most bang for your buck. But if there are in Santa Clara. Yeah. Shot Stadium's the baseball one.

Buckshaw.

Yeah. Anyways yeah. And somebody needs to figure out who's working with Santa Clara right now because I don't I don't know who we're talking to there. Concerts was a big deal, and same thing. We have the opportunity for small scale concerts at many of our parks, but I think that some some easy activation there is taking the example that we have with the concert in downtown already and doing a few more of those.

We've got a model that already works. And what we could tie in with that is, again, this need for cultural specific events, potentially a car show. As you guys were discussing the Portuguese and Korean restaurants downtown, if we had a K pop band one time, we could do that and bring in the Korean food. If we did salsa, we could bring in the low riders and that. And so, again, the only reason this can work, though, is if you continue to tie in the theme that we meet meet meet on.

So we did that. Our art contest, we talked a little bit about murals and big spaces that had open areas. But I think we maybe collaboratively decided, although it was, you know, me pushing for it. One of the cool things that we could do if we worked with SVP is actually have a contest where we painted the electrical boxes in neighborhoods, and that means art pops up all over the city. Again, keep it with a theme.

I said, you know, if you wanna contain it to be kind of a color palette and stuff, but that way, communities could gather to do it, individuals could gather, and then we could potentially have the unveiling a digital display of it at the tribe museum where we announce the winners based on whatever preferences. Anytime we have a meeting like that, it's an opportunity for a meet and greet. So I think that because the community said they wanted as many opportunities to meet people, We have to look at those opportunities to bring the the names in. We talked a little bit. Teresa gave us, you know, history.

The parade so we've got the parade of champions and this desire for, like, an NFL parade or a big parade then, I understand is really, really cost prohibited. But it's, I think, a great way for the community to come together. You could get the school districts to build floats for that much like a homecoming. One of our questions was, what are we gonna be allowed to do, if anything, at the the stadium? Obviously, not during game times, but around enough so that the parade could go to the stadium, and you could have a meet and greet.

You could have, like, a a ball again that didn't happen last year. So we would need to know more about what we're allowed to do. We talked a little bit about banners downtown as well, that there could be a buy in from local businesses, you know, where we can't maybe do the whole, but could they put their banners out, a themed banner to promote their business and also show the event? Block parties, again, I think is good, but I think that one of the things we need to do is capitalize on what's already happening. So we encourage communities to have block parties for national night out.

And, again, I think if we incentivize that with themes with a a common message on it, we would have more turnout if perhaps we could get a few named people to travel on the the the vans that stop at all of the parties, that would be incentive too. But, again, we we really wanted to talk about how can we capitalize on what we're doing. These events are already happening. This is what the public wants, so we didn't go into, like, our grab bag wish list. You guys did a good job. But but, yeah, we we stuck with this, and that's what we came up with. Any did I miss anything, guys?

Yes. I did. Yeah. Yeah. Amazing. Thank you. So as I shared earlier, we're we're gonna take these events back and kind of plot them and and categorize them. So be expecting that at the next meeting, the following meeting that we have. We're going to keep going for now. So I know we're at time, a little over, but we wanted to bring you into the next phase of trying to anchor the event strategy and community values.

And so that's really ensuring that what we plan reflects who we are and what matters to the residents. So we're going to start by inviting you all to share one word that you feel captures the core essence of what Santa Clara events should embody. And if you could just jot that word down on your map or on your sticky, that would be great. The same question is going to be shared out to the broader community through a survey that's going to launch this week. And ultimately, we're hoping that the words that we receive will inform a collective word cloud that will visually represent the community sentiment.

Keep going. So if you all could just jot down the one word. And then as I shared before, over the next couple of weeks, staff intends to analyze the events against the community values, which are the one word that we're asking of you all in the community, for practical considerations like resources, site capacity, and to help establish the unifying theme that can be presented back to the community in our next meeting. So while you're thinking of that, the staff was able to provide a few base value statements just to give you all an idea of how we thought it could be nice to utilize the values and the word cloud that's coming back directly from the community and essentially create a unifying theme. And so these are just some proposed examples really used to help spark creative thinking around Santa Clara's identities and values as we prepare to host the major events.

So again, these are all very flexible statements. I think what we had presented last time, the world plays here. And so what you see here is Santa Clara blank value, the world plays here. And I think the thought is that as we have this word cloud of values, it's something that we can layer on top into these themes. And so maybe for each event, it's a different value that's chosen, that represents the event, but also represents Santa Clara and the community.

And again, these are just thought starters. They're not final decisions. But the goal is to try to help generate and clarify the unifying theme. All right. And so next steps, we're hoping to host the next meeting on July 14 and again come back to you all with the results from the word cloud survey, the community survey, have the committee vote on a final base statement, and refine the event calendar, again, aligned to the values and the mapping input that we created today.

Is there any questions? Does anyone have any final thoughts?

Yeah, it looks like.

As a supporting idea for souvenirs, I'm thinking about the Levi's Stadium or some other landmark that can be turned into, like, a miniature kind of a takeaway for people to take away with them. Something because people like to have something tangible or even NVIDIA itself. I know they have a very fancy, like, kind of a innovative building. Mean, I don't know if their company is willing to support us to even turn that into a little little some sort of a nice quality metal, you know, souvenir piece. So

So in the same line, right, I would propose to have a kind of a core team set up within the economic development where you can take this, you know, ideas to culminate together and represent the Santa Clara. Within the Santa Clara, we have a lot of, you know, billion dollars, trillion dollars companies where they can sponsor and let them get engaged. And let's have some buy in from them also or put their name or a small logo or whatever it can. I think this can be a huge success if we have them involved and we have, you know, cash flow coming in also. So I would strongly recommend that let's have a team so that we can start engaging with them, either city council or or the committee who wants to do.

That's very important for us. Money is important. Thank you.

So I have a feeling if we have this idea, if NVIDIA buys the idea, they might the cost can can even come from partially partially can even come from their marketing cost. I think it's really cool. I mean, that's that's one idea. Or, of course, in terms of another topic for the the Koreentown or food, if we can be bringing, like, a famous band, like BTS, it's gonna be a hit

for that.

Really quick, we're going to just open up to the public online and see if there's any questions or comments or if anyone has any ideas they'd like to contribute. Feel free to raise your hand. You have a hand? Yep. We have a hand.

David, you should be allowed to speak.

No. I'm in. Perfect. So I just wanted to I didn't know if you guys were gonna do this or not if I had another chance, but you were asking for one word, for you know, that you would use to describe. And and for me, I would say welcoming, you know, with, you know, that's just my my addition. I like all the ideas that I heard, especially using the, the ugly red building on Homestead And Lafayette, and a great idea to also with the, parking lot that's there to do, whether it's chalk or do events there because it's it's wide open. I think that'd be that whoever had those ideas are they're great. So thank you.

Thank you. Is there anybody else? Any public members? No. That's it. Okay. Anything else? Yeah. I think I

think we're done. We're so we're planning our next meeting for July 14. I think that one will be back at City Hall. So we'll send a confirming email to everybody.

I like it here. Why why can't we

You want to

try it? Well, we'll have to check with the library.

Does everyone like it here? It's different. Different environment. Okay.

Well, we'll make sure and see if the library is available.

She said it was. She's the boss.

We we can't kick out story time.

It's too late for story time. Alright. Thank you. Sorry. I know it's it's a little bit harder, but it's a different environment. I think more collaborative than city hall, but what do I know? Okay. Well, I think that's it. So if unless anybody has any final comments, thank you so much for being engaged with us here. This is exciting.

I'm starting to get excited. And, yes, we need souvenirs, and, yes, we need gear that says Santa Clara so I don't have to go to the university and continue to buy everything that says Santa Clara without their SCU on it. Right? It says Santa Clara. I did talk to the city manager about they're looking for gear for at least our city employees to be able to promote Super Bowl and World Cup.

And when we come up with our our tagline, our logo, whatever it is, I'm hoping that we can get gear as well to start building excitement in the community. I think people are waiting for it, so we need to provide it for them. So thank you all so much for being present here and and being engaged with us, and we'll see you on the fourteenth. And if you have more ideas, don't forget to send them to us. Right? Doesn't mean that you have to hold them all in until the fourteenth. So continue to share. But thank you very much. This meeting is adjourned. Thank you.

Oh, let's go get a photo by the clock. Where is the clock? Let's go get a photo by the clock.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Picture by the clock. Oh, yeah. No. You can stop. I think

Addy, where's the clock? Is it right out there? Can we get a photo with you by the clock?

Okay. Perfect.

Can you take a picture of us with the clock and then put you in it?